Here are some insights from a poll of CMOs on what is likely to be big for marketers in the year 2012.

Marketers are facing hard times. Not their fault, but what with the US banking crisis and the Eurozone crisis, the markets are vanishing. "In 2012, CMOs will continue to face a fragile world economy, hyper-connectivity, growing complexity, the fragmentation of audiences, and multiple truths," says Tim Leberecht, CMO of Frog Design and Aricent.  

To gain a better understanding of what is likely to be big for marketers this year, Paul Writer ran a poll and also collected insights from senior marketers. This poll was conducted in November-December and got 189 respondents, with a mix of managers, CXOs & VPs and owners.

'It's early days yet, but marketing processing outsourcing could be a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for India'

The new buzz is now around MPO - Marketing Processing Outsourcing. The rationale behind this new trend is that companies today don't want to deal with multiple firms such as a Web design agency, an e-mail marketing agency, a database agency etc. They would much rather work with one agent that handles all this for them.

The article goes deeper into the potential revenues from this and the Pros and Cons plus Jessie Paul's views on MPO...

Do you want to engage people's attention, provide them with useful information and, in the process, change the way they think about your organization?  Here are five types of content that can help you do this and these are identified and explained in this article.  

These tips on improving content can be used for any medium from print media, such as business and consumer magazines, to websites, blogs, podcasts, videos - virtually any communication channel.

Key Account Management: What the Best Companies Have Done to Improve Their Programs    

Based on research conducted on over 20 of the best Key Account Management (KAM) programs, globally, this study outlines what leading companies have done in the past year to improve their programs. It identifies what the best programs have done to maintain their leadership position.

The two biggest trends that have emerged are great operational autonomy and increased marketing support.

Companies that target business buyers rely heavily on the white papers, articles, books, and other documents they publish to position their products or services as effective solutions to those critical business problems their customers face.

But in creating this content, B2B companies often face a common, two-fold dilemma: first, determining which topics they should focus their content development efforts on given limited marketing resources, and second, how to stage those topics over time to keep the content pump primed.