In our increasingly digitally-driven world, the simple fact is this: if you do virtually anything online, you are leaving a footprint. That footprint contains information about you, the web pages you visit, where, when and what you buy, and your activity on social media. In the age of big data, all of this information is extremely valuable to businesses who want to learn more about their customers and devise more targeted ways to advertise to them. The inevitability of giving up data online means good business for large data aggregation companies (sometimes known as data “brokers”) such as Acxiom and

One of the great things about digital advertising is the array of options available to ensure optimal return on your investment. As they become more trackable, sophisticated and targeted, digital advertisements make it possible to be strategic about your spends and measure throughput carefully. There are several ways you can choose to pay for your ads. The two most common are cost-per-thousand (CPM) and cost-per-click (CPC). CPM CPMs are billed at a flat rate for every 1,000 impressions. An impression indicates that an ad has been displayed (made an impression) on a given channel, regardless of whether it was clicked.

In the world of digital advertising, there are a slew of metrics that can help you track the success of your campaign. Click-through rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), impression count, engagement rate and overall reach are all measures, to a certain extent, of how well your ads are performing. However, if your ultimate goal is high sales volume (and whose isn’t?), there’s only one metric that really matters: conversions. Your conversion rate, plain and simple, lets you know the overallefficacy of the digital customer journey you have laid out. Whether it’s more phone calls, online purchases, form fills or whatever desired

With more consumers than ever flocking to the internet to find information, read reviews, share and shop, businesses are increasingly turning to paid advertising as an essential way to guide more traffic toward their website, brand, product or service. Because it’s relatively easy for any business to set up the likes of a Google Adwords or paid social media campaign without the help of a marketing agency, many do just that — without an intimate knowledge of the systems themselves. Therefore, a fair amount of myths and misconceptions exist about paid advertising and its functionality. Here are seven of the

If you harness data in order to inform your marketing, there’s a good chance your competitors have access to it, and therefore your customers. Now’s the time to take back control. With the explosion of big data and the associated need to manage and analyze torrents of information, data governance and security has become one of the hot-button issues of the business world. In most spheres, data security refers to preventing unauthorized access to and corruption of computers, databases and websites, and the sensitive information within. In the world of digital marketing, data security is also of great importance —

by Jeremy Gendelman, PIN Business Network What do you do, exactly? We get that a lot. Our response has typically been along the lines of: We’re a data company that does digital marketing. We’re a digital company that does data marketing. We’re a company that does digital marketing…with data. We’re a marketing agency. The response to our response is often characterized by a glazed-over look and a lot of smile-and-nodding. The truth is, figuring out how to adequately convey not only what we do but how we do it has been challenging, to say the least. Even our clients, who

by Taj Nahar, PIN Business Network If content is “king”, then video content is the protector of the realm. These days, it seems like you can’t go anywhere on social media without seeing some type of video content whether voluntary or involuntary. While the importance of video is certainly not missed, understanding the different types of video and how to best utilize it is another world unto itself. Video has become the go-to strategy for agencies, marketers, and designers to break through and get messages to a growing audience with even shorter attention spans. The truth is there is no

by Monica Paici, Internal Marketing Director, PIN Business Network Content marketing has been around for ages. While the term ‘content marketing’ has taken on buzzword-status in recent years, businesses and marketers have used this tactic to entice prospects and engage customers for eons. Think of it as education and information. Rather than just pushing products and services in a “salesy” fashion, content marketing seeks to provide valuable information. It can influence purchasing behavior, but it is not overt. Content matters because it tells a story. Beyond the typical whitepaper, study or infographic, your content can be in video form, woven

by Monica Paici, Internal Marketing Director, PIN Business Network I am sure many of you have heard the phrase, “It’s not the destination, but the journey.” Often in our daily business lives we are so focused on the destination (sale), we lose sight of our customer’s journey to get there. Don’t get me wrong, we are all interested in the destination. It means a sale or purchase for businesses, but more importantly, a solution for a client. I recently put together our customer’s user journey map (in becoming our client). It was a great exercise and very enlightening. Spending time

by Herm Brocksmith, President PIN Business Network When a product or service is sold, people and companies are quick to take credit for the sale and justify their value to you or your company. Have you listened to just about every lead provider there is explain to you that they are responsible for getting people in your door and claiming that they are responsible for the sale to your customer? That’s called Attribution. If any vendor is telling you that they are responsible for the purchase, then they clearly do not understand what today’s buyer is doing in their journey