Mobile Marketing – Why You Need a Mobile-Friendly Website?

March 16, 2011 | No comments

Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is another tool in your Digital Marketing tool box, to promote your products and services online. Businesses need to be really cautious about driving traffic to their website from mobile devices, from mobile marketing strategies, such as QR codes. Nowadays, everyone has a smart phone and most  likely your target market belongs to this group of users. You can take advantage of this by leveraging the opportunities of mobile browsing experience.

Challenges

PC-friendly websites don’t meet the challenges of mobile browsing.  You need a mobile-friendly website which is separate from your primary website. If website is not designed specifically for mobile devices, it is not going to provide a good mobile browsing experience and it is highly likely that visitor  to the website drops out very quickly. It is critical to make sure the website is mobile-friendly if your target market is active on mobile devices.

There are several reasons why normal version of the website that loads perfectly in IE, Firefox, etc. does not work very well in mobile browsers. Here are few main pain items to keep in mind.

  1. Normal version of the website is designed to capture maximum amount of content and information related to products and services. Content pages and graphics associated load fine in normal browsers, but load very slow on mobile devices. This can be frustrating to users and they tend to drop out quickly.
  2. If websites contain flash images and videos, these don’t load on mobile devices. This is a limitation on mobile devices and not going to change any time soon.
  3. Layouts of the website are designed with resolution to work for the screen size on PCs and laptops and are not compatible with mobile device screens.
  4. Navigation of normal websites on mobile devices is not user-friendly. User has to scroll the screen in all directions to access the menu items.
  5. Pull down menus don’t work on mobile devices, unless you have Java Script is installed.

How to make your Website Mobile-Friendly

There are tools available online to convert your existing website to a mobile version, Google Mobile Optimizer is an easy tool to use and it is free. But, free tools that are available offer you very basic conversion and often are not customizable. So, your best option is to invest in a paid tool and spend time to build mobile-friendly website. Some of the tools available are Mobify, MoFuse, & Mippin. These offer greater level of customization. You can also consider consulting a web designer to assist you in building a Mobile-Friendly website.
Biggest challenge you have is in optimizing the content you have generated for primary website to fit well on limited screen size and slow speed of mobile devices. Focus on the most important categories first. Identify one or two areas on the website that would be most useful to your ideal customer.  This varies greatly between industries. Airline industries may have identified flight status check, online check-in as important features in mobile context, Vs. retail industries alert users on mobile when they have a sale item or a new item in the store, so they can browse to their mobile site to shop for those items.

Your goal is to provide more personalized experience to the user and provide them with the information they are looking for at their finger tips!

For more information on this topic contact us on our Digital Marketing Website.

Online Reputation Management

February 16, 2011 | 1 comment

Overview

Online Reputation is the outcome of how you run your business, & what people say or think about your services online. If you are responsible for marketing in your company, it is important for you to be aware of how your reputation online affects your sales, especially when you have a brand that is popular and people follow closely what you do.

It is common knowledge that when comes to sharing their experiences, consumers are lot more vocal about their bad experiences than good ones (Watch this). Opinions spread faster than ever through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. This can very easily affect the reputation of any business. This can be negative publicity, especially when complaints are not handled in proactive manner. This brings the very important point of why listening & responding online is so critical for your business.

How it Works?

When shoppers search for your brand in online, both good and bad things about you show up in search results. They not only look for information on your website, but also look at blogs, review sites, forums, etc. to know what others are saying about your business. When they see good reviews about your brand it boosts their confidence and helps build credibility for your brand. What happens when you have 7 out 10 results that are bad reviews?

Online Reputation Management is a strategy to manage search engine results, by listening to what people are saying about your brand. Your ultimate goal in this strategy is to bring good publicity about your brand to the top of the search engine results, in turn pushing the bad publicity results down in the list. This requires you to have a proactive strategy in place, to handle unexpected bad publicity online.

Research is the critical and the longest process in consumers’ buying cycle.  They use search engines to research and gather information, so that they can make informative decisions. If they find information about your brand, that is more negative than positive, it is highly likely that they take their business elsewhere. By not being proactive in handling negative reviews, you might be spending lot more time and resources to gain the control back in the market.

How to Manage Online Reputation

Step 1: Monitoring

Setup tools in place to listen to what is being said about your brand online. Accept the reality that people tend to be more honest about negative experiences and more eager to share them. There are several social monitoring tools available for you to use such as Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, Social Mention, Hoot Suite, etc. Some are free of cost and some require subscription. Choose the tools wisely depending on your situation.

Step 2: Analyzing

Once you start gathering data from these monitoring tools, what do you do with it? Be proactive and analyze the data frequently, and make use of important feedback to improve your services and provide better brand experience to your consumers. Be sure to let your consumers know that their feedback is valuable for your business.

Step 3: Influencing

When you come across negative comments, while monitoring your brand getting involved in the conversation is very critical. By owning up to your mistakes, offering compensation for inconvenience caused by these mistakes and also by providing assurance that this will not repeat in the future, you can influence the outcome of negative publicity. This accountability may even help strengthen credibility of your brand and build confidence.

Similar to how you have disaster recovery, & operations crisis management for your company, it is very important that you implement a digital crisis management strategy and assign responsible parties to execute this strategy when needed.

Conclusion

Choices that you have online can be overwhelming. Before you implement or setup tools for online reputation management, do your home work. Understand which social media platform is most popular among your target demographics. Setup your presence on these platforms and start monitoring. Participate actively in online conversations, even if is not directly related to your brand. Online Reputation Management can be time consuming and it has to be done. So, make sure you have delegated this to someone in your company who is accountable for managing these activities.

Social Media Marketing Vs. Social Media Optimization

February 1, 2011 | 2 comments

You are in the time of digital marketing era, where having social media presence for your business is critical. However, if your target market is not yet on the social media platforms to engage in conversations regarding your products and services,what do you do?

Benefits of Social Media

Before you jump into social media platforms, you have to understand the benefits. With this understanding, you will be able to build a priority list as to what kind of results you would expect from engaging in these social networks.

According to companies worldwide using social media, here are the benefits of using social media.

  • Customer Engagement
  • Low Cost of Marketing
  • Relationship Building
  • Ability to reach new customers
  • Reach/Influence customers
  • Direct Customer Communications
  • Gain Credibility & Build Brand Awareness

Though majority of companies are aware of the benefits, many of them have not taken the next step into implementing this in their marketing plan. Why? Either they are skeptical about the results or they don’t think it is important for their business.

Social Media Marketing

This is a process where you actively engage your customers in conversation about your products and services by posting, information that they can benefit from, on social media profiles. You are not always selling. So, when it is time to sell your fans are ready to listen to your marketing pitch and if they like what they see, they are doing the viral marketing for you online.

Social Media Marketing is an excellent strategy if your target demographics is already engaged in these social platforms. You can spread the word at low cost.

Social Media Optimization

This is a process where you are using social media platforms to secure your company brand online and to contribute to search engine optimization. You would choose this strategy, when your target market is not yet engaged in social media platforms. This will give you an opportunity to secure your place and be ready for social media marketing when your target market is ready for it. How is this done?

Social media optimization involves content syndication and content optimization. You can syndicate the content in text, image or video format on various social media platforms and optimize them with tags and seo-friendly descriptions. Content syndication allows you to build quality links to your website, which helps you in search engine rankings.

Should You Start Building Social Media Presence for your Business?

If you are skeptical about the results of social media campaigns, you will never know unless you try it. Consult with a professional to find out what works in your industry. If you decide to manage the campaign in-house make sure you have a resource who is trained to be a social media campaign manager. Most importantly, have social media tracking tools in place to measure the performance of your campaign(s).

If you are thinking “Why should I start social media campaign when none of my competitors are doing anything?”, then this is the best time for you to start implementing, so you can be ahead of the curve. Because, by the time your competitors realize how important this strategy is, they will be playing catch up, while you already have a fan base and all set for marketing & selling!

Kriti Web Solutions, Digital Marketing

Where is Internet Marketing Going in 2011?

January 10, 2011 | No comments

Know What’s Hot for 2011, and Prepare Your Business for These Online Trends.

  • It’s the year for social media marketing. In 2011, businesses will be executing social tactics that are fully integrated into the overall marketing strategy. Every company needs a social media marketing strategy and the right resources to manage it.
  • Mobile marketing is on the go. Mobile marketing is on the go. The increase in smart-phone use and relaxed download caps on mobile phone plans has seen mobile marketing gain momentum. Tablet devices should now be a mainstream consideration in your digital marketing strategy.
  • 2011 will see a new era of online video content, re-introducing the human element and changing the nature of communication; making it dynamic, interactive and instant. Video will be used more for mainstream online content and advertising.
  • SEO is going to be complex (if it isn’t enough already!). Competition for Google heats up with Yahoo, Bing, Search.com, and social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Getting your business on the first page of search results will become tougher. Mobile search and geo-location will further increase the challenges and surprises for search engine optimizers.

How Can You Make Changes in Your Business?

It is not too late to get in the game, and start making plans to incorporate internet marketing strategies in your marketing plan, if you haven’t already.

  • Revisit your current marketing strategies and study the results from past campaigns. Seek the help of professional internet marketing consultant, if you don’t have an in-house resource to help you with this.
  • Take the time to get industry trends and competitive analysis data before choosing  strategies for your business
  • Implement strategies and monitor performance of campaigns regularly
  • Analyze the campaign results and make further optimize the campaign as needed. Make adjustments to strategies based on these results.

Kriti Web Solutions, Internet Marketing Consulting

Purl Marketing Strategy

November 8, 2010 | 1 comment

Personalized urls (Purls) are an effective way of direct marketing with increased response rates. Purls are a new type of cross media direct marketing campaign.  Purls allow you to combine direct mail campaign with capabilities of the internet, and give buyers an option to respond through the internet.

How Purls work?

By generating unique Purls for each recipient of your direct mail offer, you are personalizing the landing page for each recipient. When prospect/client lands on this personalized URL, greeting with their name and other custom information about them, it gives them unique experience online and they are very likely to pursue the direct mail offer.

e.g. if you have a travel website coasttravel.com and sending direct mail offer for summer travel discount to the Caribbean, be sure to include PURL mikesheen.coasttravel.com in every direct mail piece sent to your customer Mike Sheen. When Mike Sheen lands on this URL, he would be excited to see his own personalized page with personalized travel offer.

Tracking Results

Tracking the results of PURL campaign is easier then ever. Even though, the campaign started out as direct mail piece, the end result is consumers interacting online, to pursue the direct mail offer. With tracking tools available online, you are able to track the user who visited the landing page and their actions on the page. You now have qualified leads that you can followup on and convert them to customers by providing them with additional information, before they decide to buy from you.

Advantages of Purl Marketing

. By providing interactive online channel for response, you can increase response rates and conversion rates

. You can measure campaign performance with real-time analytics tools

. You can build segmented customer list, from their profiles

. You can define personas for your site, based on the information you collect about the visitors

. Direct targeted offers to segmented lists, to improve conversion rate & ROI

Do you need Social Media Strategies for your business?

September 28, 2010 | No comments

I come across businesses that are skeptical about how effective social media strategies can be for their business. I understand their dilemma. They don’t want to invest their marketing dollars in strategies that are not going to help them extend their target market. If you are business owner or the marketing resource in the business, here are some tips on how to make a decision on whether social media is for you or not.

Is Social Media for you?

If you answer “YES” to one or more questions below, then if you haven’t already it is time for you to start thinking about adopting social media strategies in your marketing plan.

1. Do you rely on referral or “Word of mouth” to get leads?

2. Are you trying to find ways and wishing to increase online brand awareness and visibility?

3. Do you and your management understand what social media means and understand the benefits it can bring to your business?

4. Are you customers active in social media networks and very likely to join your network, when you start building one?

5. Do you have time to invest in managing your social media profiles and other social media activities and ready to engage your customers in conversation?

Next Steps

OK. You are ready to adopt social media in your business. However, there are numerous social media platforms to choose from to promote your brand. Syndicating content (text, images, videos, etc.) on multiple platforms is key to your social media campaign success. So, before choosing the platforms, make sure you do your homework on their effectiveness and be sure to allocate resources whether it is in-house or outside consultant who can help you manage the campaign on a daily basis.

Another very  important step is to have policies in place to assist you in managing the campaign professionally. Every employee in your business has to be made aware of these policies and follow them strictly, to maintain a professional image online. If you decide to have a in-house resource manage the campaign, make them go through social media training and have them get into the habit of keeping up with changes in social media technologies. This training would save you a lot of time and resources in the long run.

New & Improved Internet Explorer;IE 9 Beta Version

September 16, 2010 | No comments

For website designers and developers Internet Explorer has always been a real problem, because it does not comply with necessary web standards (W3C) like other browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome do. Websites need to be tested with IE browser, because there are still a large user base for this browser, even though the user base has declined over last few years. In order to gain the user base back in the browser world, by with version 9 Microsoft has invested resources with emphasis on performance and web standards.

If everything goes well with the beta version of IE 9, designers and developers can make the website work in IE browser with little or no  work-arounds.

IE 9 supports features that are in HTML5 spec. It also supports true CSS3. IE 9 is faster and more efficient. Similar to Google Chrome which has clean UI, IE 9 has made the UI of the browser itself less prominent and instead makes the website look prominent. With these improvements in features and performance, IE  has a very good chance of gaining the status back as many internet users’ default browser.

Click Here to install IE 9 Beta.

Social Media Dashboard Tools

September 15, 2010 | 1 comment

I have been looking for a platform that where I can manage all my social media profiles from one place. Recently, I found few options to explore. The tools I came across are Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Seesmic. All these tools help you connect and engage across multiple social networks, with slight differences in features.

HootSuite

Hootsuite offers you the tool which runs online and very easy to manage. It requires you to configure your dashboard, to add multiple social media profiles that you can manage and customize the dashboard. Current version of HootSuite 5, allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts, multiple face book accounts, facebook pages, LinkedIn, WordPress, etc. With Hootsuite you get the cool feature of scheduling your posts for later. Hootsuite also offers  statistics tool to track the performance. It also allows you to integrate your Google Analytics account to analyze the impact of social media campaigns. There is no installation required to use this tool. I find Hootsuite to be more comprehensive compared to Tweetdeck & Seesmic.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application that installs on your desktop. It allows you to add face book, twitter, & Linked In profiles to the dashboard. You can find more information on this tool at tweetdeck.com.

Seesmic

Seesmic has Seesmic Web which does not need any installation. It also has a desktop version for Mac or Windows. It allows you to add face book, twitter, & Linked In profiles to the dashboard. However, I have not found a way to add face book fan page to the dashboard, which is an essential feature. You can find more information on this tool at seesmic.com.

Facebook announces release of “Places” feature

August 19, 2010 | No comments

Face book announces the release of highly anticipated location feature, Face book Places. This Face book app allows users to “check in” on their mobile phones to notify their friends about their whereabouts and what they are up to.

People who have the Face book app on their phone can use this feature. Currently, it’s available on iPhone only and Android and blackberry versions are expected soon. By downloading the latest face book app on their iPhone, users can see the Places option.

Usability Testing of Your Website

July 27, 2010 | No comments

Why is usability testing is crucial for successful deployment of your website?

Usability testing is an important step in Quality Assurance (QA) procedure for any product. Usability testing helps you simulate the experience of an average website user. In order to ensure the quality of the website and improve user experience, there are several stages of testing that need to be performed on the website.

Step 1: Development Team

Developers of the website are the first set of users to test the site. However, since they implemented the site, they obviously expect the site behavior to match their implementation. It makes more sense to perform testing by cross checking each feature with its specification in the requirement document. Once this stage is completed and all the issues are resolved, the site is rolled out to in house QA team to go through their testing cycle.

Step 2: In House QA team

QA team has to work hand-in-hand with the development team for the success of the project. Development team provides guidance to the QA team to prepare a comprehensive set of test scenarios to test all features of the site. Once the site is ready for QA testing, the team will go down the list of test scenarios and mark them as PASS or FAIL after successful testing. Once the testing is complete and all the issues are resolved by the development team, QA will go through the test cycle again to validate the scenarios. Often times than not, features that were functional in the previous testing phase may not behave the same with the new build. So, it is very important to randomly test the PASSed scenarios in subsequent builds to make sure they are still valid.

Step 3: Average Web User

Usability testing by a group of average users is the last step before releasing to the web. Depending on the type of industry or business, users you select may need preparation from you to familiarize them them with the industry and tips on what to look for. Once they get used to the system they are on a role with testing and provide you with very valuable feedback to improve the quality of the site.

It is important to provide the testers with a survey form to provide feedback on different components, in a systematic manner so it is not overwhelming to the developer to go back and take care of the issues. Choosing users for this stage of testing should not be a difficult task. Have a system in place to reward the participants with incentives such as gift cards, or tickets to sporting events, etc. You may be able to do better if you collect some information from the participants before hand, regarding their hobbies and interests.


« Older entries § Newer entries »