When you think marketing, you probably picture billboards, television commercials and radio jingles. YouTube isn’t something that always comes to mind, but it can have a major impact on consumers and on your business’s bottom line. In fact, YouTube is every bit as powerful as other social media sites, if not more. The popular video-sharing site attracts more than 1 billion users each month, a number that mirrors Facebook’s monthly usage. It’s also growing at a much faster rate.

Now that you understand a bit about mobile marketing, it’s time to go deeper.  Use what you learned about mobile marketing and make it work for your brand.

Mobile marketing is an evolving game. Every new advance in technology and each new trend adds another layer of complexity to successful mobile marketing. Now that you’ve gained a basic understanding of how mobile marketing works, it’s time to start making it work for your brand to maximum effect.

Quora, question-and-answer site, is barely six years old and it has already made its dent as one of the foremost platforms in the digital marketing universe. Robert Scoble, American blogger, technical evangelist, and author, says that Quora succeeds precisely because it integrates the capacities of Facebook and Twitter. Competitor with 46 other Q&A sites, including Yahoo!Answers, Quora dominates by hosting longer and meatier answers to high-quality questions.

Four months to the end of the year, and businesses or marketers who seek to lead the vanguard of change are already on the lookout for what’s new and changing. Keeping up with trends can help you compete and decide where to invest your money. The following are five growing digital marketing trends that will dominate 2016-2017.

We're exited to introduce Bloominari's newest service through our partnership with San Diego's top performing Google Photographer!

Introducing Google "Inside View" 360° Virtual Tours

Ever wonder how businesses are able to showcase a 360 degree virtual tour of the inside of their businesses?

Wonder no more, as Bloominari now offers local San Diego businesses or any business around the US, the ability to add a touch of magic to their online presence on search results and Google Maps.

Through our new partnership with the top performing Google trusted and certified photographer in  San Diego (out of a total of 6), we're now able to help every small, medium or large business to showcase their offices, showrooms, or any other area of their physical business on Google's search results and Google Maps listings.

Why should you have a Google Virtual Tour?

The early bird gets the worm.

Or, at least, you have much better odds of getting the worm than those who procrastinate.

Now that the end of the year is approaching, this might naturally feel like a good time to slack off. Alas, there is pivotal research and planning to be done!

Take advantage of the new year and use this as a time to gain momentum.

When you take the time to plan ahead, you are more likely to budget wisely, use your time more efficiently and think up creative tactics to beat out your competition.

A new year brings new opportunities, new obstacles and new goals. Do some brain storming and figure out what those are for your business!

Read my below-mentioned ideas about what you should do in December 2015 to get ahead for 2016.

As of 2015, the Internet has become a virtually inexhaustible source of information. Choosing relevant topics to share with audience boasts our position as experts and makes us an integral part of the conversation.

But there is a lot to do in order to fulfill this role successfully: browsing for current, relevant and reliable information, organizing it in logical fashion, and distributing it through our social media channels.

This can all be summed up in a process called Content Curation, which entails:

1. Identifying

Finding out which topics pique our audience´s interest and investigating and gathering relevant sources of information.

2. Filtering

Evaluating and choosing relevant titles to share in accordance to our editorial line and the audience´s interests.

3. Distributing

Spreading the end result through our channels.

Clearly, this is A LOT of work…. Content curating tools were invented to automatize and ease this task.

Here are some you may want to try:

Tonight I attended a great marketing meetup hosted by the SoCal Marketing Club in San Diego's new downtown coworking space ROC. The event featured a great talk by OrganikSEO titled "Using Content to Amplify Your SEO Campaign" and it inspired me to write this short post.

Shortly after meeting Julien Brandt, OrganikSEO's founder and speaking about various online marketing topics, he shared with me his company's new "Growing your Busines Online" infographic, which shares the essential message of this blog post in a single image. In fact, this image is being shared here on Bloominari's Blog before Julien had a chance to post it on his own site, so I'm happy he gave me the opportunity to do so :-)

Growing Your Business Online Infographic

Do you often tell “on-the-fence prospects” the same remarkable story about how your business previously helped a desperate customer, to entice them to buy?

If so, you’re on the right track.

Story telling is a valuable resource for business success.

However, changing your approach to create customer satisfaction stories that can be repeatedly shared and viewed digitally is imperative.

But you will need much more than a sheet of paper with a bunch of testimonials about how amazing your product or service is. Smart buyers need to be convinced…and nothing is more convincing than a case study.

Case studies incorporate promotional marketing with customer evidence to tell a successful story of the business coming to the rescue for the customer.

Why does your business need a case study?

Here’s the thing. As business people and marketers, we LIVE for grand plans. We love plans. We like knowing what’s happening, when, for how much, why and how we’re going to use/measure/analyze it. Crazy!

But sometimes, we have to remember the art behind marketing, branding, communicating. It’s a game of trial-and-error, test and default. Sure, there are some things that can’t go unplanned: budgets, strategy, team responsibilities. But when it comes to pure creativity and the softer, subjective matters, it’s totally okay to just let things breathe for a bit first.

These days, it’s not just discovering the campaign slogan and printing a million flyers or setting a dozen storefront displays. With digital, and the ability to change certain things on the fly, it’s okay to dive in headfirst! You’ll learn from watching the world interact with your brand/product/idea -- and get the chance for some testing to boot.