The concept of an influencer strategy isn’t anything new. Ask any business owner and they’ll say word of mouth is a key driver to gaining new customers. Scale that for larger brands and the approach requires much more than asking your customer to grab an extra business card on their way out.

We live in a multi-channel world. Consumers not only use more than one channel to make a purchase, they often use those channels simultaneously (checking online prices in stores, watching TV while browsing on their laptops) There are many factors that affect the quality of the cross channel experience. Externally, messaging, visuals, and functionality are all critical while internally marketers need to button up things like offer optimization, attribution modeling, and analytics.

Executing and developing the most effective marketing campaign requires a combination of forethought, research and analysis. There are a number of marketing optimization methods and technologies that can help you succeed. Sirius Decisions recently highlighted 8 keys to a successful marketing campaign. We made an infographic highlighting the eight most important strategies for successful marketing campaigns and took a deep dive into them below.

Marketing attribution, the process of identifying the “touches” that led to a sale, has never been more popular. Now, with social media marketing playing an ever-increasing role in marketing campaigns, companies are scrambling to trace the dollars spent on campaigns to specific sales. How many widgets did that tweet sell?

It always surprises me when I encounter a marketer who uses direct, singular attribution as the core of their marketing analytics. Don’t get me wrong; I understand the allure.

Aberdeen reported in February that 100% of businesses are using more than one channel to interact with customers. Multi-channel hasn’t been new for years, as their CEM report pointed out. Not only is the term tired but pointing out that businesses use more than one channel to communicate and drive sales is old news and completely misses the point of modern marketing. 

The promise of marketing analytics has long been surrounded by a haze of suspicion and poor execution. Too good to be true, too dismissive of the marketer’s intuition, analytics seem to some to be an expensive solution to a problem marketers do not think they have. Even for those marketers that understand the value of this technology, analytics often fail to meet their expectations. But why? We took a look in this infographic and discuss solutions below.

Consumers are connected to the brands they use in more ways than we could have imagined just five years ago. Today, consumers are reaching out to the brands, and no longer wait for brand initiated conversations.

While web advertising was once considered the cutting edge of advertising, marketers now find themselves grasping for evidence of ROI and sweeping up cookie crumbs. But there’s an alternative: mobile. With mobile, marketers have the opportunity to pull mobile data and create targeted messaging – not to be confused with an overstatement about location targeting – but true, useful data based on the fact that we now know the mobile user.

If the sightings of people walking into one another on the street, couples ignoring each other at restaurants and holding up traffic with heads down wasn't evidence that mobile phones have crept irreversibly into our lives, here is yet more cause for marketers to take serious note: “A combined 51% of time on retail sites took place on devices as of February (37% on smartphones, 14% on tablets) compared to 49% on PCs,” according to a new study by mobile ad network Millennial Media and comScore.

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." –from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell