Big Data is all the rage but if you can't relate it meaningfully back to your customers and business processes than it isn't going to do you any good.

In certain industries there is no denying that there is a seasonal component to revenue generation. Two of the most obvious are retail and hospitality. Seasonality is easy to detect, confirm and measure. As a marketing professional do you simply accept the seasonality of your business or are you actively looking for ways to combat it?

It may seem like a silly question but all too often the hand-off of the lead generation program and the posting of sales collateral are the only real touch points between the marketing and sales teams.

The data generated over the last two decades first with traditional websites, then with search engine technology and now with social media are forcing the agency to once again “adapt-or-die” with the adoption and use of marketing analytics across all of its clients’ outlets and campaigns.

The next time someone tries to sell you SEO/SEM by calling it “marketing optimization” you can tell them, “I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means.”

“In the past, marketers were using the information in their databases to determine a consumers' lifetime value to the brand,” says Mark Miller, SVP and CRM practice lead at Digitas. “Today, marketers must use their database to figure out how to position their brand in a way that provides value to the consumers, instead of the other way around.”

"The requirements for big data analytics among SMBs are largely being driven by marketing departments. However, the lack of expertise within internal IT is becoming a main barrier for adoption."

Organizations use BI systems to provide real-time monitoring of KPI. Data mining business intelligence data allows you to make and test informed hypotheses about where your business is going.

The common wisdom is that it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. But are all your customers worth keeping?

Marketing departments will spend more on IT than IT departments by the year 2017.