Content by

Kara Burney

Unite Your Social Ads Reporting in One Place

Say goodbye to spreadsheets and data silos, because TrackMaven just launched a new suite of paid social analytics! Introducing Social Advertising Analytics in TrackMaven from TrackMaven on Vimeo. Now with advertising coverage across Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Audience Network, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, TrackMaven makes it easy to prove the impact of your brand across…

How to Explain Marketing Strategy and Analytics to Other Executives

Marketing is critical to the growth of your business. You know, and I know it. But do other executives know it? If you’ve ever encountered resistance to your marketing strategy, or received unhelpful “suggestions” driven by poor understanding of how marketing works, the answer is probably not. The problem here is that, despite working with each…

The Must-have Skills for Ambitious Marketing VPs

There’s always room for improvement, even at the top of the organizational food chain. Maybe you want a bigger slice of the annual budget so you can pull off unique and creative campaigns. Perhaps you want to build your personal brand alongside that of your brand. Or you could simply be angling for a promotion….

Marketers, It’s Time to Embrace Failure

Have any of your marketing campaigns ever flopped? Big time? Join the club. In business and in life, we’re taught that everyone makes mistakes. What we learn from our mistakes is what matters. Sadly, most organizations don’t work this way. Every one of us has failed at some point in our careers. Yet oftentimes the…

Getting the C-Suite to Give a Damn About Social Media

CMOs and their digital leaders are fighting an uphill battle. The challenge? Convincing the C-suite that social media investment is worth a damn. Most CMOs, however, are going into this battle without armor. Only 18 percent of CMOs can quantitatively show the impact of social media performance on their business. That’s just poor preparation. CEOs are…

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Why Marketing Leaders Need to Step Up

If you’re a CMO or head of marketing, sales and marketing alignment is a hot topic on your agenda. Why? Because marketing leaders are under fire to prove that marketing is a business driver, not a cost center. To do so, you need to ensure a smooth handoff with sales. Those leaders who don’t step…

Higher Education Marketing: Why Universities Are Skyrocketing on Social

School is cool again. Scoff all you like; the numbers don’t lie. Higher education marketing statistics show that educational institutions experienced the highest follower growth across the social media landscape in recent years, with an average annual follower growth of 77 percent. In comparison, the wellness industry had the second highest annual growth at a…

How to Take the Pain Out of Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

As a marketing leader, you’ve likely read your share of articles talking about how hard it is to measure marketing effectiveness. And while I agree that marketing performance measurement is not something a lot of marketers feel comfortable with, the truth is, with the right tools and processes, it doesn’t have to be as painful…

The One Reason Why Your Marketing Compensation Plan Is Failing

You’re falling short of you marketing goals. You’re going back and forth trying to find out where you’ve gone wrong. But there’s on area of your process you forgot to inspect: your marketing compensation plan. Did you know that, although more than half of marketers say their primary objective is to increase sales, less than…

3 Ways to Future-Proof Your Marketing Team Structure

So you’re trying to reach device-swapping, channel-changing customers. How’s that working out for you? Instead of blaming the millennials, perhaps it’s time to change with the times yourself. Yes, it could very well be time to consider a complete overhaul of your marketing team structure. Why? Many of the traditional ways in which marketers manage…

3 Ways Misalignment is Sabotaging Your Marketing Team

Data-driven management is essential to mobilize and motivate a well-oiled marketing team. Equip yourself with actionable strategies, technology recommendations, and budgeting trends in TrackMaven’s 2017 Marketing Leadership Survey. Studies (and common sense) tell us that when marketing is aligned with cross-functional teams, businesses see faster revenue growth and higher profitability. With all of this evidence,…

Prove Your Impact: The 2017 Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report

Do you know how your social media, blog, public relations, and website performance compare against your industry average? TrackMaven’s 2017 Digital Marketing Analytics Performance Report provides these answers and more. Our latest research effort goes far beyond broad best practices by drilling down to industry-specific benchmarks for 13 industries and 39 sub-industries. Using our marketing analytics platform, we analyzed 12…

What Is Good ROI for Your Marketing Campaigns?

Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important metrics for determining the success of a campaign or program. By tracking the level of return from investments in marketing, business leaders understand the effectiveness of the company’s marketing program. But what is good ROI for marketing campaigns? At its most basic level, “good ROI” means…

How to Calculate ROI for Marketing Activities

Top-down pressure for marketers to prove ROI is on the rise. However, CMOs are unsure of how to calculate ROI for marketing activities and quantify their business impact. Every marketer needs to be able to prove their return on marketing investment and tie their efforts to revenue and other business outcomes. When it comes to…

Social Media Sentiment Analysis vs. Social Incident Response: What’s the Difference?

Social media marketing is a many-headed hydra. From content distribution and campaign management to social listening and social analytics, it’s challenging to find the right division of labor to tame each element of social media management. But when it comes to preserving brand health, social media sentiment analysis and incident response are two often-confused components…

How to Set the Right Google Analytics Goals for Your Business Website

Google Analytics goals help marketers measure how well their website meets target objectives. But do you know the most valuable website actions and conversions to track for your business? If you’re unsure, or are undertaking a website redesign or rebrand, just ask yourself a simple question: why do you have a website in the first…

Tracking Marketing ROI? Start With These 5 Questions

Ever tried to explain the ROI of your marketing to your CEO? Tricky, isn’t it? Tracking marketing ROI is hard. For most businesses, proving the value of content marketing is even harder. With so many touch points, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which tweet, blog post, or ebook converted someone into a customer. To break down marketing…

Ask a CMO: How to Build a High-Performance Marketing Team

All marketing leaders aim to elevate their teams from good to great. But Christine Schaefer, CMO of ThreatConnect, has a blueprint to make this dream a reality. Christine joined #TrackMavenLive to share her four-step process for structuring, organizing, and incentivizing a high-performance marketing team. Watch the complete presentation now, or read the key takeaways below! How to build…

The Most Effective Marketing Channels for Your B2C Business

With so many different channels to choose from, determining how to allocate marketing budget is enough to make any B2C marketer dizzy with frustration. Will email deliver more value than social media? SEO or paid search? Which are the most effective marketing channels? For starters, the trends are clear when it comes to online versus…

Social Media ROI: Can You Prove It?

Marketing is accountable for sales and revenue — but can you prove content and social media ROI? If you can’t, you’re not alone. According to The CMO Survey, social media spending is expected to climb to a 20.9 percent share of marketing budgets in the next five years. But few marketers can justify these escalating…

2017 Marketing Budget Planning: Trends, Tips, and Top Priorities

All marketing budgets are finite. So how do you decide where the money goes? To break down the spreadsheet gymnastics that is marketing budget planning, we invited Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, to advise marketing teams on the top five core budgeting considerations for 2017. Matt joined #TrackMavenLive to outline the planning approaches that help the…

"The MQL is Eating Marketing": How to Fix Broken B2B Lead Generation

The alignment problem between sales and marketing is a well-beaten drum. But Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared, pinpoints the root cause when he says “the MQL is eating marketing.” Joe joined #TrackMavenLive to identify three key alignment challenges that cripple B2B lead generation at most organizations, and explain why he opted to move…

2017 Facebook Advertising Report: Budgets and Benchmarks

Four million businesses actively advertise on Facebook — 30 times more than on Twitter and eight times more than on Instagram. That’s one incredible source of ad revenue for Zuckerberg. But for businesses seeking to stand out on Facebook, that’s a whole lot of competition. New research indicates just how hard it is to keep pace…

Inbound vs. Account-Based Marketing: Avoiding the False Choice

According to Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at InsightSquared, we marketers often fall victim to False Choice Syndrome, thinking it’s all or nothing when it comes to selecting the most fitting programs. The head-to-head battle on most marketers’ minds these days is the one between inbound marketing and account-based marketing (ABM). Joe joined TrackMaven to…