Class: Analyzing Inbound Marketing (AZ401) Professor: Marshall Sponder, Monster.com , Web Analytics Association for Social Media In this class Marshall takes you through a tour of web analytics and how to track and measure your efforts related to social media, web, and more. Besides giving you an overview of how web analytics work, he dives into some specific examples of how to understand the data you are getting from the analytics tool. Here I talk about the final 5 classes. If you haven’t done already, check out the review of the first 5 presentations. MORE >>

The first step to improving digital marketing results is to understand the emerging trends and best practices. e-Strategy Trends ). e-Strategy Trends ). The majority (as much as 70%) is “dark social”—links shared through email or instant messaging that generally get lumped in with “direct” traffic in analytics programs like Google Analytics. Blogging generally gets the largest share of inbound marketing budgets, followed by social media, SEO (if calculated separately from blogging) and PPC advertising. e-Strategy Trends ). MORE >>

They call this analytical process “Moneyball.”  I think many of us are like Billy Beane with our b2b marketing budgets. We have smaller marketing budgets and staffs as compared with our competitors—so how can we have a bigger impact? We want to say “we have a booth at that show” or “we have an ad running in that publication.”  However, reporting from your marketing automation platform may show you that your money would have been better spent on seminars if you were looking to generate sales opportunities. It’s all about metrics and performance.  MORE >>

SHIFTING MARKETING TRENDS – Conventional outbound marketing budgets like public relations, telemarketing, direct mail, trade shows and print advertising are shrinking against increases in social media, virtual events like webinars, seo and social media. 61% of marketers plan to invest more in earned media during 2011 whilst the average budget spent on company blogs & social media has nearly doubled in the last two years. Every channel is a potential source for leads, all of us know this in business. million, 41.7 million online1. China population 1.3 MORE >>

Findings from research conducted by Searchmetrics help explain this trend. The search analytics software company found that, of content included in Google’s general search listings, video appeared most frequently, being displayed in over 70% of search results. It’s no surprise then that the use of video is on the rise, according to the 2012 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report published by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. And it’s no wonder. Why to Use Online Video for B2B Marketing. MORE >>