Contributed by Laura Patterson
- How to Use Your Marketing Analytics Smartly
Knowing how to collect, read, and use your analytics can mean better customers and higher retention rates. Here are four ...
- How to Use Product-Market Fit to Drive Business Growth
The term "product-market fit" may not be familiar to some marketers, but it's fundamental to business growth. Here are five ...
- How to Measure Touchpoint Effectiveness: Six Steps to Better Customer Experiences
Each touchpoint of interaction with your customers creates an opportunity for insight, improvement, and engagement. Here's a six-step process for ...
- How to Use Data to Reveal Your Brightest Star Customers
Discovering what drives your top buyers—and applying that info to prospects—can help you get more stellar customers.
- Four Essential Success Factors for Transforming Marketing Into a Center of Excellence
Some marketing organizations excel at marketing performance management and, as a result, achieve better growth for their companies. How? They ...
- How to Improve Your Research ROI: Six Best-Practices
Customer or market research and intelligence are essential to fact-based decision-making. Here are six best-practices for conducting research and reasons ...
- 2017 Marketing Performance Benchmarks and Trends [Infographic]
What distinguishes excellence among marketing organizations? What do best-in-class marketers do better and differently that enables them to achieve marketing ...
- Marketing Activity Metrics Mean Little: Here's How to Really Prove Marketing's Value
The challenge? Measuring Marketing's performance and value to the business. The traditional approach to metrics simply perpetuates the myth that ...
- Five Ways to Compete Against Low-Price Competitors
All of us face a low-cost or low-price competitor at one time or another. The solution isn't to lower your ...
- How to Use Scenarios to Achieve Marketing Agility
Scenario analysis is an essential part of creating agility. Scenarios help you anticipate. They help you ask better questions and ...
- How to Operationalize Your Customer Journey Map
Clearly, developing a customer journey map is beneficial to your business. But how do you ensure that all of your ...
- Marketing Proficiency: A Golf Metaphor
A successful golfer in a recent interview stressed the importance of being proficient with every club in his bag. Marketers, ...
- Data and Analytics: Three Key Steps to Successful Business Decisions
Without a doubt, data and analytics have become central to every organization's business strategy. Find out how to enable your ...
- How to Make Progress on Your Marketing Excellence Journey [Infographic]
What do best-in-class marketers do better and differently in their pursuit of marketing excellence? Find out in this infographic, packed ...
- How to Create a Marketing Measurement Playbook to Select and Measure the Right Metrics
With the convergence of online and offline marketing, choosing the right metrics is far more important than the quantity of ...
- Avoid a Zero-Based Budget by Driving Growth as a Marketing Center of Excellence
Marketing budgets are already on the chopping block, even though CFOs say better top- and bottom-line growth requires sales and ...
- Go DIY or Call in an Expert: How to Choose
As a marketer, you need to know when to buckle up and tackle an initiative internally or when to secure ...
- How to Convince Your CEO That Skimping on Marketing Talent Is No Bargain
One-click Cyber Monday-like shopping to achieve market leadership—and get a huge discount on marketing talent to boot? Oddly, some CEOs ...
- How to Apply the 'Golden Circle' to Your Marketing and Performance Measurement
Marketers are likely in the thick of marketing planning, so now is a good time to revisit how to apply ...
- Fix the Brittle Customer Relationships Affecting Your Bottom Line
Customer relationships can become brittle or fragile over time. You can measure and offset that brittleness in a variety of ...
- Safeguard Marketing's Value: Build a Marketing Technology Ecosystem
The vast number of available marketing technology options is proof that marketing is evolving into a technology-powered discipline. To ensure ...
- Modify Your Language to Gain Credibility, Influence, and Relevance With the C-Suite
Would you like to be perceived by the C-Suite as someone with business acumen? As influential, credible, and relevant to ...
- How to Harness the Value of 'Strategic Speed' With Alignment and Analytics
Marketers can deliver on the value of strategic—not just operational—speed to gain competitive advantage by upping their analytics and alignment ...
- Take Your Influence and Credibility to the High Board: Diving Into Change
Marketers feel the pressure. They know that their credibility and influence are at risk when they cannot connect marketing activities ...
- Marketers, Here's How to Answer the 'What Have You Done for Me Lately?' Question [Infographic]
Most marketers are facing constant scrutiny regarding their performance and contribution. Very few, however, are responding to it in a ...
- Analytics and Metrics: Related but Not the Same (An Explanation and a Checklist)
Though marketers use metrics and analytics to prove and improve marketing's value, the two are not the same. We explain ...
- Are You Too Busy Chopping (Marketing) Wood to Sharpen Your (Marketing Operations) Ax?
Your to-do list never seems to dwindle, no matter how often you hack at it. But chipping away at your ...
- Five Key Metrics You Need to Create a Customer-Centric Company
To ensure a customer-centric vision takes root in your marketing organization, you need to establish clear metrics that are linked ...
- Why Your Data Scientists Need to Be Storytellers, and How to Get Them There
Unless your data can be effectively collected, analyzed, and transformed into meaningful and actionable insights—and then used to tell a ...
- Marketing Accountability Is the Horse, Automation Is the Cart. Put Accountability First
It's easy to get excited by all the sexy new marketing tools. But it is a mistake not to have ...
- Marketing Ops Is Now a Must-Have: The Six A's of Marketing Performance Management
With the proliferation of marketing automation tools and increased pressure from the C-Suite to prove the value of Marketing, marketing ...
- What You Should Measure in Your Marketing—and Why
Most marketers have made measurement a top priority. However, the purpose of measuring must extend beyond collecting metrics.
- What Separates 'A' Marketers From the Rest of the Pack? [Infographic]
Despite advances in data, analytics, and technology, only 26% of marketers are capable of determining the impact they themselves have ...
- Improve Success by Adopting These Three KPI Categories
Outdoor sports are in full swing, and even athletes who aren't planning to compete are honing their workouts. Which made ...
- Three Elements of Successful Change Management
Change is part of successful companies' improvement process... but it doesn't always go quickly and smoothly. To make sure your ...
- How to Get to the Heart of Customer Experience
If customer retention is a top priority for you, and you haven't embarked on a customer experience mapping initiative, you ...
- Five Approaches for Making Sense of the Data Kaleidoscope
Marketers have access to more data than ever before, so the ability to identify data patterns and use that information ...
- Four Marketing Performance Management Resolutions for 2014
If you've made your marketing New Year's resolutions, we hope you devoted at least one to marketing performance management. As ...
- Bridging Marketing and Finance: Don't Get Lost in Translation
Whether your goal is to obtain a seat at the table or to prove the value of Marketing—or more easily ...
- 1-800-MARKETING: Transitioning From Service Provider to Value Generator
There's a difference between being a service organization to Sales and being a value generator for the company. As marketing ...
- Marketing Operations: Pit Crew or Service Station?
A good way to think about your marketing operations function is that it could operate either as a pit crew ...
- Increasing Marketing's Relevance to the Business [Infographic]
The results of the 11th annual Marketing Performance Management Survey are out. Find out about the key findings in this ...
- More Data Does Not Equal Better Insights
We're drowning in data. We generate it from our own activity or research; we collect and capture tons more from ...
- Four Steps to Ensuring Your Strategy Achieves Results
Many companies at all stages invest time in planning but lack the processes and leadership needed to ensure a strategy ...
- Connect Customer Experience, Convenience, and Differentiation to Business Results
Understanding how the customer behavior you can monitor influences the buying process... is key. Here are three areas to monitor ...
- Managing Marketing Content Across the Customer Lifecycle
Getting caught up in the content marketing frenzy is easy. But content delivered in the right channel, but at the ...
- Power Up Your Marketing to Prove Business Value [Infographic]
Numerous studies throughout 2012 reiterated just how challenged marketers are in proving Marketing's business value. Some marketers, though, are cracking ...
- A Three-Step Approach for Linking Content and Behavior: Measuring Relevancy
Almost everyone would agree that content must be relevant. But what is the best way to measure relevancy? Many of ...
- The Six A's of Marketing Performance Management [Infographic]
What grade would your CEO give your marketing organization for its ability to demonstrate its impact on the business? Today's ...
- How to Transform Marketing Into a Center of Excellence [Infographic]
Nearly everyone understands that the marketing function is vital to an organization's success. However, not all folks understand the various ...
- How to Improve Performance Measurement in Four Steps
Measuring and reporting on Marketing's value is more important than ever. To truly demonstrate their value and design an effective ...
- Follow Three Steps to Identify Your Campaign Goals and Measure Their Outcomes
Do you know exactly what your campaign goals are? Do you know how to measure your campaign outcomes? If not, ...
- Two Key Building Blocks for Creating a Marketing Dashboard
Not having the right information means that you'll have to base your business decisions more on instinct and intuition than ...
- How to Create an Actionable Marketing Dashboard (and Why You Need One)
If you want to answer the C-suite's questions about how Marketing is performing, you need a dashboard—an insightful report that ...
- Three Keys to Accelerating Marketing Measurement and a Fact-Based Culture
If CMOs are to be accountable for marketing ROI, their organizations must have marketers who have data, analysis, and measurement ...
- Delivering on the Promise of Marketing Automation
More and more organizations are investing in marketing automation platforms. Is yours one of them? If so, learn how to ...
- The Six Cs of a Customer-Centric Marketing and Sales Pipeline
Customers today are actively engaged buyers, so your approach to the sales and marketing pipeline must evolve. Learn six revised ...
- Analytics and Marketing Operations: A One-Two Punch for Growth
Today's customers are more value-oriented and less loyal. Considering the increase in customer expectations, the competitive landscape, and the data ...
- Planning Isn't Free: What Marketers Can Learn From HGTV
HGTV shows make those overnight home transformations look so easy. Many marketers approach their marketing plans the same way: a ...
- Need to Engage and Connect With Prospects and Customers? Marketing Automation to the Rescue (Maybe)
Think marketing automation platforms are just a way to make your marketing organizations more efficient? Wrong. These systems—if used properly—can ...
- The Price of Chasing the Next Shiny Toy
Marketers tend to race headlong, hell-bent after the next shiny toy. But at what price? I'd suggest at the price ...
- Grow the Bottom Line With Voice of the Customer Research
When executed well, a VoC program can provide insight about customers and what is important to them. Besides the obvious ...
- How Vulnerable Are You to Customer Defection?
Our job as marketers is to acquire, grow, and retain profitable customer relationships to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Here ...
- KPIs Provide Insight to Influence Success and Strategy
Effective marketing-measurement helps companies guide scenario modeling, planning, and investments. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) is an integral part of ...
- Five Marketing-Accountability Resolutions for 2011
Marketing accountability was a key topic of the last decade, and as 2011 kicks off—it looks like that's not going ...
- Six Best-Practices to Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
Your sales and marketing organizations are the most critical links to customers. The alignment of those two organizations determines how ...
- Three Critical Steps for Securing Your Marketing Budget
Now that fall is here, you are likely tackling your marketing plan and budget. The pressure for marketing organizations to ...
- Marketing's Missing Link
Perhaps because the difficult economic climate has forced marketers into a more tactical mode, with leaner teams trying to execute ...
- Three Key Investments for Improving Marketing Effectiveness and Accountability
Over half of the responding companies to a recent survey indicated that the biggest barrier to an effective measurement strategy ...
- The Three Ps of Marketing Operations
For Marketing to fully achieve maturity in marketing performance measurement and management—or just take it to the next level—the role ...
- The Nine Most Common Data Mining Techniques Used in Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics take you beyond the traditional slicing and dicing of your data so you can be smarter and more ...
- How to Create Your Marketing Dashboard in Five Easy Steps
You already know that a dashboard is an essential tool for improving (and proving) marketing effectiveness. These five steps will ...
- A 12-Step Guide for Driving Marketing Action With Data
Are you facing increasing pressure from your leadership team to justify your marketing decisions? Most marketers can no longer afford ...
- Embracing Cross-Channel Analytics to Create a Competitive Advantage
If you are using multiple channels and you want to understand both what's really working and enrich your customers' experiences ...
- Marketing: Beware of 'Outkicking the Coverage'
Although football metaphors abound in business, this article explores the idea of "outkicking your coverage," which is when an overly ...
- Setting Performance Targets: The Ins and Outs in 10 Steps
Despite the emphasis on and progress in marketing performance measurement and management over the past decade, research continues to show ...
- Four Customer-Centricity Best-Practices and Three Customer-Value Metrics for Customer-Relationship Success
Changes in the way customers receive and process information via social-networking sites, mobile phones, and the Internet, combined with shrinking ...
- Win/Loss Analysis (Part 2)—A Process for Taking Revenue up a Notch
Part 1 of this article series examined the purpose, definition, and metric associated with win/loss analysis. This final part discusses ...
- Win/Loss Analysis (Part 1)—A Process for Taking Revenue Up a Notch
When done properly, win/loss analysis provides clarity and insights into customers' perceptions of your product, experiences throughout the sales cycle, ...
- Benchmarking: A Best-Practice for Improving Marketing Performance (Part 2)
Knowing what to improve and by how much is vital to establishing realistic performance targets and metrics. This two-part article discusses ...
- Benchmarking: A Best-Practice for Improving Marketing Performance (Part 1)
CEOs and CMOs are interested in seeing marketing organizations improve their performance in two key areas: effectiveness (the ability to ...
- Measuring Social Marketing and Media
The more quantitatively you can measure your social media, the better. And the closer those measurements are to business outcomes, ...
- Tackling the 'Too Hard to' Pile of Marketing Accountability
If you're like us, you probably have one of those piles on your desk that keeps being moved from one ...
- Managing Marketing Performance: The Role of Data, Analytics and Metrics
Performance management has been applied to various parts of a business for quite a long time, particularly when it comes ...
- Marketing Optimization for Maximum ROI
You've probably heard phrases such as site optimization, search engine optimization, event optimization, and campaign optimization. A more recent concept ...
- How Marketing Can Go Beyond the 'Make It Pretty' Syndrome
At a recent conference, Sylvia Reynolds, chief marketing officer for Wells Fargo, asked, "When did Marketing become the make-it-pretty department?" ...
- Five Steps to Prepare Marketing to Demonstrate Value in a Tough Economic Climate
We may all be tightening our belts a bit more soon. As a result, our marketing budgets will be under ...
- For Whom the Bell Tolls: Not Necessarily the CMO—How to Survive and Thrive Instead
The role of the Chief Marketing Officer has evolved since some of the first CMOs, such as Mark Mears of ...
- Recovering the Lost Art of Product Marketing
With product marketing, your company will be able to prepare the sales channels to relate to the buyer and enable ...
- MP 'Classic Truths': If You Don't Measure, You Can't Manage: The Best Metrics for Managing Marketing Performance
Without metrics to track performance, marketing and business plans are ineffective. For marketers, three primary metrics stand out as a starting ...
- Which Metrics Measure Marketing's Impact on Business and Influence Strategic Direction?
Results from a recent survey found that only 17% of us indicated that our CEOs would give marketing an A. ...
- How to Write a Playbook that Enables Sales Effectiveness
The sales playbook captures your company's knowledge about its markets, value propositions, offers, competitors, and best practices. These are the ...
- Transforming a 'Use Case' Into a Sales Tool
A use case, often created for product development, is commonly used to capture functional requirements. A use case provides one ...
- The Science Side of Marketing and the Emergence of Marketing Operations
Marketing operations enables an organization to run the marketing function as a fully accountable business. Marketing operations is about performance, ...
- Using Personas as a Sales-Enablement Tool
Think of personas—customer archetypes—as "stand-ins" representing the needs, goals, and personal characteristics of various groups of your customers. They are invaluable ...
- A Marketing Toolkit for Every CEO
If you're the CEO of a small or medium-sized business, your challenges not only include prioritizing the numerous demands on ...
- Dragons, Quests and Marketing Plans
A good marketing plan is in essence the Cliff Notes version of the company's current status, how it got there ...
- The Four Marketing Practices of Winners
For marketers in the services industry, it's important to understand the key factors that enable us to profitably acquire and ...
- Five Serious Considerations (and a Checklist) for Your Next Marketing Plan
Most businesspeople intuitively know that the key to successful marketing is having a marketing plan—a blueprint for action. But many ...
- If You Don't Measure, You Can't Manage: The Best Marketing Metrics
Without metrics to track performance, marketing and business plans are ineffective. Businesses need to know which success factors require measuring, ...
