With marketing teams being challenged to deliver results despite tighter budgets and smaller staffs, how is it possible to improve measurements and ROI analysis now, when they did not get addressed in prior years, when more resources were available? more

Digital marketing is hot. And a recent MarketingProfs survey showed that the first items that marketers faced with reduced budgets would cut were print advertising and tradeshows. So, why focus on print collateral at all? Here's a close look at three reasons why print collateral may still be viable and ... more

Why do people believe things irrationally, in the face of zero evidence? You already know the answer: People who really, really want to believe, will believe... regardless of where the evidence points. Are you managing your marketing program this way? more

The process of thinking deeply is known as "workable wondering," which involves the use of empirical, rigorous, and relevant information to challenge our assumptions. It means more than collecting information. It requires reading between the lines. more

Long-term corporate success is linked to the ability to innovate, and Marketing should play a more central role. Who is better positioned to give insight into who will buy, how many they will buy, why they buy, and when specific markets will buy? It is time for marketing executives and professionals ... more

For any online business, the goal of search engine marketing is to achieve high rankings in the major search engines for keyword phrases specific to the products or services offered. What's more, it's just as crucial to ensure that the keywords chosen are the ones most likely to convert to sale ... more

Sometimes the best laid plans go wrong because, in fact, they weren't the best laid plans. In this season of spring, when new life and fresh hope comes a-budding, author Jon Kranz offers a little... fertilizer. Herewith, a grumpy, glass-half-empty, downright surly look at all the ways marketers shoot themselves ... more

Some very successful companies have made the transition from the Real World (RL) to a three-dimensional realm called Second Life (SL)—a virtual world where millions of dollars are spent. The rationale behind these transitions ranges from attracting press coverage to brand engagement with potential clients. Whatever the desired outcome, SL is ... more

Well-executed market segmentation quickly identify customer profiles that have a higher likelihood to buy. And once a company has identified that customer profile, it can use that information to target new customers with similar profiles. By targeting these prospects directly, marketers gain higher and quicker return on their marketing investments. ... more

They're born between 1979 and 2001—the kids of Baby Boomers and the nation's most racially and ethnically diverse generation. They have strong opinions on which brands they'll buy and for which employers they'll work. They're going to have a huge impact on business and marketing, and the world may be ... more

Marketing is the engine of any enterprise. Yet marketing is often underutilized. We find marketing practitioners frustrated at not being able to make the essential contributions to their company's success that they are capable of—and ideally positioned to provide. Peer managers and members of the executive team have difficulty articulating ... more

If your company isn't looking at the latest trends in marketing to women, focusing a significant amount of your resources on this market, and generating innovative marketing ideas, you are missing out on a substantial amount of revenue. Women have the power, the money and the will to work with ... more

It's safe to say that we all have a list of top marketing strategies. Every year they appear on the strategic plan, they drive activities throughout the firm, and their progress is discussed at the highest levels. But are the top strategies that firms identify really the ones that they ... more

We know that people don't always do what they had intended to do. Yet, self-reported intentions continue to be used widely in marketing research because they represent easy-to-collect proxies of behavior. For example, most studies of satisfaction use consumers' intentions to repurchase as the dependent variable, and most companies rely ... more

The CEO wants to accelerate quote-to-cash and create in-account champions. Also at the top of the CEO's mind is a call to go deeper into the installed base... and build products that create competitive differentiation. How would you say you're doing when it comes to aligning your marketing organization with ... more

Great news for corporate executives with an eye on marketing performance: The discipline of measuring and managing marketing ROI is rapidly growing and taking hold. For at least the past five years, executive surveys have put marketing ROI at the top of the agenda, and you had to wonder when ... more

If you're like most of us, you use Google almost daily as a search tool. But Google is capable of so much more than simple search. You'd be surprised at what Google can do to make your work life more productive and easier on any number of levels. In fact, ... more

If you're like most of us, you use Google almost daily as a search tool. But Google is capable of so much more than simple search. You'd be surprised at what Google can do to make your work life more productive and easier on any number of levels. In fact, were ... more

Given the strong business pressure to improve Marketing's accountability, the race to better understand the customer is in high gear. Data warehouse, data-mining and customer relationship management (CRM) systems promised a seamless flow of intelligence and insight to executives' fingertips. While technology can bring data and information together and make it ... more

This series has gone a long way to help you make the invisibly rich Internet more visible. We close the five-part series by tapping into the wisdom and experience of two renowned Google experts, who share some of their favorite tips, tools, insights and search strategies for researching with Google. ... more

This series is all about surprises and revelations – at least when it comes to using Google. And here’s another: Some of Google's most valuable properties aren't even search engines. Instead, they are other resources or tools like online research assistants, Web-based email, browser toolbars, and social networks. These valuable ... more

Now that you are intimate with the range of Google operators to refine your research searches, it's time to put the knowledge into practice in the real world. It's also a good time to delve a little deeper into the essential features of the Google interface. *Please note: this article ... more

If you're like most of us, you use Google almost daily as a search tool. But Google is capable of so much more than simple search. You'd be surprised at what Google can do to make your work life more productive and easier on any number of levels. *Please ... more

Were you to master Google's powerful search refinement operators and lesser-known features, you could save lots of time scouring irrelevant results. More enticing is the promise of elusive nuggets of market research and competitive intelligence out there, waiting to be discovered. *Please note: This article is available to paid subscribers ... more

Increasingly, corporate leaders in all industries are seeing the value of making their organizations customer-centric. What can customer-centricity mean to your company? How do you determine your company’s potential? And what must you do to create, lead and maintain a truly customer-focused organization? (Please note: This article is available only ... more