Marketing and Big Data: Finding That Needle in the Haystack

We once measured our audience using demographic buckets, especially with the use of age groups, gender, and financial ability as keys. Classic marketing teaches us that this is the best way to define our audience, and to make appropriate pitches that will elicit favorable response from the target audience. Still true, but with a big…

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Critical Steps for Protecting Customer Data in Your Small Business

Protecting customer data in your small business takes good planning, training and vigilance because serious threats come from all sides: Hardware, Software, People, and Systems. Hardware “Skimmers” are responsible for many of the infamous retail customer data breaches that have made headlines in recent years. Skimmers are hardware devices that are surreptitiously installed on your card readers.…

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Big Data: Information is Not Knowledge

Say that you have a log file of every contact to your website. Or that you are a cell phone company with a multi–billion record log file of every call made from every location to every number dialed using your network. You can accurately state that you have big data at your fingertips. But it…

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6 Ways Marketing Automation Will Improve Your Inbound Marketing ROI

To take full advantage of your inbound marketing efforts, it would be wise to invest in marketing automation. Marketing automation has the ability to enhance the impact of your content, capture lead intelligence, increase conversion rates, foster repeat purchases, and improve the overall customer experience for your brand. In this blog I want to focus on the…

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3 Ways Data is the Key to Retail Growth

Data is more available and more easily accessible than ever before. However, if you do not know how to access it, or what to do with it when you get it, it doesn’t help you much. If you have the right data and know how to use it, you can grow your retail business exponentially.…

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The Future of Personalization

If you haven’t been thinking about the future of personalization, you should. The CMO Council released a fascinating study, looking at how marketers are viewing/using personalization and what that means for all of us down the road. The study, done in partnership with Pegasystems, is entitled “Predicting Routes to Revenue, and found that nearly half of…

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Numbers Make the Conversation More Interesting

Numbers are the bane of many sales people’s existence. Everyone wants to talk about numbers, but it’s far more fun and easy to talk about our cool products, the flashy features, and all the bells and whistles. Or in conversations with our managers, it’s easier to talk about all the stuff we are doing, or…

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How to Stay One Step Ahead of Hackers

They can come at you and your small business in waves. Unless you’re not prone to reading the news, you likely know that cyber-criminals have impacted countless American and foreign businesses in recent years. While some of the better-known, bigger companies have been hit, it is not uncommon to hear about smaller businesses also being…

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