[Note: This is Part 1 of a 5-part post. We will have a new post up each week! Want to be notified when the next post is up? Just enter your email address and hit “Subscribe”, or follow @kwanzoo on Twitter.]

B2B marketers today  face an interesting paradox. Online marketing channels have brought us closer to our audience than ever before.  At the same time, marketers are being asked to reach prospects through more channels to gain their attention, with more targeted campaigns, without a lot of creative, agency or IT resources. Social and mobile are critical new additions to the more traditional B2B channel mix (email, websites, display).

This past year saw growing adoption of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) systems at mid-to-large enterprises. Eloqua recently filed to go IPO, as has ExactTarget. Marketo just raised a $50M round of financing to accelerate their growth. Small-to-medium (SMB) businesses are also stepping up their use of marketing automation, CRM, email and social media marketing platforms from companies such as Act-On Software, Salesforce, Constant Contact and others. These trends will continue. Kwanzoo is at the cutting edge of this transformation of enterprise marketing, for an increasingly social, real-time world.

As a young business, we have had to think hard about how we can add value, address our customer’s marketing challenges, while integrating seamlessly with their  existing marketing systems and tools. We are grateful to our customers for their trust in us, and for sharing their insights and feedback. We see the following key trends and themes emerging for B2B marketing in 2012:

1. Maximize the RPM Investment
2. Campaign and Funnel Automation [See Part 2]
3. Go Social, Go Cloud without IT [See Part 3]
4. Connectors, Connectors, Connectors
5. Marketing on Mobile to Business

Maximizing the RPM Investment
RPM platforms such as Eloqua and Marketo are helping B2B marketers effectively identify and nurture prospective customers who visit their company website. As marketers continue to deploy RPM systems, they are considering these additional opportunities to maximize the return on their RPM investment:

Find More Prospects, Everywhere
A prospect touches the company blog, community site, social pages or a partner page, but does not visit any website pages monitored by your RPM system. Is there an easy way to engage the prospect, and capture a lead for ongoing nurturing on all those placements? How about leveraging partner channels (website, email lists) better? Is there a way to quickly and easily run co-branded campaigns via partner channels, on infrastructure (CMS, RPM, Blog) that is completely different from what a marketer uses in-house? Marketers are excited about ways to widen their lead funnel with easy-to-deploy solutions to these challenges.

Learn More with Every Interaction, Everywhere
You send out newsletters and nurturing emails to 1000s of prospects. Is there a way to learn more about specific prospects, and their needs? Find out a bit more about what they are thinking? Which of your 17 different product lines are of most interest to an individual prospect? What’s the prospect’s key pain point from your long list of pain points? You know that a long survey is not going to work. Is there a way to get answers to these questions, in a simple, non-intrusive way, so your sales person is armed with more insights upon lead hand-off? We can now easily address this, with newer approaches to driving interactivity, and triggering short surveys and question-based engagement everywhere.

Offer A Different User Experience
B2B marketers are now opening themselves to learning from their B2C colleagues. After all, B2B prospects are people too! And people love to engage, interact, hear their peer’s opinions. People want to share their knowledge, preference for solutions, and recommend what they love to their friends. B2B marketers who make it easy for their prospects to engage, interact, then receive more personalized offers that they can share with their friends will see greater success. Of course, marketers want easy ways to create these user experiences so as to drive the prospect to consume more content assets, or sign up for a webinar that meets their needs without breaking the budget.

Relationship Targeting Drives Campaign ROI
Marketing Automation Systems, along with Real-time IP data providers (such as DemandBase and Quova) deliver better targeting on landing pages. It’s quite common to pre-fill form fields with the Company Affiliation of a prospect (mapped from the prospect’s IP address).

What promises to drive significant new campaign ROI is leveraging the same Real-time IP data, combined with Target Account or Account Relationship information in an RPM system (such as Eloqua) to dynamically change and serve highly targeted, relevant, marketing offers everywhere. Marketers will be able to define rules in their RPM system to map or update Target Accounts into different sales pipeline stages. RPM systems will then interact with Engagement Marketing platforms such as Kwanzoo to make all of this possible.

We are excited about the opportunity to work with trailblazing partners and customers, to  bring new ideas and approaches to a broad range of key demand generation and lead nurturing challenges that B2B marketers face today.

As some of you may already know, we recently announced  Kwanzoo’s partnership with Eloqua. We delivered on the first phase, that enables better prospect profiling inside Eloqua lead nurturing emails, and widening the lead funnel to capture more “top of funnel” leads into Eloqua. For the next phase, we are working with Eloqua on leveraging and making business sense of the insights that are captured inside Eloqua, and using those insights to deliver better targeting of Kwanzoo campaigns.

Our core vision remains: offering a comprehensive platform to ideate, quickly build, and execute highly engaging, multi-channel campaigns. Bring interactivity and increased relevance, grow word-of-mouth mentions and sales, while delivering greater insights.

SEE ALSO:

Part 2 – Campaign and Funnel Automation for Enterprise Marketers, who are currently forced to piece together a campaign from lots of moving parts, across many different systems and tools.

Part 3 – Go Social, Go Cloud without IT where we look at new opportunities for marketers by incorporating social and cloud technologies, and enabling social interactions when engaging prospects.

You can also hear us discuss these ideas and approaches in our Insights Webinar with Eloqua. Catch it live or recorded here.

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