<p>Businesses are looking at social technology as the holy grail of inbound marketing and lead generation.</p><p>There are many facets to these technologies that offer significant opportunities to capitalize on Web site traffic and lead generation. A hot topic is social technology, which has changed the way companies interact, react and understand their customers. Social technology software is segmented into monitoring/listening, collaboration, marketing automation and social tools. These categorizations are sub-categories of social technology and not understanding what you are trying to achieve within your marketing efforts could be detrimental in selecting the wrong software.</p><p>Marketing automation has rapidly made significant improvements in this sector. These improvements have caused companies to re-examine new ways to automate and streamline marketing tasks and workflows. Traditionally marketers and marketing teams could only drive campaigns, rate their success manually, partially being able to track success and failure of marketing efforts, not having the ability to nurture prospects and almost zero analytics on their campaigns.</p><p>Marketing automation tools provide companies the ability to execute inbound and outbound marketing strategies with greater visibility, more control throughout the process and a significant amount of analysis. This collection of tools automates and streamlines the end to end marketing process and offers companies more visibility and flexibility to achieve its social business initiatives.</p><p><a href="http://www.itbusiness.ca/blog/how-to-assess-marketing-automation-and-social-solutions/44846">Keep reading...</a></p>