Metrics

Map the customer journey

There’s never been a better time for marketers for to see, understand and respond to the customer journey. Today’s “open social age” has created a “looking glass” for companies to understand the complex nature of their customers as millions of them are broadcasting their opinions on a real-time basis.[read more]

Sales pipeline

It’s common for leaders to measure their sales pipelines by the probability of the deal closing. And a common mistake. Probability of close is a subjective measurement that requires the sales rep to make a judgment about their chances of making a sale. It requires interpretation, bias and is ripe for abuse.[read more]

Socially Stephanie to the rescue!

In the inaugural post of our new social media advice column, social media pro Stephanie Frasco has some tips for Knackered Knitter in Nashville, who wants to know how to build up a social media presence for her knitting company...AND find time to actually knit.[read more]

Questions about Google's Penguin update? / shutterstock

Last week Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Penguin 2.0 is a couple of weeks away, so if you’ve been partaking in black hat SEO tactics, it’s time to stop. Listen up and follow these steps to make certain that your site is safe and your ranking doesn’t get slammed.[read more]

The phenomenon of big data certainly comes with big promise. After all, having terabytes of data on customer history and behavior is certainly better than trying to extrapolate from just a few data points. The good news is, there are technologies and tools that make it much easier to find the gold hidden in the data—and use it to refine your online marketing with laser precision.[read more]

It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by numbers. It almost feels like the new binary; we used to speak to computers in 1s and 0s, and now we have thousands of numbers with which to communicate our social media successes or failures. So how do you know which measures to pay attention to, and which ones are more vanity stats?[read more]

This is your only stop on the internet where you will find such a large, detailed guide to increase traffic to your website! I have not yet seen a guide where it lists so many effective traffic generation techniques, never mind a detailed explanation of each one.[read more]

Many branded viral videos achieve that status by being supported by a sizable seeding campaign. When a video is produced, companies will invest huge dollars in paid media to drive views of their YouTube content, pay to have high-profile sites and blogs host the content, and will put PR initiatives in place to raise the profile of their content to garner more views.[read more]

Facebook analytics

Engagement has become a nearly universal social media KPI. However, Facebook's infamous People Talking About This (PTAT) metric puts a bit of a wrench in this equation. Using Nike Golf's Facebook Analytics as an example, we can clearly see how PTAT doesn't correlate with engagement.[read more]

down the rabbit hole?

Inbound Marketing is a salesperson’s dream. As long as you are willing to properly review the data analytics, it shortens the sales cycle timeline, allowing for more conversions and more success.[read more]

Though Hixson describes Tellagence akin to climate prediction, it’s actually even a bit more than that. It’s more like being able to subtly influence the weather by knowing where to strategically set up clouds.[read more]

online influencers

How much of our time, effort and money is spent targeting those that aren’t influential with our branding messages hoping to spread the word about our product our service? Is this an effective way to spend our time?[read more]

In doing your evaluation, you should always be benchmarking one tool vs another. There are rare instances when there really is only one option, but you still need to do some research to get to that conclusion. Next, get your Sales Rep to tell you the differentiators between their product or services, and that of a competitor.[read more]

KPI / shutterstock

Too often when looking at a sales team’s success, managers only look at the actual sales. Of course, this is important—but the sale is a lagging indicator. So how, as sales leaders, do you create leading indicators, tracking the behaviors required today for sales tomorrow? The answer: KPIs.[read more]

content marketing science (posterize/freedigitalphotos.net)

Every interaction we engage in has an effect on our thinking and emotions. Your buyer personas don’t have to fall for your branded solution, but it’s in your best interest to try. Here are some scientifically proven ways to drastically improve the persuasiveness of your content marketing strategy.[read more]

social media

As marketers, it is our jobs to assure our clients that the time and money that they are investing in social media is not in vain. Here are 6 statistics that suggest that social media is still heading for world domination.[read more]

attract fans / shutterstock

Facebook is a beast. Small business owners who attempt to tackle the beast have the best intentions in mind, but the beast inevitably wins and the small business owner gets lazy. If this sounds familiar, we’ve got your cure to improving Facebook engagement by truly understanding your audience.[read more]

targeted ads (image credit)

As of late, there seems to be a lot of noise on my Twitter feed around increase in ad spend across various emerging markets globally. In Middle East and North Africa (MENA), digital advertising budgets are projected to double from 4% to 8% in 2013. The question: is that money well spent?[read more]

digital measurement (image: Brad Barket/Getty Images for Hulu)

Nielsen may have been slow to adjust to the shifts in consumer behavior brought about by DVRs, Social Networks, mobile and online viewing, but they are now catching up: they will be rolling out Nielsen Digital Program Ratings, which will measure audiences for TV content viewed online.[read more]

link building / shutterstock

Conducting keyword research and implementing selected keywords into website content is an important step in an SEO campaign, but it doesn’t start and end there. The ongoing component of an SEO campaign is link building. But all inbound links aren’t created equal.[read more]