19 Feb

Posted at 09:00h in Mobile Marketing

The 4 Essentials You Need to Make Mobile Marketing Work

Mobile marketing is an area that many Internet marketers don’t pay much attention to. They believe that their website is mobile-friendly – sadly, many Internet marketers are wrong.

This is tragic, as smart phone owners are great potential customers, they are young, well-educated, and have high incomes – all traits that Internet marketers want to market to. To the left is a chart from the Pew Research Center from a study done at the end of 2014, when 2015 data is available Pew will update their findings.

Study after research study has proven that the majority of smart phone owners do Internet research before buying a product online or going to a particular store.

How can you tap into this titanic, plentiful marketplace?

You need a plan. Marketing to different age groups requires different messaging as does most of the other categories. Often, sellers may conduct more than one marketing campaign at the same time targeting different groups of prime prospects.

The 4 Essentials of Mobile Marketing

For local businesses, Internet marketing is the most cost-effective way to come up on the first page of local search results and get new customers.

  •      Small Bites of Information
  •      Focus on Local Search
  •      Location – Based Services
  •      Geotargeting

Small Bites of Information

A study done by Microsoft in 2015 found that while humans excel at multi-tasking the average attention span has dropped by 12 seconds to a mere 8.25 seconds, in contrast, the tiny brained goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds.

When it comes to viewing website your potential customers spend a mere 10 – 20 seconds on a site. They only read 25 percent of text on the page. If you were to ask your website visitors how long they stay (or check it out free on Google Analytics ) if the time is short, fit your text to their attention span. This is one of those cases where more is less.

Focus on Local Search

Your mobile ready website is important. Include your address and phone number on your site. If you are downtown, tell people that. If you are across the street or near a local landmark tell visitors that as well. Include a link to a map to your location if it is not automatically included by Google Maps. It is beneficial to let customers know if you are near public transportation – if you are, say it. For example, “we are located just one block from the Brown line stop on Seacrest Avenue.”

Location – Based Services (LBS)

Location-based services use the GPS ability of smartphones and other sophisticated technology to find you. While one of the most used of LBS is entertainment such as restaurant reviews and reservations, movie times and reviews as well as buying tickets online, it is now becoming more widespread to include all kinds of applications including,

  • Local news
  • Points of Interest
  • Directions
  • Getting a ride from a car service like Uber (use their app)
  • Local advertising online when using a smartphone or other portable device

LBS comes in two flavors, Push and Pull. Push provides users with information from their service provider although it is not asked for at that time. Pull services require users to make a request for information or services.

If the putting together of the essentials for mobile marketing is something you would like Webociti to help you with, contact me. My phone number is 678-892-7157.

Till next time,

Joe

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27 Mar

Posted at 13:46h in Digital Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Why You Must Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Google announced on March 24,2015 that beginning April 21, 2015 the mobile friendliness of your website will become an important element of how Google’s algorithm will rank your existing site. If you haven’t optimized your site for mobile search it will be moved to a lower search engine ranking (SER).

 

Mobile Web Search

Mobile Web Search

Google is not doing this to mess with your website search results, The coming update that is concerned with mobile optimization is, according to Google, to give users the most relevant, high quality search results. The ease of using a site on a mobile device is going to be a factor in those results.

Finally, Google’s formal definition of “mobile” is only a single word – smartphone.

More Reasons to Optimize For Mobile

Do you know that over 41 percent of Smartphone users have purchased something using their phone? If you have not optimized for mobile search, you are missing nearly half of your potential customer base. Additionally, the growth of Smartphone use for search, has increased 229.08 percent. This is because now, 58 percent of all consumers in the United States own Smartphones. This is a large and growing demographic that you must optimize for or they will never see your site, but a competitor’s will pop up if they have optimized for local search for your type of business.

Other important reasons for optimizing for mobile search include,

Consistent Customer Experience

Studies indicate that over 60 percent of people have increasingly stronger opinions of brands and companies that offer a good mobile experience. But, 90 percent of people surveyed say they had to switch devices to complete a task. When a site is optimized for mobile, your customers are offered a consistent experience that creates the feelings of reliability and trust that will keep them coming back to you. When transactions are easily completed, buyers come back.

Reduce Your Bounce Rate

The content for your website that looks so great on your desktop computer may be completely unreadable when a Smartphone looks for it. What is even worse, visitors will leave your website if they have to zoom or pinch in order to read what maybe an illegible font on a Smartphone. By making your mobile site user friendly, customers will stay on your site longer and potentially click to continue to a purchase.

User Self-Control

Users have little patience, so, if your mobile page does not load within 3 seconds, users leave looking for a quicker loading site – you just lost a potential buyer of your goods and services. If your mobile site has any of these symptoms, get it optimized.

  • Large images
  • Small font
  • Clunky looking layouts

One of these problems is reason enough to optimize, but two or more and once again, you are losing customers to competitors. According to Google, 81 percent of Smartphone purchases were impulse purchases.

Mobile Users are Different Than Desktop or Laptop Users

The reasons mobile users differ from other users is they want the information they are looking for fast, and in little bites that they can easily digest. To increase conversions on a mobile website your “call to action” must be clear and easy to read. Links to other pages must be working and fast – remember these buyer have little or no patience.

Contact Webociti

Need help for mobile optimization in order to get better results from your Internet marketing? Call Webociti at 678-892-7157. For other methods of reaching out visit our contact page.

 

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18 Feb

Posted at 17:05h in Mobile Marketing

Best Practices for Mobile Marketers in 2015 and Beyond

Many people incorrectly assume that just by virtue of having a mobile marketing campaign, they’re already doing everything that they need to succeed in a digital environment. This may have been accurate five years ago, but in 2015 and beyond it couldn’t be farther from the truth. If you want to achieve the highest level of success on the Internet, you’ll need to make sure that you’re always keeping a few key things in mind.

E-mail Formatting

This is called responsive design and refers to the idea that you need to make your emails responsive to the device that they’re being read on, similar to the steps that you would take with your website. This makes sure that they’re always capable of being read properly on a mobile device, regardless of what device that actually is. As a result, you

need to make sure you’re following certain formatting rules like the use of short headers, large text, larger buttons and a single column layout. Short headers will help make sure that ideas really stand out on a mobile device. Large text is easily read on a device with a small screen size, while large buttons are significantly easier to tap with your finger. A single column layout will help make sure that no formatting is lost due to mobile e-mail applications.

List Your Business in the Right Places

Another way to achieve success in mobile marketing has to do not just with listing your business online, but listing it in the right places. Search engines like Google and Bing  naturally give precedent to their own services. A business listed on Google Places will always return higher in the search results than a business with just a mobile landing page, even if that landing page is literally the best that’s ever been designed. This is just the way the world works in 2015.

As a result, you need to list your business with certain mobile-friendly sites and services to help make sure you’re seeing the penetration levels you’re after. Don’t neglect sites like Google Places, Bing Places, Yelp, Yahoo! Local and more for the best possible results.

Utilize All Available Communication Channels

One of the great things about mobile devices is that they have a large number of different communications channels built right in. This allows users to receive messages directly from your business on their own terms. The thing that you need to keep in mind, however, is that you should utilizing all of these channels equally – don’t neglect one in favor of another or you risk alienating a huge portion of your audience that may prefer that method.

Don’t just utilize e-mail marketing, for example. Also focus on social networking, SMS text messaging and even “Push” notifications to help connect with your target audience in the most organic way possible.

12 Feb

Posted at 13:27h in Mobile Marketing

Since the release of Apple’s iPhone and the ensuing explosion in popularity that the smartphone has gone through in the last five years, the world of digital marketing has essentially been re-built from the ground up. The Web in general is becoming much more of an intimate experience, thanks largely to the fact that users are connected at all times on devices that they can carry with them wherever they go. Marketing has had to become much more intimate as a result, which is where the idea of mobile marketing enters into the lexicon for all time.

What is Mobile Marketing?

Simply put, mobile marketing is a type of digital marketing that is targeted directly at smartphones, tablets and other types of mobile devices. Thanks to the GPS hardware that is normally installed in these types of devices, along with the huge amounts of information that users are storing on them at the same time, mobile marketing can provide customers with location-based and other personalized information at a moments’ notice.

Types of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing can take a few different shapes depending entirely on the type of audience that a business is trying to reach. SMS marketing takes the form of traditional text messages, similar to the type that you probably receive from friends and family members on a daily basis.

“Push” notifications are essentially the smartphone’s version of a pop-up advertisement. These can be triggered based on a series of pre-determined events (like the launch of a new product) or even via location. A user can automatically receive a “Push” notification on their iPhone when they’re physically close to the store in question, for example.

One of the most popular types of mobile marketing, however, is mobile Web marketing. This is a form of advertising that features ads and other types of marketing-related messages that are specifically designed to be viewed on a smartphone or tablet. Mobile Web marketing is governed by a set of guidelines and standards that were created by the Mobile Marketing Association. These include recommendations regarding the size of certain ads, where they should be placed inn relation to content and more.

Responsive Design

One of the most important factors to keep in mind regarding mobile marketing is the idea of responsive design. Not all smartphones are created equally. They can vary wildly in characteristics like screen size, resolution and included hardware based not only on the original manufacturer but also regarding which specific model in a product line that you’re talking about. Responsive design practices will take a piece of content formatted for the mobile landscape and make sure that it can be properly viewed on every type of device that a user may own.

If you only formatted your mobile advertising for the Apple iPhone, for example, you run the risk of creating content that will display improperly on devices with wildly different technical specifications like the Samsung Galaxy (and will thus alienate those users as a result). Responsive design practices not only help make sure that all members of your target audience are accounted for, but they also help save time and money because businesses no longer have to design multiple versions of the same piece of content to account for changes in devices on a regular basis.

Our company, Webociti, specializes in providing solutions for your Internet marketing challenges. Call us for a free marketing consultation at 678-892-7157.