In an upsetting blow to marketers everywhere, research indicates that over 70 percent of marketers failed to deliver quantifiable results for their efforts in 2013.

While there’s much to be said for experimentation with new tactics, there’s also a harsh reality here: A huge majority failed to track and attribute marketing spend to closed business. As budgets continue to increase, this tracking is critical to understanding whether your content strategy is effective. Without a means of evaluation (or by ignoring the data you have, which is even worse), you’re letting your gut dictate your content marketing decisions, instead of letting your audiences’ preferences determine your direction.Continue Reading

Despite the popularity of video, there’s still a common misconception that you can create tons of video content, throw it up on YouTube, and pray to the marketing gods that it attracts attention. However, this kind of wishful thinking is crazy. Video marketing involves more work. It has to be timely, relevant, memorable, and most importantly, optimized if you’re going to see any return on investment.

Just as you optimize landing pages and build full campaigns around a piece of written content to ensure it performs, you have to do the same with videos. In other words, you can’t bank on “going viral,” but you can add some leading-edge customization to video content to make sure it drives business. Continue Reading