Karissa Bell says, “Over the course of an hour, @MashBusiness covered an array of questions, ranging from what the current state of digital marketing, to how brands can most effectively communicate with their audience in a way that feels genuine and authentic. Several digital marketing experts us will be: Alex Amado, VP of experience marketing at Adobe; Cammie Croft, deputy executive director of Amnesty International; David Berkowitz, chief marketing officer of MRY; Ellyn Fisher, senior VP public relations & social media for The Advertising Council; Gillea Allison, marketing director... [...]

Jonathan Long says, “The holiday season is right around the corner, providing businesses with an incredible opportunity to generate record sales online. Ecommerce sales have increased year after year, reaching $53.3 billion in 2014, which was a 15 percent increase over 2013. Cyber Monday alone generated $2.038 billion in sales, a 17 percent increase from the previous year. Those numbers are impressive, but even more impressive is the fact that they only account for desktop sales. Consumers are becoming more comfortable conducting ecommerce transactions on their smartphones and tablets, providing... [...]

Stacy DeBroff says, “Recently, I spoke at the 11th Annual M2Moms Conference in New York, which has become the premier conference on marketing to Moms, attended by both agencies and leading national consumer brands. Moms are a critical target market that so many business marketing teams tend to overlook when developing a strategy for consumer products. During my presentation, I shared my trend-spotting on some key emergent trends that will really matter to marketers across the coming year. Trend #1: Moms Resent Intrusive Marketing Who resents when someone actually calls your cell phone? Lots... [...]

Dr. Amit Pareek is offering to set you up in 5 online businesses, all of them designed to attract clients looking to promote their business online. With this new offer (he calls it his 2 Cent Traffic System), you can help business people with these marketing needs: ■ Facebook Ads Made Easy. ■ Facebook Remarketing Made Easy. ■ Google AdWords Made Easy. ■ Pay Per Click Made Easy. ■ Media Buying Made Easy. Pareek includes the following components for each of the 5 niches: • High quality & High Definition Video Series (70-80 Videos total) for you to sell. • Ready to... [...]

Elizabeth Victor says, “Spam is the scourge of the Internet. From phishing messages to malicious attachments and links to viruses, spam affects billions of email users each year. Although spam messages are at a 12-year low, nearly half of email sent is spam. If you’re running an email marketing campaign, and your emails are mistakenly flagged as spam, you’ll lose conversions as well as revenue. This article will outline how a small business or email marketer can avoid the spam folder by following the CAN-SPAM law, using email best-practices, and testing regularly. Follow the law The... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Today, at an event organized to discuss Facebook’s growth opportunity in emerging markets, the company introduced a new ad unit called “Slideshow.” Slideshow is a new video substitute — although Facebook calls it video — that is principally designed to play in markets where mobile connections are slow or unreliable. Companies like Coke can use it to create more dynamic and engaging ads for users on a 2G connection — in India, for example. The idea is that Coke (which participated in the beta) will create two campaigns: one a traditional video, the other a... [...]

Ryan Phelan says, “I’ve been in the email marketing industry for fifteen years, and have seen firsthandwhat works and even what doesn’t work in email testing and optimization programs. So here are some tips and tactics from my email marketing experience to help you in your testing efforts. Headlines, headlines, headlines Subject lines are always popular email items to test and for good reason – the subject line and the From field are the first two things an email recipient will see with your email send. There’s plenty of information and misinformation out there on what... [...]

Bill Platt and Andrew Zirkin have been online, earning a full-time income, for years and years. They tried many ways to earn income until they settled on creating products of their own and then selling them online. This approach, they have found, gives them the biggest payback for the time they invest. In fact, they say that you can structure your income to make $10,000 from a single hour of work. And that’s what they want to show you in their new training, 900-Pound Marketing Gorilla. This requires some planning and a lot of outsourcing of the nitty details, but they say it is a goal you... [...]

Lauren Colman says, “The alignment of an organization’s sales and marketing efforts is a crucial strategic imperative for companies that desire sustainable growth. Despite the evidence of improved business performance, it’s still a rarity to find an organization that has and maintains full alignment. The good news is that the issue is getting far more attention than ever before, and more organizations are making progress. A major cause for the overall lack of progress is that while the issue of alignment is getting more strategic attention from executives, it’s still getting very... [...]

Edwin Bos says, “A couple of weeks ago, Amazon sued over 1,000 people for posting fake reviews on its site. The defendants in question had offered their services on fiverr.com. But is Amazon addressing the symptoms, not the cause? Let’s go back to the future for a second. In 2012, Gartner said that by 2014, 10-15% of social media reviews would be fakes, paid for by companies. According to the BBC program Rip Off Britain this year, it’s been estimated that as many as one in five reviews online might be fake. It’s a big problem with even bigger ramifications for those playing... [...]