Most everyone in the business world has heard that social media is the place to be. Since crowds of marketing professionals and agencies alike are pounding the metaphorical social pavement, it can become a bit muddied with poorly-developed strategy and content.

In order to properly develop a winning social media strategy, you should understand the ways in which your business, product, or service can best build a social community using social market analytics to study what, when, how, why, and where your brand should show up and engage with your audience.

In today’s FAQ Friday, we’ve got the answers to your social media questions on how to measure success within the current social landscape for your business.

Email newsletters are great for keeping everyone on your email list up-to-date on the latest news and promotions. However, there is one catch. You want to make sure that you are creating effective email marketing campaigns that nurture and convert your leads into repeat customers. With that said, let’s explore three measures that your email marketing strategy needs in order to be effective for both your business and your audience.

Discovering consumer behavioral patterns within your company is vital to forming any effective marketing or sales strategy. Without understanding the behaviors of your customers, how can you hope to have any successful marketing campaigns or lead conversions? In today’s Thought Hive, it’s time to focus on the numbers and how you can use consumer behavior studies and digital analytics to create successfully targeted messages for your audience.

Inbound marketing has given marketers the unprecedented ability to know and understand their consumers better than ever before. Today it’s possible to know where a lead comes from, exactly what prompted the conversion, what pages they visited, what information they sought out, and more. Data is everywhere and readily available that it can help you to target your market and your message with pinpoint accuracy.

The problem lies in the amount of data available! Now more than ever, we’re answering your questions about what important information that you need to measure in order to establish marketing metrics that matter.

Page load times and page views are just a few analytics that a web guru may be studying day in and day out. However if you want to learn how to focus in on metrics that affect your business, then you’re in luck. In today’s blog, we’re mapping out the differences between web analytics and marketing analytics and how working closely with your marketing analytics matters for your business.

There's more marketing data out there right now to overflow any spreadsheet and overwhelm statisticians who love number crunching even more than Nate Silver. Just the names of popular marketing metrics themselves can be too heady. That’s why in today’s blog, we’re defining key analytics like customer acquisition cost and lead management in order to hone in on how these measurements affect your brand reach.

When you mention the word "success" to a business owner, there's no shortage of mental images that immediately spring to mind, which is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that there are literally dozens of ways that business owners, employees and customers can ascribe value to what businesses do day in and day out. However, some people tally success whenever a business has high customer retention or robust employee satisfaction ratings while others measure success based on sheer profitability or whether your customer base is expanding.

Therefore, the fact that success is such a malleable term, it means that unfortunately two people might not be talking about the same thing or that, for instance, the marketing metrics that you're focused in on might be measuring activities rather than ROI-yielding outcomes.

In today’s In-Sites Thought Hive, we’re laying down the facts on what we mean by measuring marketing success using key analytics.

Knowing how a website or site page is performing is crucial to the success of any business. Sometimes businesses hire others to stay informed and sometimes they build an in-house team. No matter who does the performance montoring it should be monitored and progress should be noted. In other words, if you don't know how your website is performing you may not be fully aware of how your business is performing. There are many ways you can track page performance and plan your content marketing SEO strategy.

Sales and marketing alignment can be challenging for many businesses, but the rewards are definitely worth the effort. Closer alignment of sales and marketing processes can send your revenues soaring—an increase of 208% in marketing revenue going to companies that closed the gap successfully. Lets explore some of the most frequently asked questions surrounding sales and marketing analytics, and ensure you are tracking metrics that matter most to the success of your business.

With a flood of customer data and the right CRM to make sense of it all, you might still be wondering about the differences between descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

• Descriptive analytics 
• Predictive analytics 
• Prescriptive analytics 

These terms have been bandied about in marketing circles for so long that their meaning has become a little blurred over time.