Marketing Google

Why did Amazon buy Whole Foods?Many speculate that Amazon did so to thwart the mounting offensive from traditional retailers. As the news of the Amazon/Whole Foods deal monopolized press headlines, Walmart announced the acquisition of Bonobos menswear. In 2016, Walmart also bought Jet.com, an online bulk retailer, for $3.3 billion, the largest deal ever for an e-commerce company.The acquisition wasn’t just to give Walmart access to new channels and customers. They also brought in new thinking and expertise to shake up the executive ranks. Bonobos, in particular, understands up-market consumers and how to balance online and physical retail strategies to reach them. This is a key area in which Walmart has struggled in the past.The future of commerce is hybrid, blurring the lines between online and offline engagement.Amazon has made it clear that it was expanding beyond e-commerce to reimagine brick-and-mortar for a modern economy. Beyond its rising bookstore footprint and experimental …

There are many powerful ways to influence your customers and heighten your conversions, but one of the most effective methods is instilling urgency. If you can successfully inject urgency into your sales-oriented content, including your product pages, you’ll have a much greater chance of increasing your conversion rates.Urgency and its cousin, scarcity, are so effective because they influence customers to pause their conscious thinking and act quickly. A common challenge in the customer decision-making process is when consumers begin to overthink their purchases, to the point where it takes them so long that they forget about it, or they are so overwhelmed by the idea of committing to the purchase that they choose to move on to other things. By instilling a sense of urgency, you eliminate the delay and lead them straight to the purchase.There are multiple ways to add a level of urgency to your content experiences and increase your conversions. Here are five recommendations you can sta…

Transparency is arguably the biggest driver of change in ad tech these days. And attribution service AppsFlyer is offering another way to shine a light on what’s going on.The Tel Aviv-based firm has announced its Agency Transparency solution, which lets a brand more easily drill down into granular detail about its app install campaigns. AppsFlyer says that, to its knowledge, this is the first ready-made transparency option for agencies about this kind of data.Previously, Senior Director of Agency Alliances Daniel Kahtan told me, the default setting in AppsFlyer’s agency dashboard showed total app installs by agency or by a given campaign or series of campaigns. Agencies had more detailed info, but they often preferred to export it and then present it in conversations with the brand.This allowed the agency to maintain control of its relationship with the advertiser. Kahtan said the previous thinking was: “If the client sees everything, [the agency’s] expertise is at risk.”Now, agencies…

These days, everyone seems to be doing video advertising — and for good reason. Video ads are a great way to get people to pay attention to your business and attract new customers. In fact, Outbrain reports that up to 87 percent of online marketers are using video!However, amid all of this enthusiasm for video advertising, marketers have yet to answer a simple question: What sort of video quality do you need to make video advertising work?For decades, video advertising has been the nearly exclusive realm of gigantic businesses. Generally speaking, these companies have spent tens of thousands to millions of dollars on each ad. For many businesses looking to get into (or get more out of) video advertising, dropping that kind of money on one ad simply isn’t an option.Until now, no one has really taken a hard look at how much time and money you need to put into a video to drive profitable results. This is unfortunate, because for most marketers, it’s becoming increasingly important to und…

Guest blogs are a popular link-building strategy used by businesses all over the world. And until recently, many were relying on guest blogging as their primary source of earned links. But a diverse link profile is essential to maintain ranking. So how can businesses achieve this?“The landscape of SEO and link building is always changing, and today, the importance of building high-quality links has never been higher” – Paddy Moogan of MozGuest posts are an easy and effective way to build earned links. But on May 25 2017, Google issued a warning to sites against excessive guest posting.“Lately we’ve seen an increase in spammy links contained in articles referred to as contributor posts, guest posts, partner posts, or syndicated posts,” Google stated.Google even followed up with a nice list of what violates favorable link earning . . .What are brands and businesses to do? Rely solely on natural link building through highly authoritative content? Well, this would be ideal for all. But le…

I love what I do.I would not want to be doing anything else.Being a digital nomad is great. I get to travel, meet new people, speak different languages, mingle with new and exciting cultures, and learn a whole lot about a world that I didn’t know existed.And I can sustain this level of nomadicism with my digital work.Currently, I’m working here at SML as an editor. I’m also a freelance writer, I’ve run part-time businesses before (with very part-time earnings), and soon I’ll be starting up my own blog.All of these things take place on the internet (with the exception of writing, but posting articles and getting paid requires the internet), so all of these things can be done wherever there’s internet connection.But being a digital nomad is more than one of these romantic dreams that gets touted by self-professed “internet gurus” that try and sell you their products.I’m here to say:It’s not a particularly glamorous lifestyle.I’m not sipping Piña Coladas with the Sultan of Brunei on a se…