blog

Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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What social media marketing metrics are you using?

The latest research from MarketingSherpa indicates that businesses using social media to promote their products and services — and fill their lead streams — are employing a variety of measures to gauge the effectiveness of their initiatives. Of course, the metrics you’d expect have been most widely adopted, but there are some important stats being watched by a small group of companies that signal where social media marketing is headed.

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When should the handoff from marketing to sales occur? The trend has been to gather ever more intelligence about your targets before unleashing the sales force on an opportunity, in the hopes that a more refined view of the prospect will lead to a shorter and more successful sales cycle. With more metrics brought to bear on the situation, the conventional wisdom goes, the sales team will be better equipped to communicate with the prospect, understand his needs and close the deal.

There is some truth to this thinking, but it has led sales and marketing departments astray with over-analysis. Analytics and market and prospect intelligence are undoubtedly crucial to the effective progression of a sales opportunity from early marketing efforts through the sales cycle and ultimately through implementation, as well. But, data has become a crutch, preventing sales and marketing teams from moving swiftly to take advantage of clear opportunities.

IT marketers and sales forces need to regain a sense of balance.

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