From eMedia Vitals: How to serve marketers' lead-nurturing imperative

August 2, 2012 - The following is an eMedia Vitals article written by Tom Smith, vice president of performance marketing for UBM Techweb, and published in this week's ABM Vital Guide.

Each week, the Vital Guide focuses on a single essential (i.e. vital) digital technology or tactic and offers case studies, best practices and analysis for audience development, editorial, sales, digital personnel and corporate management.

Two short years ago, demand-generation services were driven by the marketer’s equivalent of hardware feeds and speeds: Tell us the number of leads you can produce, in what timeframe, at what cost per lead.

Things have changed at warp speed.

Today’s B2B marketers require every bit of detail they can get on a prospect’s demographics (job title, company size) and where they currently fall in the purchasing cycle for a product or service. They’re also eager to get a comprehensive view of content assets downloaded or consumed, as well as broader online behavior – namely, whether prospects visited web pages with content relevant to the marketer’s strategy.

Marketers share a common set of challenges that are driving this dramatic shift:

- Budgets aren’t growing rapidly (if at all) so they need maximum bang for the dollars they’re spending on demand generation.
- Marketing pros are being measured less on the quantity of leads they deliver to sales and more on the “convertability” of those leads. Read more.