With more than 8,000 martech companies in America today, it’s become abundantly clear that the competitive advantage every business is looking for is being sought from the technology sector masterstrokes.

When you look at financial services firms, the first thing that comes to mind is accounting, financial planning, legal and management consulting firms. Although the breadth of professional services firms is much greater than that and includes marketing and recruitment, it’s our financial and legal counterparts that really struggle to stand out from the crowd.

Facebook is the largest and most popular social media platform with 1.39 million active users. Facebook revolutionized social media and can be accredited with monetizing social media platforms with the use of Facebook advertising. Facebook's ad platform offers companies the chance to specifically target not only their prospective customer group but go a step further and target segments within your potential customer base.

Social media is taking an increasingly larger portion of any marketing strategy, where, as of 2021 - there are 3.96 billion people using some form of social media. It’s an ever-expanding landscape that allows for a multitude of interactions where influencers are partnering with brands for paid promotions, and brands are leveraging influencers to boost their brand awareness.

Many believe that great leaders are born or rise to the occasion, but with such a need for leadership ever-present in business, government, and the NFP sector the question hangs, can great leaders be created?

These days it seems that Twitter functions as little more than a platform to cyberbully celebrities.

For marketers, Twitter offers very little utility in generating qualified leads, with only fleeting opportunities for genuine engagement.

“It’s not what you sell that matters as much as how you sell it”- Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-Founder of HubSpot.

Marketers and Sales Representatives are two jobs that are essential to the successful operation of any growing business. While Sales representatives offer a more tangible contribution to achieving your bottom line, marketers coordinate a number of intangible associations surrounding an entire brand that, organizing public relations and media exposure activities, running advertising campaigns to develop a greater awareness of the products on offer, and employing a range of monitoring tools to provide quantitative results. In short, both roles impact leads and revenue with one more focused on building a transactional customer relationship, while the other is focused on managing.

Good marketing goes hand in hand with good selling and while both roles serve their own purpose, here is why being a marketer is just as important as being a Sales Rep.

You're probably reading this right now because you are not sure how effective your marketing strategy is, or you might simply want to know how to maximize your marketing efforts.

Either way, by reading this article, you’ve already placed yourself in a better position to take action to drive growth for your business. In a modern, golden age of technology with declining attention spans, businesses that are not willing to adopt a constant improvement for their marketing strategy, will inevitably fall behind. It cannot be emphasized just how important it is for businesses to adjust to such dynamic times. 

If you don’t know if you are one of these businesses falling behind, here are some signs you should be looking out for when analyzing your current marketing strategy.

The meteoric rise of digital marketing only proves the importance for businesses to understand how to effectively measure their success. We've discussed what the best marketing tactics for lead generation and marketing strategies for small companies are, but how can we actually know whether these strategies have worked or not?

This is where Digital Marketing Metrics come in. Metrics are the tools we use to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.  You can capture these metrics through analytic tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot Analytics, and SEMrush. This is not to be confused with your business Key Performance Indicators.  Key Performance Indicators track the performance of your business, whilst metrics are an indication of how effective your processes are. All KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs.

An advantage of understanding how to read metrics is that you are often able to see the impacts of your marketing campaigns in real-time, as opposed to traditional marketing campaigns, where the results were often not seen until months to potentially years later.

However, a word of warning, not all metrics are as effective as others. These metrics are called Vanity Metrics as described by Tableau. Vanity metrics may sound good on a report but will not provide you with any true insight on how to generate greater sales.  For example, the number of Instagram followers. Having many followers may look appealing, however, is this large number reflected in revenue?  These are considerations one must take when allocating resources to boosting.

To assist you in determining which metrics you should prioritize, here are the essential 6 digital marketing metrics your business should understand!

Many entrepreneurs are natural marketers. They come up with great marketing ideas that are often more creative and, on the mark, then those who are paid to do marketing for a living.

The biggest challenge they face is execution.

Sound familiar?