In college, my roommate had her mattress mailed to our apartment—which sounded weird, because how was that going to fit in a mail truck—and it showed up in a box. A full-size mattress was folded up and squeezed into a box and dropped off on our porch.   Direct-to-consumer businesses are changing the game. For instance, if you were only able to buy a mattress at Sleepy’s or Mattress Giant before, going direct-to-consumer means that…

Audience targeting is just what it sounds like: the practice of using data to segment consumers by demographics or interests in order to find the holy grail that is the right person on the right device at the right moment. With audience targeting, you’re more likely to reach consumers interested in your products or services with relevant messaging. It also decreases the odds you’ll waste ad spend on uninterested eyeballs and help move potential customers…

It’s time for another round-up of the online advertising news, folks. Let’s see what’s been going on recently in the worlds of search, social, and ecommerce. Facebook makes it easier to control ad placements If you’re currently running—or have ever run—contextual advertisements, you understand how important it is to have control over the content that’s being associated with your brand. Knowing this, Facebook has introduced an inventory filter for advertisers who are buying placements within…

Webinars are a great tool for any stage of the buyer’s journey, but you’re probably not going to get the level of attention and engagement you’re after if your webinar is a sales presentation in disguise. Take these four basic actions to ensure better ROI for your webinar efforts. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

The current competitive landscape dictates that to survive, you must keep growing. And so businesses employ all sorts of strategies and tactics to sustain this growth. One of the most historically successful and proven methods for growing small businesses has been email list building. That’s because having a quality email list offers lots of advantages. An email list gives you direct access to the people who want to hear from your business, and it also…

This isn’t going to be a blog post about the importance of semicolons or serial commas in your content, because whether or not you use these punctuation marks doesn’t really matter. Okay, Oakhurst Dairy would disagree—and for good reason. Last year, drivers won a settlement claim and the company had to pay out $5 million over an ambiguous series in Maine state law. The problem? A missing serial comma led to multiple interpretations about who…