The growth of the internet has given consumers a new voice. They can quickly share their experiences, both good and bad, with their friends and with entire social networks. Amazon built a significant portion of its business on the power of reviews, and now nearly every industry has its own dedicated review platform--Foursquare, Yelp, Angie's List, and on and on.

Harnessing these reviews can be a boon for your business. If they are left unchecked, they can be a liability. Learn how to use these review sites

We've been around the block a few times, and we've learned a lot by doing. After serving dozens of clients in a variety of industries, we realized that we were seeing trends. Many business owners, despite hailing form vary different business worlds, had the same challenges and were missing the same opportunities.

So instead of reviewing a news item, we exchanged our observations on the biggest marketing mistakes that we see businesses make. For you as a business owner, correcting one of these problems can

Too often conversations around marketing devolve to discussing specific tactics. Facebook. Email. Landing pages. For these tactics to be effective, they need to be driven by a big picture strategy that takes into account all of the pieces on the board and considers how those pieces can best work together.

In our own work, we often lead these strategy sessions with clients, using our outside perspective on the business to ask challenging questions and to foster critical conversations. You should make strate

If you haven't heard, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, in a move that surprised pretty much everyone. At the time of this podcast recording, details on what exactly Microsoft planned to do with the professional social media platform were sparse, but even today, there is still a great deal of speculation as to what Microsoft stands to gain from buying LinkedIn.

For our parts as marketers, we dig into the opportunities that a tie-in with Microsoft might create for LinkedIn and for LinkedIn users, and we discuss

Pokemon Go has taken the world by storm, and now that some of the hype is fading, we sit down to talk about what the success of Pokemon Go could mean for the future of marketing and how it could change the way we use mobile devices and augmented reality in our businesses.

In our discussion of Pokemon Go, we explore the power of data--the good and the bad--in marketing and how businesses can use customer data effectively while at the same time staying ethical and trustworthy.

Note: Meesha predicted a partn

Email marketing is a classic staple of direct marketing that's been used for as long as we've had email. As a tool of creating engagement and for driving sales, email is just as important now as it ever has been. However, the way prospects interact with email has changed, so our approach to email marketing needs to evolve accordingly.

In this episode, Marshal and Meesha talk about email marketing trends and concepts, talking about the history of the practice and making predictions for where it's going. If

For many years, the internet was a wild west of creativity and also artistic liberties. People regularly hijacked source code, borrowed images, and repurposed music without asking permission or even notifying the original creator. Now that the internet has matured and has become a powerful economical people, intellectual property is more valuable than ever and many creators are hellbent on protecting their work.

Unfortunately, this can mean trouble for small business owners. Recently, we've seen small busi

Marketing and advertising are quickly evolving industries. If you're running a business, keeping your marketing going is a challenge in itself. Keeping with all of the new ideas and changes in the space is not just a challenge, it can be outright impossible.

In this episode, we talk through some of the changes we're seeing, what we like, and what we're excited about. We hope it helps you with your own business.

About the Hosts:

Marshal is a content marketer and founder of Carper Communications. Learn more

The challenge of bringing an innovative product to market is that your target audience might not immediately see the benefit. They don't realize that they had a problem, so they are not open to pursuing a solution. It's a weird problem for a brand to face because simply telling people that your product exists probably won't win them over. You have to get their attention and educate them.

In this episode, we kickoff with a discussion of Squatty Potty and use their store as an example of how you can lead you

Taking a brand new prospect from awareness all the way through loyal customer requires multiple touch points and the culmination of many different tactics. Too often, however, we see businesses fixate on just one point of their sales funnel, which means they miss out on opportunities to increase their ROI by ignoring other important parts of the customer journey.

In this episode, we reboot the podcast with some observations about our recent work and talk through the value of looking at the big picture of y