One of the best quotes about planning ahead comes from that iconic Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” This is particularly apt in the world digital marketing, where lack of specific strategies to achieving clear goals will sink any business big or small. For that reason, we’ve listed five features every marketer needs to look for when selecting an effective marketing-planning software solution.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Planning, Marketing Analytics, Financial Planning, Revenue Attribution, Marketing Budgeting, Marketing Insights, marketing measurement, alignment
Spreadsheets were developed to manipulate numbers, not to juggle marketing campaigns, sales leads, the demand center, teams divided by region or country, or conflicts between digital campaigns and events. In fact, the more information crammed in to a spreadsheet the more unwieldy it becomes. The harder it is to use, the more the data becomes siloed. And when the data is siloed, it might as well not even exist.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Planning, Marketing Analytics, Effective Planning
The most effective marketing organizations in 2017 (and beyond) will be those who break down any remaining barriers that prevent them from working harmoniously with sales. Collaboration is the path to better results for both teams, a bigger contribution to the company’s bottom line, and a clear justification for getting a sizeable budget renewed each year.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9, sales, sales enablement
Real-time data has become a common expectation in marketing technology products. Once you know the option exists to see how your marketing campaigns are playing out instantaneously, who wants to wait days, weeks, or months?
Topics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9, Effective Planning
Marketing data has come a long way. The insights we can now glean from marketing analytics give us the power to make huge strides in how well we do our jobs. Of course, the path from marketing data to clear, actionable dashboards and reports depends on some pretty powerful tools.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9, Business Intelligence
We all have brands we like and maybe even, on some level, feel connected to. But at the end of the day, brands are still brands. It’s a much bigger uphill battle to encourage engagement or connection with a brand than it is with a human being.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9, Marketing Stream
How much time do you spend looking at marketing data in spreadsheets? All those numbers, charts, and graphs you and your marketing operations collect and try to parse in the hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of how well your marketing is performing – are they really helping you improve?
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9
CMOs often invest in or depend on existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools, in the hopes they can gain new insights to improve decision making. There are mountains of data locked away in silos and business systems, and BI tools give users hope of finding it. So why do so many BI tools fail to deliver?
Topics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9
A common myth is that waterfalls don’t lie. But if you’re looking at only your overall waterfall, you might be missing some key points. Think back to your recent quarterly business review.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9
According to its technical definition, A/B Testing is the “randomized experiment with two variants.” As we consider the complexity of today’s world, however, we start to understand that the optimal answer may not be A or B and in fact, it likely isn’t.
Read MoreTopics: Marketing Analytics, Hive9, Marketing Stream
