New York SBDC Research Network

Mobile marketing has finally come of age with more consumers than ever making purchases using their mobile devices. If you're in business, then this is a trend you need to pay attention to. CIO.com reports that 28 percent of sales are now conducted on mobile devices, primarily smartphones. In 2014, sales using smartphones increased by 87 percent year-over-year. While sales via tablets expanded by a smaller percentage, it still grew by 52 percent. In other words, mobile marketing is the wave of the future. Yet, many brands have yet to develop fully mature mobile marketing strategies. For some, mobile marketing remains somewhat vague and difficult to contain in the same way as traditional marketing. While mobile marketing is still growing and evolving, it is basically any type of marketing that is used to promote business through the use of a mobile device, including smartphones and tablets. Mobile marketing doesn't have to be some mysterious thing. More from Entrepreneur

Customer experience is becoming a huge focus across industries, and technology is playing a starring role in its evolution. Technology is making everything more computerized and automated; nevertheless, customers are feeling more and more that businesses are listening to their individual wants and needs. Why? Let's take a look at some hot trends in customer service. 1. Businesses are focusing on emotional intelligence to better understand and respond to customers Put simply, emotional intelligence is the ability to relate and empathize with others, ultimately enabling positive interactions. Read more from marketingprofs.com

When you're thinking about starting a company or first in the entrepreneurial trenches, any nugget of advice you can get from someone who's been there before is like gold. But as time goes on, you'll realize that some of those tips are better — and more applicable to your business — than others. So, to get you started on the right foot, no matter where you are in your startup journey, we asked 10 founders to weigh in on the absolute best advice they received as they built their companies. Take note of these (sometimes surprising) lessons for your own venture. More from MASHABLE >

Social media has become one of the most important outreach and marketing channels available to brands, which in turn means that it’s important to have a social media strategy as a core part of your overall marketing plan. Social media channels offer businesses a cost-effective way to promote their companies, to increase brand awareness, and to generate customer engagement. On the other hand, social media marketing is also still a very young discipline, and a rapidly changing one, which means that as a whole it is one of the hardest channels to consistently get right. Unlike TV advertisements or other types of advertising, there are no established rules and no real paradigms or laws that marketers can reliably follow. In this absence of rules, how do you know what to do? Read more from BPlans.com

There is no question that the way that social media has developed, images play a central role more YouTube enjoys over 4 billion views daily. Instagram has bypassed Twitter for mobile users. photographs on Facebook draw 53% more "likes" than those without. Pinterest is the 2nd largest referrer of social traffic. It grew by 50% in a year. These tools are driven by images and require (almost) no words. The fact that FaceBook was willing to pay the big bucks for Instagram is testimony to the importance of images. than ever before. There has been a dramatic shift towards visual marketing. Everyone needs to start thinking in these terms. As I visited the RN Pinterest Page I searched on "SBDC" to see the results and they were patchy. A quick visit to a few SBDC websites demonstrated very, very few images.We are often looking for good pictures from the various centers for different uses. Potential clients visiting our center sites would benefit from a glimpse at wha

Small businesses acknowledge the business effect mobile can have, but so far, they haven’t done much about it. In March 2015 polling by  Endurance International Group , 78% of US small-business respondents said their businesses did not have a mobile solution or app, despite the fact that 71% felt that having one would have a positive impact on business. SHARE THIS 0 2 0 4 0 Expertise, time and money all play a role in mobile’s low adoption. Among respondents who didn’t have a mobile solution or app, half blamed it on the fact that they didn’t know how to build one. Around one-quarter said they were too busy running their businesses to maintain an app, and spending itself was an issue, as a similar percentage said creating a mobile app simply cost too much. Similarly, 37% of respondents cited the time and resources required to enable mobile sales as one of the biggest mobile strategy challenges. - See more at emarketer.com

From CBS Sunday Morning : Meet the bulldog Zelda -- pampered, adored, and really spoiled by owner Carol Gardner. And why not? Gardener says Zelda changed the course of her entire life, which in 1997 needed changing. "I was recently divorced -- hence, depressed, hence in debt, and having a very difficult time," Gardner said. "And so a friend said, 'Sweetheart, you need to either get a therapist or a dog.'" So at 52, Gardner adopted Zelda, an English Bulldog, though she had scarcely the money to feed her. Then she learned a nearby pet store was having a contest: "The prize was 40 pounds of dog food every month for a year," Gardner said. All she had to do was design a holiday greeting card. So she did what anyone would: she put Zelda in a Santa hat and sat her down in a bubble bath.