A Harvard Business Review case study recently posed a provocative question: when should humans listen to algorithms vs. when should they trust their own experience and intuition? For this case study, the issue related to which of two employees to choose for a promotion. But, given the widespread applications for the use of big data and the power of predictive analytics, the question could be applied to any field or area of business practice—including content marketing.
When should content marketers listen to the algorithms instead of relying on their own instincts, which have been finely honed over time? Continue reading “Go With Your Gut: When You Can Ignore the Algorithms”

Marketing has long been faced with a perception that its results are difficult to accurately measure. Consequently, many business leaders are skeptical of investing money into marketing efforts, because they aren’t convinced they can tie the dollars they put into marketing to their bottom line. When it comes to online marketing, in particular, a lot of metrics have been developed to help evaluate the effectiveness of marketing efforts in the absence of the ability to measure a concrete ROI.
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Today, virtually every business has a webpage, sometimes multiple pages. Not to mention social media accounts. But, while getting your name and your brand online is a crucial first step for raising awareness and preference for what you have to offer, it’s just one piece of the marketing puzzle. To be truly effective, you need to develop a process and method of tracking how effective your online marketing actually is.
Big data is the concept of tapping into the massive amounts of data collected every day on millions and millions of people conducting countless transactions around the world. The idea is that there is so much data available, you can not only draw conclusions about the characteristics of a market, but also draw correlation between those characteristics and purchasing behavior, and also determine causation, and also predict what they will do next. Powerful stuff.