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4 Steps to Move from Insights to Action

posted on May 14, 2013

This post is presented by Marketing Pilgrim’s Analytics Channel Sponsor WebTrends. It was written by Stephen Eide, Training + Development Specialist at Webtrends.
action

If you’re like most digital marketers, you track a set of website metrics—measurements such as site visits, time on site, referring sites and the all-important purchases, conversions or downloads. While tracking and reporting on these metrics is fairly straightforward, do you know how to use them to make improvements?

While it can be challenging to move from reporting on results to driving action, it’s a critical transition. It can help transform your organization and put you on the path to marketing glory.

Here are four steps to get you started:

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Five Questions You Must Answer Before Testing Your Landing Page

posted on April 22, 2013

WebTrends Landing Page White PaperThis post is presented by Marketing Pilgrim’s Analytics Channel Sponsor WebTrends. It was written by Karen Wood, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Webtrends.

It’s a cold, hard reality that your landing page has just four seconds to capture a visitor’s attention. Not only that, landing pages are the stage in the campaign funnel most vulnerable to customer abandonment—converting, on average, just three percent of visitors.

This so-called success rate begs the questions: Is three percent acceptable to your bottom line? And what is it about your marketing efforts the other 97 percent rejected?

The Hard Truth on “Gut-Feel” Marketing

All too often, poor campaign performance is rooted in human condition. Many marketing decisions aren’t based on data, but rather on opinion—and often, that opinion is just the highest paid person’s gut feeling. As a result, the marketing team is sent down a path without any certainty that what they are doing will produce results.

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4 Simple and Powerful Tips to Get the Most From Conferences

posted on January 25, 2013

Internet-marketing-conference-partyToday’s guest post comes from Dave Taylor.

If you’ve been in the online marketing industry for more than a year or two, you’ll already have figured out that there’s no better use of your time than attending a professional conference, expo or workshop. It’s not about the content of the sessions themselves, and it’s not even about the expo hall but about everything in between. The parties. The informal meetings at the bar. The opening reception. Even the “speed dating” or other conference-sponsored events can prove invaluable.

IF you know how to work the halls.

I just got back from two major conferences — New Media Expo and the Consumer Electronics Show — and ended up on stage, speaking at both of them. That’s a secret way to significantly increase the value of attending a conference, but we’ll get back to that momentarily.

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3 Social Media Tricks to Improving Your Online Reputation

posted on November 15, 2012

Social media has revamped the Internet through its ability to not only build influence, but also humanize a brand or individual. This counts as much in a content sharing environment as it does to the ability to impact online reputations. What’s more is that publishing to social networks is both simple and cheap. However, as great as social media outlets are there is also a battleground mentality present for people who are targeted by negative content. No matter how this information is published—a blog post, article, press release— it affects success.

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5 Key Signals That Your Leads Are Ready to Buy

posted on October 30, 2012

This is a guest post by Sarah Goliger, an inbound marketer at HubSpot. HubSpot is a marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA that makes inbound marketing and lead management software. HubSpot is also the sponsor of Marketing Pilgrim’s Inbound Marketing channel.

If you’re generating leads for your business, you should know that roughly 50% of those leads will not be ready to buy immediately, according to Gleanster Research. What can you do, as a savvy inbound marketer, to convert more of those leads into customers? The answer is lead management.

By nurturing them with content that is closely-targeted to their needs and interests, you can educate your leads and pull them through the initial stages of the buying cycle until they are ready to be handed over to your sales team. But how do you know when a lead is ready for that first sales call? With the latest analytics tools and lead management software it’s easy to track behavior on your website and collect data that will help you make smarter marketing decisions.

Here are 5 B2B buying signals you should look out for and specific actions you can take to increase your sales.

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Keeping Pace With the Change – A Digital Marketer’s Dilemma

posted on October 24, 2012

This post was written by our Social Media channel sponsor Full Sail University.

As the Program Director for the Internet Marketing bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Full Sail University, I’m frequently asked how we deal with the rate of change in the industry.

This is a particular challenge when you’re trying to teach Internet marketing, but it’s a problem that virtually anyone in the digital space faces. Change is not only inevitable here; it’s virtually constant.

Keep swimming, Nemo.
There’s no way around the fact that what worked last year – or even last week – may not get the same results today. It’s your job (and mine) to keep pace.

I asked my colleagues and students for suggestions about how they stay current. Here are a few of the responses I got:

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10 Questions Every New VP of Marketing Should Ask

posted on October 18, 2012

The following post was created by our Inbound Marketing channel sponsor, HubSpot.

So you’re starting a new job. You’re going to be the VP of Marketing at a mid-sized B2B company and you need to figure out how to succeed. There are a million paths to barrel down – you could dive into social media, you could invest in marketing automation, you could focus on SEO. The list is endless, so how do you know where to begin?

Here’s a series of 10 critical questions you need to ask – a basic inbound marketing framework – to get you started on the right foot.