Mobile Marketing

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Mobile SEO – Optimize Your Mobile Website

January 18, 2012 | No comments

Overview

As the number of consumers owning smart phone has increased exponentially over the years, volume of searches over mobile internet has grown significantly. It is crucial for businesses to consider SEO in their mobile marketing strategies, to ensure that their web sites are found easily on mobile browsers.

There are a number of Mobile Browsers out there and they differ in their supported features. Different mobile Operating Systems support different browsers and some browsers only display mobile websites that are optimized. Refer to this list of Mobile browsers.

Mobile SEO

Here are some key factors that influence mobile SEO that can get your business maximum exposure in mobile search engines.

  1. First and foremost strategy in Mobile SEO is Mobile Friendly website. If Mobile website is not easy to navigate, driving traffic from Mobile SEO is not effective. Refer to Google’s blog post for tips on building mobile friendly website
  2. Stay away from the solution that reformats your main site for mobile phones, by running through third-party template based system. This solution does not take care of screen rendering for various devices and hence makes it very hard to navigate your site.
  3. Consider a fully optimized mobile site that provides key functionalities that are useful for users on the go. This makes the navigation of the site lot easier and provides much better user experience. This will help you with search engine rankings as well.
  4. Techniques to optimize mobile website for search engines are not very different from those you have used for traditional websites. You need follow basic guidelines of SEO such as,
  • Page Titles,
  • Page descriptions & headings
  • Keywords in headings and text
  • Outbound links
  • Search Engine Compatibility

However, due to limited screen size on smart phones, length of keywords used in mobile search is shorter. Google’s Mobile Keyword Research Tool allows you to set Mobile filter to list Mobile relevant keywords.

5. Generate Sitemap for the mobile site and submit to search engines. This helps in getting the pages indexed in search engine    database.

6. Prevent using flash that cannot be displayed on iphones currently. HTML5 is expected to resolve this issue.

Conclusion

Mobile SEO is a very powerful strategy that you can adopt and leverage the power of Mobile Search to drive significant traffic to your website. Once you got the attention of Mobile User by displaying high up in search results, your options are many. You can engage the user with other integrated mobile strategies, such as social media marketing, & location based marketing. This helps build your brand in the Mobile world and in turn your online reputation.

 

Mobile Web Sites OR Mobile Apps?

December 5, 2011 | No comments

Overview

If you are a business venturing into Mobile Marketing world, choosing between Mobile Web Site and Mobile App is a difficult task, unless you understand the pros and cons of each. With this knowledge you can better evaluate the benefits of the two options and relate them to your business needs. This post will help you in understanding the two options better, so you are better informed when it is time to choose between the two.

Mobile Apps

Mobile applications are application software developed for hand held devices. These need to be developed using the native code on the device platform. Most popular platforms are from Google (Android) and Apple (iPhone).

Pros:

  1. Apps use native code on the mobile device. Using native code usually results in higher performance
  2. App is distributed through native app stores and potentially enhances distribution
  3. Apps can work offline & launch on Single click  from an icon
  4. Apps can help build  customer loyalty & can bring repeat customers
  5. Apps can utilize native functionality of Smart Phones (camera, gyroscope, and push notifications). This offers richer functionality

Cons:

  1. Apps need to be developed for each mobile device platform. This can easily drain your resources.
  2. Apps require approval from each device app store. Revenue sharing with app stores such as iTunes & android market
  3. Apps don’t achieve success in App stores unless close to the top in the category
  4. Apps need to be pushed to customers via text or emails and require users to download. Also, require users to download updates
  5. Apps are not easily scalable

Mobile Web Sites

Pros:

  1. Mobile Web Sites Can be designed to work on any device platforms
  2. There is no need to download websites. They can be found in Search Engines
  3. Mobile Web Sites are easier to support and maintain. Less expensive than apps
  4. Mobile Websites updated automatically. No need for downloads.
  5. You don’t need to get authorization from third party distributors and no Revenue Sharing

Cons:

  1. Mobile Web Sites  need to be optimized to be found on search engines
  2. Cannot guarantee performance with Web Sites. Depends on how well the sites are built
  3. Offline browsing of web sites not available on all devices
  4. Mobile Web Sites cannot access all of the Smartphone’s native functionality (camera, gyroscope, and push notifications).
  5. Mobile Web Sites are limited in functionality

Summary

Now, your decision to choose between mobile websites and mobile app, depends on where you are in your business and how much resources you have to invest in marketing.

  • If you are an established brand, you are better off implementing apps to add more value to your brand and increase customer loyalty. Since your customers already love your products, you can add some fun to their shopping, with feature-rich apps.
  • If you are still in the process of establishing your brand, your best option is to go with mobile website with most important services that you offer, so you can provide more content/information on the web site for customers to learn about your brand. Use Mobile apps for promotional campaigns, fun games, etc. to retain the customer base you build.

If you have further questions regarding Mobile Marketing options for your business contact us through our Digital Marketing Web Site.

Mobile Marketing Strategies

November 7, 2011 | No comments

Overview

In the previous post I shared with you tips on how to determine whether or not Mobile Marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy. By now, you have done your research in the industry and determined that Mobile Marketing is relevant for your business. If you are ready to adopt Mobile Marketing into your business marketing plan, here are the next steps.

  1. Define the goals for your marketing campaign(s) – generate leads, retain existing customers, offer promotions, improve brand awareness, loyalty programs, etc.
  2. Research your target market
  3. Determine which channel(s) is(are) effective and relevant to reach  your target market/demographics & how to integrate them
  4. Design & implement your campaign with carefully crafted marketing message
  5. Keep the campaign exciting with prizes, fun games, etc. to make your customers to want to come back to participate
  6. Measure the results of the campaign and use the data to further optimize the campaign

Mobile Marketing Strategies

There are multiple mobile marketing channels available to run your campaign(s). Few channels that you can consider are:

  1. SMS (Short Message Service)
  2. MMS (Media Message Service)
  3. Mobile Web Sites
  4. Mobile Applications
  5. QR Codes
  6. Location Based Services

1. SMS

This strategy is used to send out simple text blasts to consumers regarding an event reminder, event sign up, short-term promotion, etc. If you are considering this strategy, always be sure to use consent-based list and give consumer an option to opt-out of this communication. This strategy particularly works well for businesses such as restaurants, spas, night clubs, happy hour event venues etc. to  send out event reminders, discount coupons, etc.

2. MMS

This strategy is used to send out text, or media such as slideshow, audio and video to mobile phones. This can work for any business that sells products. They can attach image of the product they are promoting or personalized video message about the product, in marketing messages.

 

3. Mobile Web Sites

Mobile websites are websites that are compatible with hand held devices. Due to limitation in the size of screen and small space for keys, it becomes very difficult for users to navigate your website that is designed for desktop/lap top computers. In order to improve user experience in browsing your website on handheld devices, you have to make sure that the website is compatible. Before designing a mobile website, Identify 4 or 5 main functions that are going to be handy for visitors when they are on the go. These functions are going to drive your mobile website. Do not go with the quick fix option of using third party tool that allows you run your main website through to generate skinnier version of the site. This does not serve the purpose.

4. Mobile Apps

Mobile applications are application software developed for hand held devices. These can be downloaded from software distribution platforms. Mobile apps are useful when you want to promote specific products/services in your business. Few tips on how you can use mobile apps for your business:

  • Allow customers to download coupons
  • Earn reward points through loyalty program
  • Promote events that you are sponsoring
  • Allow customers to communicate with each other about your products and services.
  • Build brand awareness by selling on mobile software distribution platforms

5. QR Codes

QR Code (Quick Response Code) , also known as 2D bar code that stores information horizontally and vertically. QR codes can store up to 7,089 characters that can be encoded in the form of text, URL or other data.

In order to make use of QR codes, smart phone users need to download QR code readers compatible on their smart phones. Once they have the reader, all they do is to take a picture of the QR code with the reader.  Few ways you can use QR codes effectively for your business.

  • Send customers to company webpage for that product
  • Coupon page
  • Send a text message to accept an offer, etc.

QR codes are still catching up in the US. These are widely used by restaurants, packaging companies, real estate agents, automotive industry, and many othe B2C industries. B2B industries need to define clearer goals, before they start using QR codes for marketing.

 

6. Location Based Services

Location-based mobile marketing is a great way to link social media and mobile marketing campaigns together. Location-based social networks such as Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla allow people to interact, share and recommend places based on their physical location.

Conclusion

Before you start incorporating one or more of the mobile marketing strategies listed above, invest time in learning how the new strategies blend with other online marketing campaigns that you already have in place. If you don’t have a in-house resource to put together a integrated strategy, seek help from a professional. You can enhance the results of your campaign by integrating mobile marketing strategies into your overall strategy. Some of the benefits of this integration are:

  1. Consistent brand experience
  2. Reduce costs by identifying less profitable marketing channels
  3. Provide customers with multiple ways to connect with you

 

 

Mobile Marketing – Is It Right For Your Business?

October 10, 2011 | No comments

Current Trends

There is a paradigm shift in the way marketers communicate with the consumers. One-way messaging strategy is no longer effective. As the use of smart phones and tablets is increasing exponentially, marketers now have two-way communication media channels to effectively reach their personalized messages to the hand-held devices.

Marketers adopted SMS and MMS marketing, several years ago, to send out marketing messages to the consumers. However, SMS and MMS by themselves are not effective any longer.  “Mobile Marketing” is a blend of several strategies, such as Mobile Websites, Location Based Marketing, Mobile Advertising, & Mobile Apps along with SMS and MMS strategies.

According to eMarketer, 7% of internet users use their mobile phones for browsing the internet. This number is expected to increase to 18% by 2012. The amount of internet traffic coming to the websites from mobile phones has significantly increased. This shift in trend highlights the importance of providing improved user experience in browsing on Mobile devices.

Is Mobile Marketing Right For You?

Before jumping into implementing Mobile Marketing Strategy for your business, it is important to know its relevance for your business and how it can help achieve your goals.

There are few obvious reasons why Mobile Marketing can be effective.

  1. Communicating to your customers via their mobile devices makes your marketing message more personal and effective.
  2. Via Mobile Campaigns you can reach your customers quickly and be sure that your message is read within minutes of it being received. Because, people carry their mobile device on them at all times.
  3. It is very easy to share content. If your marketing message has some value to the consumer, they are likely to share that message with their circle.
  4. Every activity on in a mobile marketing campaign can be tracked to a single phone numbers, and make it easy to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

Now, next step is to determine, how Mobile Marketing can help achieve your business goals. Some of the business goals for you to consider are:

  1. If Mobile Marketing can help in retaining customers and build brand loyalty by closing the the gap between existing customers becoming repeat customers. One way to achieve this is by keeping existing customers engaged with product promotional offers, & discounts
  2. If you are already leveraging Social Media Marketing to build your brand online, integrating Mobile Marketing strategy such as Location Based marketing (Four Square, Bright Kite, Gowalla, etc.) with Social Media Marketing can boost online engagement with customers significantly.
  3. If your site traffic measurement shows considerable amount of traffic coming from mobile phones, creating a mobile friendly website might be a great way to enhance users’ browsing experience on their mobile phones and keep them engaged on your mobile website
  4. If you are in a industry where information is update frequently, Mobile Apps might be a great way to keep your customers up-to-date with most current information about what’s going on in your business
  5. If you are already running SMS and MMS campaigns, these are still effective if you integrate with rest of the strategies in your Mobile Marketing Campaign.

Conclusion

Now that we have established the fact that there is enough potential to grow your business with mobile marketing campaign(s), it is time for you put a program in place. Do not attempt into dive into Mobile Marketing without doing research. Invest in research on the industry and competitors. Make sure you find out where your target market is, before choosing a platform to run your campaign. Once you have all the data you need, choose the right tools to run & measure a successful campaign.

If you have questions regarding Mobile Marketing Strategies for your business, send us your questions via our Digital Marketing Web site.

 

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.