It is customary at this time of year for pundits to make predictions about the coming year. For many technology vendors, this results in prophecies about product developments and such. I’d like to offer up a change in pace and modestly suggest some customer trends. Up until 2010, adoption of B2B marketing automation has been substantially driven by tech-savvy early adopters. In 2010 B2B marketers sustained traditional marketing practices like email campaigns and continued experimenting with social media, content marketing and thought leadership. In many campaigns, the data was encouraging but the challenge for B2B marketers was connecting marketing results (in the form of increased traffic) to sales results (increased leads and revenue).

As online marketers searched high and low to meet this challenge, interest soon focused on marketing automation as marketers increasingly saw that early adopters were using this technology. In 2011, I expect this trend will significantly increase and adoption of marketing automation will spread beyond this group as word spreads within individual markets.

For example, the use of content marketing has grown and as a result, online marketers are beginning to understand that content must be tailored to where the customer is in the purchase cycle. This goes hand in hand with lead scoring and lead nurturing and points to marketing automation as a way to exploit this new way of developing customers. Although early adopters have a significant profit motive, it is this pragmatism that propels a technology through early adoption and even into adoption by the early majority. I can’t wait for 2011.