Here is a recap of the latest marketing news and trends that small business owners, entrepreneurs,
and marketers need to know. Curated from top sources, these are the most relevant stories of the last week.
BarkBox cuts Facebook spending in favor of traditional channels
BarkBox has joined the growing group of direct-to-consumer companies that are redistributing their Facebook spending to traditional channels.
The subscription service, which delivers boxes of dog treats and toys starting at $21 per month, has spend around 75 percent of its ad budget on Facebook since launching in 2012. In April, it cut that to 25 percent to spend more on TV, direct mail, event, and retail, with plans to add radio and out of home.
Email Is Still Your Customers’ Preferred Communication Tool. Here’s How to Make Sure Your Email Marketing Gets Through.
Email remains the most valuable tool for businesses of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. By taking a few simple steps, audience reach can be guaranteed and stabilized, thereby improving return on marketing dollars spent.
Forty years ago, Thuerk understood that leveraging email was a pathway to generating sales. In his case, it led to producing more than $14 million for the company he was working for. Today, that potential is even greater, with more than half of the world’s population having at least one email address. In fact, according to a study conducted by Radicati Group, by the end of this year, over 3.8 billion people will use email to communicate.
How does Yelp’s review solicitation penalty work?
Contributor Joy Hawkins provides an overview of how Yelp’s review solicitation penalty works and explains why you should not ask for reviews.
Back in November of 2017, Yelp announced it would start issuing penalties for businesses that solicit reviews. Yelp said:
“Now, we are also demoting business pages in Yelp search results that show indicators of organized review solicitation through reputation management companies. We are taking this action because promoting biased reviews, or promoting businesses that have artificially inflated their ratings, is misleading for consumers and unfair to businesses that have honestly earned their great reputations while adhering to Yelp’s policies.”
The basics of working with Amazon Marketing Services
Contributor Daniel Gilbert shares his insights on Amazon Marketing Services and how they stack up (or don’t) against Google AdWords.
Amazon used to just do books, but now they do more or less everything. Aside from every imaginable retail product, they also provide video, groceries, music and cloud computing, and they’ve even opened a few physical bookstores. It was just a matter of time before they launched an advertising platform as well.
For US readers, that’s pretty old news by now. For the UK and Europe, the launch of Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) is much more recent.
Still, despite AMS having been around for a while, I haven’t seen many articles or advertising professionals talking about it. I am going to switch gears here, and instead of talking about Adwordsor pay-per-click (PPC) issues like I normally do, I’m going to share my insights on Amazon Marketing Services.
