Marketers should use lead generation to build brand awareness, nurture prospects and …

“. . . customers, qualify leads and ultimately generate measurable revenue.”  Dan Strickland recently downloaded Marketo’s comprehensive, 160 page guide to lead generation, covering topics ranging from content marketing and website SEO to telesales and content syndication. Marketo’s Guide provides a “How To” for: Defining a lead and understand his or her buying journey Building a […]

Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua: New data shows marketing automation market share in unprecedented detail

“This new information is from Datanyze, a company I’ve called the Google of sales and marketing for software-as-a-service technologies. Datanyze continually scans over 11 million of the world’s most-trafficked websites, looking for the little Javascript embeds and web tags that indicate the presence of an integrated SaaS technology — in this case a marketing automation […]

“7 Keys To Great SEO: What SEO practices are most important nowadays for brand publishers?”

Answers to Seven keys to successful SEO: Original, engaging stories always win. Keyword and audience research still matters. Great headlines are key. Better content > more content. Optimize on both the page and platform level. Get inbound links. Social matters to search, in more ways than one. Read details of what each key truly means […]

Mobile Contacts Are Now The Real Social Network

Editor’s note: Peter Yared is the CTO/CIO at CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter @peteryared. Facebook’s surprising acquisition of WhatsApp signals that it has realized that users’ true social network is the contact list on their smartphones.

As the line between platform and publisher continues to blur, who wins and who loses?

What Amazon Knows That Distributors Don’t – Internet Retailer

An interesting blog post by Ragda Bodla (Director, Industry Marketing, NetSuite Inc.) on Internet Retailer today is a good read:  “What does Amazon know about succeeding in B2B? Basically, B2B buyers increasingly want the same shopping experience they have as consumers on B2C e-commerce sites. The same people who buy shoes online are also buying […]

Playing the Price Game | STORES.org

The catalyst behind this move is “dynamic pricing,” a strategy that is the direct result of Internet price transparency. It refers to frequent price changes based on customer traffic, demand, weather, time of day, loyalty card data, competitive factors and some complex algorithms.  The concept of dynamic pricing has been enormously successful for industries like […]

Amazon tightening grip on showrooming

Amazon takes showrooming to next level with image recognition … mobilemarketer.com Amazon is tightening its grip on showrooming with a new image recognition application feature that cuts down on the number of steps it takes for a consumer to find and buy a product – read full story by Mobile Marketer’s Lauren Johnson     […]

CES 2014 brought us the future, and it is curved, ‘smart’ and wearable

Source: Washington Post “. . . John Curran, a senior executive with electronics and high-tech at consulting firm Accenture, said that over half of respondents in a survey . . . Fifty-six percent of respondents from the United States, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada said they would [buy] a wearable device — […]

Responsive Design: Quick Guide for Email Templates and Websites

Seven out of ten recipients will delete an email if it doesn’t look good or work well on their tablet or smartphone, and the same goes for websites

Google vs. Facebook in the Battle of Affinity

Excerpt from Nate Elliott, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research  posted on Allthingsd.com  ” …this affinity data Facebook is collecting is enormously different from the intention data Google has traditionally collected. Think about it: Intent is expressed before a purchase; it’s an indication of what we want. But affinity is typically expressed after a […]

Yahoo Climbs Back Above Google in U.S. Web Traffic

Lizz Gannes from Allthingsd.com posted interested Yahoo! story today. . .[Excerpt]: “Yahoo properties got more unique U.S. visitors than any other company’s in July, according to comScore. They had 196.6 million, compared to 192.3 million for previous leader Google. What’s more, Yahoo’s numbers didn’t include the new Yahoo-owned Tumblr, which came in 28th place.”  Read […]

Why Local Commerce Will Be Larger Than E-Commerce For The Next Decade, An Analysis

A very interesting TechCrunch.com article [was posted: 2/24/13] from Yelp’s Mike Ghaffary about local commerce vs. e-commerce, it gives e-commerce strategist food for thought, read on . . .

Intuit Acquires Facebook Ecommerce Platform Payvment’s Team, Tech, And Patents While Ecwid Takes Its 200K Merchants

Is it really mobile vs. social or mobile + social = commerce?

Industry Statistics: E-commerce sales grow 17.3% in . . . – Internet Retailer

BREAKING NEWS:  Industry Statistics – E-commerce sales grow 17.3% in Q3 – Internet Retailer E-commerce accounted for approximately 5.2% of total retail sales excluding foodservice — mainly restaurant and bar sales—during the three months ended Sept. 30, up from 4.7% in the third quarter of 2011 and 5.1% from the second quarter of 2012, the […]

How Target Plans to Build on Its E-Commerce Momentum — Fortune

More profit sapping e-commerce investments are coming. via How Target Plans to Build on Its E-Commerce Momentum — Fortune

VB LIVE: Want a lucrative app launch? Freemium is key!

VB LIVE: Want a lucrative app launch? Freemium is key — but tricky. Learn how to balance free versus paid features without pissing your users off in our latest interactive VB Live event, where industry leaders will take you for a deep dive into best practices for app monetization. Register here for free. The trickiest part… […]

Your Mobile Contact List Are Now The Real Social Network — TechCrunch

Facebook’s surprising acquisition of WhatsApp signals that it has realized that users’ true social network is the contact list on their smartphones.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Defends His Net Neutrality Proposal

All digital media and marketing professionals need to follow this store as it may impact our clients and for some in media, your employer as well!

Google ditches its own protocol for HTTP/2 and a faster web

You Know You Want A Galaxy S5 With Swarovski Crystals On The Back

TrustRadius’: Marketo & Pardot are the best enterprise products with ratings 4.2 and 4.0 out of 5. For SMB?

New marketing automation rankings . . . “For mid-sized companies, TrustRadius’ data says that Marketo and Pardot were the best products, with customer satisfaction ratings of 4.2 and 4.0 out of 5, respectively. And for smaller companies, Hubspot, Act-On, and Infusionsoft topped the list, with Hubspot getting top honors for an almost-perfect 4.8 customer satisfaction […]

China’s Luxury Boom Moves to the Web

NewsCred Raises Another $25M For Its Content Marketing Platform