Tis the season! According to a new survey by Deloitte, holiday sales this year are expected to increase by 3.5 to 4% over the same period last year, bringing the cash register total to a whopping $965 billion.

While inbound marketing is a multi-faceted and multi-layered approach that embraces the full spectrum of marketing activities – from buyer persona development to campaign tracking to analytics – at the core lies what is truly its most defining element: the buyer’s journey.

An Adobe Systems and ResearchNow survey of digital marketers found that 76% of businesses believe that measuring marketing ROI is a critically important objective. That’s the good news. The bad news, however, is that only 29% – or about 3 in 10 – feel that they’re doing this effectively and consistently.

In the world of content marketing, retargeting refers to a strategy where customers are presented with specific, contextual online ads that are triggered by a small file – or “cookie” – that was automatically placed on their browser during a previous browsing, shopping or surfing experience.

Like plenty of other businesses – including some of your biggest competitors – you wisely decided to launch an Inbound Marketing program to generate more leads, sales, revenues and profits. Good move! 

It’s not uncommon for businesses to juggle what it would consider a “crazy number of tools” to manage their marketing analytics. 

Social media is so simple anyone can do it.

Wait, scratch that.

Social media is so simple anyone can do it wrong. Let's look at how you can stay in front of a social media blunder and create the kind of social media presence that can actually help your audience while promoting your brand.

Business owners and marketing executives are constantly searching for ways to maximize their marketing ROI – especially now that competition is fiercer than ever, and customers can instantly exit the sales funnel simply by hitting the back arrow on their browser or the “unsubscribe” link in their email.

One of the fundamental things that we help our clients understand and appreciate is that in the inbound marketing world, the goal isn’t merely to get traffic. That was the case several years ago when internet marketing first hit the scene, and frankly, it was the wrong metric.

If cash is the proverbial lifeblood of a business – particularly small and mid-sized businesses – then leads are the fuel that drives more customers, more revenues and more profits. Every organization wants to drive traffic to their website, but more importantly, they want to produce qualified leads as a result of that traffic.