PayPal team says, “The world of entrepreneurship is a tough one to crack. You know that to be a successful entrepreneur you must dream big, take risks and be prepared to fail. Countless budding entrepreneurs turn their dreams into reality with the help of enablers such as PayPal providing a gateway to receive payments internationally. PayPal has been working to enable hundreds of thousands of local Indian businesses of all sizes to expand their businesses across borders, reach a global network of 192 million active customer accounts in 200 markets, and receive payments faster via PayPal... [...]

Scott Sampson says, “As a marketer, it pays to have access to consumer data. The more you know about your target audience, the more personalized your marketing efforts can be. While physical billboard ads are strategically designed and placed to reach a local audience, it’s more challenging to pinpoint where and when a digital audience will consume your brand’s ads. The solution? Hyper localized digital marketing. Location-based data allows brands to create strong connections with individual consumers rather than blindly targeting large segments of the population. By analyzing extremely... [...]

Ben Davis says, “The most important tenet of service design is working with user stories in mind. This obsession with user centricity is creeping across business – is there any company exec that hasn’t expounded to the press that “the customer is at the heart of everything we do”? Thankfully, there’s a renewed focus on the customer among marketers, too. Marketers should always be cogniscent of what customers want to achieve by buying their product or using their service. How was this focus eroded in the first place? Has the idea of optimisation in digital media... [...]

Ulrik Bo Larsen says, “Today, the customer journey is no longer happening merely on your e-commerce website or in your physical store. Rather, it is largely made up of instances of knowledge-sharing and conversations that are happening outside of your brand’s owned channels. And that’s true of almost every stage of the customer journey—from research, to discovery, to consideration, to brand advocacy. As social media becomes increasingly important to both ensuring a memorable customer experience and mapping the customer journey, marketers are using social listening to help formulate... [...]

The SmartCompany has released an ebook titled “Location marketing made easy”. The SmartCompany team says, “Do you want to get your products and services seen by people shopping locally? Location marketing is incredibly useful for SMEs because it means they can pitch their business to consumers at the exact time they need them. This handy guide, brought to you by Sensis, explains how to tap into everything from local search, paid advertising, mobile search, mapping tools and social media options. Learn all about: Local and mobile search Paid or unpaid advertising options How to... [...]

Shubhomita Bose says, “To say that digital marketers have to be jacks-of-all-trades is a considerable understatement. Marketers don’t often get the recognition they deserve for having to master so many different software tools, but if there’s one profession that requires knowledge of more tools than a Swiss army knife, online marketing is it. In this article, we’ll be rounding up our top 99 online marketing tools. In this list is (almost!) every tool you’ll ever need to master (almost!) every aspect of a digital marketing campaign, from PPC and SEO to social to content and email marketing.... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “High keyword rankings are the most sought-after achievement in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Small businesses and brands alike strive to obtain the first organic listing in search results because of the lucrative traffic and lead opportunities that are associated with this position. But with the evolution of paid advertising and expansion of universal search, as well as Google’s continuous efforts to provide consumers with content that resolves their demands directly in search results, the opportunities attached to traditional keyword rankings are... [...]

Victoria Godfrey says, “Marketing automation technology is designed to automate portions of the marketing process and provide data that helps marketers and brands determine who to target across multiple outreach methods. But it’s not just a tool; marketers use automation technology to strategize and implement business decisions. When using marketing automation platforms to maximize email efforts, marketers need to choose the correct tool with the proper features and use the data produced to its greatest potential. Once marketers are able to gain insight into how recipients are engaging... [...]

Andrew Medal says, “All you need to do to cook up a classic example of the word “creepy” is look at today’s targeted ad campaigns. It doesn’t take more than a second between the time you look up a product on one site and find it as an ad on your social feeds. While nearly all social media channels harness targeted ads, Instagram, which Facebook bought for $1 billion in 2012, is leading the charge. Actually, the topic of this article derived from a conversation my girlfriend and I were having, when the topic of discussion all of a sudden coincidentally ended up in her Instagram... [...]

Samantha Merlivat says, “Intuitively, it makes sense that if a consumer engages with a brand’s ad or marketing message, this should count as a positive outcome. Yet, we’ve spoken to a number of marketers and measurement companies that found that optimizing for engagement ultimately did not help them drive positive business outcomes – instead leading them to waste time and media dollars on the wrong users. The issue we keep encountering in discussions around engagement is that advertisers count interactions – clicks, shares, likes, comments, views – as proxies for engagement. There’s... [...]