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Find the Perfect Bite For Customers’ Mobile Appetite

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mobile appetite

Mobile web site up and running. Check. Reading latest trends on marketing for smartphones and tablets. Double Check. Wondering what to serve up next to your mobile audience. Triple Check.

Now is the time to…pause between courses. First off, congratulations on making the jump to mobile. Next up:  Step back and look at your business big picture and assess what to add to your mobile marketing menu.

Consider these factors before embarking on a deeper financial and time investment:

#1 Focus on short and long term business goals: Does mobile fit with how your customers engage with your business? Are you a local business seeking new customers? Do you have an established clientele? An online store with a wide-reaching audience?  These are but a few questions to answer before proceeding.

#2 Mobile is part of your marketing strategy, not  plate du jour: Mobile promotion is an extension of your  integrated marketing program and should not operate in its own silo nor be a stand-in for a plan. In the excitement of the collective mobile moment, best intentions can get burned, resulting in a disconnect between your online and offline messaging and brand look and feel—not to mention confusing your customers.

#3 To-go with your customer adds responsibility. Sounds heavy but it’s true. Or as Ford Global Head of Social Media Scott Monty said at his NMX keynote this January, “Mobile is like a piece of jewelry, you have to be invited there.” He advocated using that privilege wisely. Otherwise, your business could be dismissed just as quickly as it was sitting down at the table.

So…are you hungry to go further down the mobile marketing path? Here are some popular and effective ideas to consider:

The Free Appetizer: Search

One of the most basic but sometimes overlooked mobile marketing tactics is listing your business on mobile search engines, portals, and web sites. And if you’re a neighborhood business, even better: Google reports that half of all mobile searches are local. Keep these three things in mind:

  1. Duplication is a good thing: mobile search is often separate than “desktop” search.
  2. Use consistent contact information everywhere.
  3. List your business in as many broad categories as possible so it’s found searching multiple ways.

Google Maps and Facebook are the most popular search methods, but other major ones include Google Local, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local, and YP. Don’t forget about secondary listings like CitySearch, city and neighborhood directories, and industry/trade group listings. Make sure you are also covered on mobile business sites like Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare. Think of all the places you do business with, official and unofficial partners, and awareness opportunities.

The Weekly Special: SMS (Short Messaging Service aka Texting) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service)

According to Mogreet, SMS texts have a 95% open rate and are accessible to 98% of all mobile consumers, making it one of the most cost-effective, targeted marketing tactics—yet one of the most underutilized. Reason? Companies sometimes overlook the humble text as not sexy enough or  right “image”…they might want to think again, but proceed with care.

While the high open rates is great news, there are caveats: Make your text count with a strong CTA, especially since some receivers may incur a fee, and there are also reams of intimidating text marketing guidelines. The three most important ones:

  1. Get  opt-out permission.
  2. Document it.
  3. Be clear on what the receiver will get.

(See Guide to Text Messaging Regulations and Best Practices for complete rules).

There are numerous ways to laser-focus your text program: day/time (lunch specials, holidays), customer segments (repeat buyers, zip codes), or exclusive offers (VIP, limited-time), to name a few. There are no official “rules” on frequency, but general guidelines are no more than once a week or as part of a specific campaign. There are many text service vendors and prices vary on quantities and features.

MMS is a bigger time and money investment but also more attention-grabbing. Add video, mobile coupons, QR codes, music files, or any other visual elements. The same rules apply as SMS except it may eat up more data for the receiver or be slower loading.

Cross-promote SMS/MMS and provide ample opportunities to sign up on your web site, place of business, social media, business cards—anywhere your customers can see it.

The Fine Diner: Mobile Apps 

You might think apps are reserved for big budgets, large companies, and out of your league. These days, apps for your small business are within reach. There are many reasons to consider this prix fixe: For starters, if you are local business, research shows users prefer apps to connect.  Apps also show that you are catering to your customers, and lastly, they serve as a virtual mobile screen billboard  24/7. That said, an app should not replace a mobile web site, but serve as an alternate way to interact with your business. Make the app useful, intuitive, and require only few steps to complete a task. Be sure to cross-promote the app on your web, social sites, and ads.

There are several ways you can build an app for an iPhone or Android  (the most popular, but others are available): vendor-created or DIY . Because apps are now an established category, small businesses can take advantage of common pre-built functionality like maps, online ordering, appointment setting, social sharing, and other tasks that require  simple tailoring to your business. Not surprisingly, the more customization, the more expensive the app.

What’s the special sauce for your business?

These ideas may stir up  your mobile marketing recipe—there are also ads (including in-app ads), video,  and other tactics that haven’t even been introduced yet. Mobile marketing is a fast-paced, ever-changing landscape. Whatever approaches you take—like a new entrée—taste-test it, refine it, or decide it’s not delicious enough and scrap it altogether before making a big time or money commitments.

Image Credit: Altered, from Bigstock

Consumers Are Connected: Are You?

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Just the other day, I went shopping with a friend of mine who is obsessed with her phone. She checked into the mall via Foursquare, telling others exactly where she intended to shop. We found some cute shoes, which prompted her to like the brand on Facebook, and before leaving the store, she double-checked movie times for the film we wanted to see. We had some time, so we stopped for a bite to eat before the movie, and of course, she had to share a picture of her meal on Instagram. During the movie was the longest she was away from her phone all day!

It’s easy for me to point fingers and snicker at my friend’s phone addiction, but I’m not much better. Even when I’m at home, I sometimes find myself using my laptop, phone, and Kindle at the same time.

Today’s consumers are connected. There’s no doubt about that. The only question is this: is your business connected too or are you being left behind in the dust?

Social Trust

At BusinessNext Social 2013, Mobile Marketing Academic of the Year Lin Humphrey will be be presenting “The Connected Consumer,” a session where he’ll talk about his study findings on psychographics of social media users and what some digital marketers are doing to feed into this need for connection.

In an interview with USA Today, Humphrey remarked, “Research shows we trust our network more than advertisements or celebrity spokespeople, so it makes sense for a business to encourage photography and social endorsements.”

Social networks enable this kind of sharing, but what is your company doing to connect with consumers who want to use these networks?

  • Are you easy to find on social networks?
  • Do you reply to consumers’ questions and complaints via social media?
  • Are you actively looking for people talking about your company?
  • Do you reward social sharing, encouraging customers to talk about your company online?
  • Do you say thank you when people are complimentary about your company?

You have to be able to scale your social media efforts; talking to every single customer or potential customer isn’t sustainable. But you’d be amazed at what any kind of social presence can do for your company.

Best Online Marketing Practices

So what can your digital marketing team do to engage consumers via social media? There’s a laundry list of techniques, but something the best marketing campaigns have in common is enabling self-expression and connectivity not just to the brand, but to other users.

  • Clothing company Betabrand gives $20 discounts to users who take pictures of themselves wearing Betabrand items.
  • Coke and Pepsi both unveiled programs allowing consumers to buy a soda for someone else at a random vending, and then watch the receiver’s surprised reaction. The person could then send back a thank you note.
  • Back in 2004, Burger King already realized the power of online self-expression and connectivity. In the “subservient chicken” campaign, they allowed users to log online and give an actor in a chicken suit commands to follow. The site is still live to this day, and promotes Burger King’s “have it your way” philosophy.

Of course, hiring an actor in a chicken suit isn’t the right course of action for all businesses, but there’s still something to learn here about connecting directly with your audience. For even more “best practices” and tips for digital marketers who want to reach the customers, make sure you attend The Connected Consumer session at BusinessNext.

Why Small Businesses Need to Go Mobile [Video]

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Did you know that an astounding percentage of mobile searches are people looking for local information? It makes sense, right – someone is out and about, has the urge to stop for food, and wants to find the hours and location of nearby restaurants. Or they’re at the mall, decide to see a movie and need show times. Or their car breaks down and they need to find a nearby mechanic.

If you’re a small business without a mobile-optimized website, you’re missing out. This video explains further:

We’ll also be talking about video at BlogWorld New York next week! Check out our mobile track, as well as the Social Media Business Summit, which has even more great social information for small businesses. There’s still time to register and get tickets here!

Mobile Marketing – Where Small Businesses Should Focus

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… by Navin Ganeshan

Working for a marketing services provider that focuses on small businesses, we’re always hot on the trail of anything that promises to deliver the one thing that small businesses value the most – leads, leads, leads.

In this context, to say that mobile marketing shows promise, is an understatement of biblical proportions. Mobile internet usage has grown to 120M users in 3 years, or as analyst Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins puts it in real-world terms, “faster than any new thing”. Half of all smartphone users have used their phone to buy products and services. 50% of all US shoppers (not just smartphone users) will use the mobile web to influence shopping decisions by 2014.

But despite these overwhelming trends, we find that small businesses remain confused and conflicted about the value of mobile marketing activities. In our own surveys via the Small Business Success Index, less than 7% have a mobile-optimized website. Over 60% consider mobile marketing to be “cutting edge” or “ahead of its time”.

So what’s the disconnect? Why is it that John Q the consumer is (supposedly) voraciously consuming mobile bandwidth searching, clicking, downloading and interacting, while the same John Q the small-business owner views mobile like it were quantum mechanics. So let’s hit reboot, or rather hold down the power button and flick the slider to off. Let’s run through some commonly mentioned (if not exactly used) mechanisms for mobile marketing.

Custom Apps
This seemed to be an obsession in 2010 for the few tech-savvy small business owners with money and time to spare. But unfortunately the jury is out, and other than bragging rights with your family and friends, spending thousands to develop a marketing app that is found by a few, downloaded by fewer and used by no one is probably not great ROI for a restaurant or dry-cleaner. With some exceptions – if you transact primarily in content (bloggers), there are cost-effective DIY App services like AppMakr that let you satisfy your subscribers (or feed your ego) for a few hundred dollars.

Mobile Display Ads
For now this is still dominated by larger brands and marketing campaigns, but newer services like WhereAds from Where.com show a promising future where for a small monthly fee, a restaurateur can target nearby hungry consumers with a real-time coupon that pops up while they’re listening to Pandora.

SMS Advertising
This is a well-established market with many cost-effective solutions. Usage continues to grow for now, but as with email marketing, its appeal is bound to wane eventually as customers get tired of SMS-spam and contextually irrelevant ads.

Check-Ins
Social networking app like FourSquare and GoWalla have also provided small local businesses a great new channel for cost-effective marketing by incentivizing visits and actions, as do rewards services like CheckPoints and ShopKick. A merchant can offer a free appetizer to new visitors or to loyal customers. But these share a limitation as a marketing channel – they are restricted to users or members of a specific service – the whole walled-garden dilemma.

And this brings us to the two most important but under-appreciated ways to market on mobile. Drum-roll, please…..

Search (simply showing up)
As Woody Allen famously said, “80% of success is simply showing up”. When mobile consumers search for products or businesses, they’re generally looking to act and act quickly, or in marketing terms, “intent is high”. Consider this – half of all mobile searches are considered “local”. And 43% of these local searchers actually walk in the door – that’s almost half! So if you don’t show up, you’re not in the game. It’s that simple.

Mobile consumers generally find businesses in three ways – (1) Search Engines (2) Maps and (3) Directories which sometimes come with their own location-based apps like Yelp, Urban Spoon or Trip Advisor. But with so many different directories, apps, review sites that track businesses, it can be challenge to cover all your bases. Local marketing or directory-submission services such as Network Solutions’ Local Search VisibilityTM help broaden the reach by submitting to hundreds of directories for a monthly fee – a small price to pay for omnipresence.

Engagement (making it easy to interact)
Once they find a local business, what next? Mobile users behavior and expectations are different from those online. So it’s imperative to have a website that is optimized for mobile users – basically this means skipping the elaborate animations and fancy graphics to instead provide key features or information that are no more than one click away – Click-to-Call, mapping/directions, menu, reservation links or any coupons or specials you can use as incentives.

But getting a mobile presence doesn’t mean creating a whole new site. Services such as Network Solutions’ goMobiTM or DudaMobile allow you create a mobile presence using your existing domain name and based on content extracted from your existing web-site. But the resulting experience feels more like a native app.

Another equally important aspect of optimizing your presence is keeping your profile up-to-date on directories and networks like Yelp, TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon, Facebook Places etc and ensuring that they have compelling information and content about your business. There’s nothing less inviting than a Facebook profile with a big ? as your profile picture.

To summarize, these are exciting times – we’re witnessing a renaissance for small business local marketing with mobile being at the epi-center of innovation. But the most important things to consider are still the basics – optimizing for search and enhancing the engagement experience.

Network Solutions® fosters small business success in the highly competitive online space by providing the tools and resources to start, grow and manage businesses online. Leveraging more than thirty years of pioneering experience, Network Solutions helps companies thrive in an increasingly digital world. To ensure our customers’ success, we support them with outstanding customer service and mobile web solutions that are simple, innovative and reliable. Additional information can be found at about.networksolutions.com. We are thrilled to meet with you at BlogWorld, come by and see us in the nsMobile Lounge (booth #109) to take your business MOBILE.

Navin Ganeshan, Chief Product Strategy, Network Solutions
In his role leading new product development and strategic-investments for Network Solutions, Navin attempts to make sense of trends and technology that is transforming small business marketing. Most recently, he ran NetSol’s Web-Presence business which included web- hosting, ecommerce and security product-lines. In his current role, he is shaping NetSol’s strategies for local/social marketing, Cloud/SaaS, social commerce and most importantly for mobile presence, marketing and commerce. He regularly represents Network Solutions and it’s massive small business customer-base at industry events, most recently speaking at AffiliateSummit,  SalesForce’s Dreamforce and the OpenXChange Summit. He recently hosted ProductCampDC – an “unconference” for product-marketers. He is a recovering gadget-head but still frequently sports the iTrifecta – (MacBook+iPad+iPhone).  He is @Nganeshan on twitter. Navin is speaking at #BWENY on Tue, May 24th, 3:45-4:45PM on “Mobile Marketing 101 for Small Business.”

Mastering Your Mobile Marketing Mojo

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… by Doug Devitre

The power of a computer in the palm of every person enables our society to receive, disseminate, and share information faster than ever before. The mobile phone we once relied on only made calls. Now we can watch videos, communicate face to face, and share documents from anywhere, anytime, and in any format.

Entrepreneurs can now be more flexible in servicing client needs with minimal investment and without being physically present. Innovations like cloud computing, mobile video, and apps systematize business operations. The time saved by integrating these into practices gives professionals more time to focus on prospecting, appointments, and sales opportunities.

Cloud Computing
Take a look at the My Documents folder of your computer and ask yourself which documents do you send out most to clients, customers, or partners on a regular basis. A company brochure saved as a .PDF, template employees can edit in a .DOC. file format, or .XLS spreadsheet that others can perform calculations from the equations you create.

Two tools www.Box.net and www.Dropbox.com will store the documents others request online and give everyone quick access to preview, download, and share. Every document and folder of documents is assigned its own unique hyperlink.

Download the apps for Box and Dropbox to your iPhone, Blackberry, etc. and when logged in all of your documents will be ready to share right from your device. This way when you are sitting in the fast food drive thru and someone requests your company brochure you can send it without waiting until you get back to the office.

Vivacious Video
Would you rather watch a 2 minute video or read a 500 word article? Personally I like videos because they explain advance concepts with visuals rather than trying to interpret text. YouTube videos are different than other video hosting providers because they can be watched on most devices just like they can be on a computer. Every video uploaded to video is a link. This link can be shared by email, text message, Facebook, or Twitter and watched on the mobile phone when clicked.

Instant Lead Follow Up
A website that asks for customer contact information in exchange for a special report, product offering, or service inquiry must be responded to quickly or lose the opportunity. The contact information can be emailed to you however few people check their email every 5 minutes. In addition to the receiving the lead by email set up a system where you receive a text message. Every mobile phone carrier has an email to text message address. Find yours here. Include this email in your website follow up system in addition to your business email address so that when someone inputs their contact info you receive both a text message and email in order to follow up.

Apps
The mobile phone that rests in your pocket runs applications very similar to the ones on your computer. Although they may not have the same functionality the ability to access contacts, documents, and budgets make it is easy to follow up on the fly. Some of my favorite iPhone apps are Box.net for online document storage, Kayak for booking travel, Tripit for storing travel plans, and Groups for email groups and group instant messaging.

Small business owners have many options to run their business while on the road and there is no one single solution. Those options can be customized to fit your specific needs by innovating solutions that the provider may not have intended. The more creative, practical, and succinct you are at arriving at your objectives the easier it will be to make more money from your mobile device.

Doug Devitre, Chief Experience Officer of Doug Devitre International, Inc. helped real estate professionals, brokers, and associations save money, time, and creates value using affordable technology solutions all over the world. Join Doug on the conversation on Facebook, on Twitter @DougDevitre or subscribe to Doug’s blog to get the freshest ideas on how to use technology in real estate.

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