We know that it’s difficult to make sense of everything that’s happening in the digital space. It seems that every time you think you might be on top of it, everything changes and the current starts flowing in a different direction. We want to help you understand what’s happening in the digital advertising space, whether you’re a marketer or a seller. It’s time to start transitioning into selling digital media, so understanding and embracing the latest trends will help you stay relevant in today’s market. In this post, we’ll focus on social media marketing and the newest trends you should know about. Social media networks are constantly evolving and providing new ways for users to connect and express themselves, as well as, offering fresh opportunities for brands to advertise and reach their unique audiences. What do marketers and brands need to know about social media?

We’ve probably all seen the endless reports about employee disengagement, unemployment rates, and the seemingly unrectifiable skills gap. Maybe you yourself are feeling disengaged or seeing too much turnover and having problems with finding supposedly qualified individuals to fill open positions. If your company has been making excuses for too long and essentially punishing its profits, as well as its workers, it’s time for change. Realizing the importance of educating and training employees and then actually implementing effective programs is the only way to long term company success.

Think of a “salesman”. What kind of picture did you envision? Most of us probably conjure up an image of a sort of caricature. The qualities of this fictitious being are usually boisterously exaggerated - they’re loud and talk a lot, they have a response for everything, they can be pushy or even aggressive, they won’t take “no” for an answer, and are wonderful at changing the subject every time you ask a poignant question. Hopefully you don’t have any of those qualities, but if you ever see yourself or someone on your team slowly transforming into this cliché, here are four secrets of what makes a great salesperson. Follow these rules to get back on track to the road to success. Listen It’s easy for anyone to get caught up in what they have to say, especially when there’s a pitch that’s just begging to be delivered. A great salesperson takes the time to focus on their prospect’s needs. They listen to what the needs, desires, and current problems that require solving are and then pitch their offering as a natural solution. Because their pitch is tailored to what the prospect is actually looking for, they come off as much more helpful and overall more knowledgable. Over-deliver

You’ve probably known for a while now that cold calling is something everyone dreads - whether they’re on the initiating or receiving end. This past Wednesday an incredibly timely piece popped up on Mashable - Your Sales Strategy Shouldn’t Rely on a Cold Call - written by HubSpot’s CMO, Mike Volpe. And yesterday ClickZ posted an article about The Importance of Personalization. Although outwardly their messages don’t seem to be overly similar, if you’re a seller or a marketer, you should really take the wisdom they provide to heart. Hopefully you’re ahead of the game and already putting the insight of these two articles to use in your daily work activities. If not, then it’s time to catch up. Let’s be honest: it’s almost 2015 and the internet and all of the information it provides about nearly everyone and everything isn’t just going to disappear anytime soon. So why are some of us not really making the most out of what we have? Why are we still punishing ourselves (and others!) with completely frozen cold calls and generic messaging? Surely we want to make our lives easier and have our potential clients and customers like us from the start. What should we really be doing?

The amount of data that advertising campaigns produce is enormous and can be entirely overwhelming. It may seem completely insurmountable and if it’s not analyzed properly, the insights will get lost, and render all of your efforts worthless. A key to any successful advertising campaign for a marketer is to gain an understanding of the data and apply it to the other campaigns waiting in the wings. For all of you forward-thinking, enthusiastic marketers out there - here are six steps to getting the most out of all of your campaigns and how to use your data purposefully. 1. Take off those rose-tinted glasses Hopefully you’ve approached all of your campaign launches with certainty and confidence. But when the data comes in, it’s time to take off those rose-tinted glasses and get ready to see the sometimes raw reality. That’s not to say that it’ll be bad, it might just not be exactly what you imagined. There probably won’t be any entirely unexpected surprises, but you should be prepared to see facts and figures that aren’t completely aligned with your initial positive outlook.

In last week’s post we looked at the waves Apple’s freshly announced hardware would make in the mobile landscape. This week we want to take a dive into how new trends in mobile marketing have been shaping its growth and potential indications for its future. By now its no secret that internet traffic from mobile devices is higher than from PCs, with the majority of that traffic coming via mobile apps. Most of us are constantly bound to our smartphones and tablets. We’re always anticipating emails, scrolling through our social media feeds, listening to music, keeping track of our grocery lists, logging our physical activities, playing games - the possibilities are practically endless. It’s as if we’ve grown these kinds of high tech computerized appendages- using our devices for almost everything has become entirely natural and seemingly essential to our daily lives. Any kind of interruption in our day-to-day activities seems like a hinderance, as anyone that has experienced traffic or delays in their morning commute can attest to. It just seems that much more annoying and entirely unnecessary.