Inbound Mobile Marketing

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If you’re looking for more customers and more sales for your business, we’re assuming you know the #1 thing that separates a successful business from the competition, right? If you don’t, let us point it out to you. It’s simple. All it comes down to is presence. Presence, simply put, is the number of people you can reach at any given moment. In this day and age, with all of the latest trends and technologies, it is becoming harder and harder to keep growing your business without using expensive mass marketing, or outbound marketing methods. We understand that average business owners like yourself are having trouble getting your foot in the door, especially when competing with larger corporations. After all, it takes money to make money right? Well, we come to you today with a solution. A solution that will solve all of these problems that we have just discussed. This solution is inbound mobile marketing, and we’re going to show exactly how it can help you level the playing field and get your company’s foot in the door!

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What you need is a direct line to your customers, a way to contact them anytime day or night. So how do you do this? Phone calls? Nope. Caller ID has done away with that. Emails? No way. People are tired of receiving spammy emails and a majority of people have spam filters set up on their email accounts. How about text messaging? Yep! Text message marketing, or SMS marketing, is part of mobile marketing, which is the fastest growing method of connecting with your leads, clients, and audience. Some may think the internet is the #1 way to communicate with your audience, when in fact, it’s not. But in actuality, mobile devices outnumber desktop computers 4 to 1! Think about it. There are 1.8 billion people surfing the internet from a desktop computer right now, but what about the people who aren’t near a computer right now? How are they accessing the internet? That’s right, 5.2 billion people have their mobile phones with them RIGHT NOW! People obviously don’t answer their emails right away, but text messages? According to multiple studies, 95-98% of people answer their text messages within 3 minutes of them arriving. So, taking into account a staggering fact like that, it is almost GUARANTEED that your message will at get read.

Once you’ve decided to launch a mobile marketing campaign, you will be able to target your SMS messages so they are specifically tailored to each individual who will receive them. With response rates ranging from 10-70 for every 100 messages sent, you can be assured that your business will not only be reaching a wider range of people than if you were using outbound methods, but your business will also assuredly grow.

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So let’s take a look at how this works. The first thing you’ll want to do is build a database of contacts based on opt-ins. You can get people to opt-in to your database using incentives such as “Text MOBILE to 55555 to get 10% off your next purchase at Anchor Mobile!” You will be able to get your own short code and keyword once you decide on a service provider. Once you have people opted-in to your database, you can now text them discounts, deals, and announcements pertaining to your business. By this point, you now have a channel to communicate directly with your audience regardless of what time of day it is and where they are located. It’s like having a virtual line of people lined up outside of your establishment, waiting for you to text them the next deal so they can come in.

It’s also important to note the differentiation in costs. Outbound marketing and mass marketing methods are expensive, costly, time consuming, and it takes awhile for the effects to be felt, if they will be felt at all. With inbound mobile marketing, the effects are felt almost instantaneously. SMS campaigns will not only promote and establish a presence among your customers, but it will also help you build customer loyalty through long-lasting customer-business relationships. The best part is the longer you run an inbound mobile marketing campaign, the more efficiently it works. You presence, customer loayalty, and overall effectiveness of your campaign will get stronger over time.

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Since inbound mobile marketing is gradually becoming a standard practice for all businesses, both large and small, it is imperative that you launch a campaign SOON before you get lost in all of the other companies rushing to do the same. If you start now, you can get ahead, and your campaign will be that much more effective. The more effective your campaign is, the more you reap in benefits later on. That means more presence, more loyal customers, and more profit!!!

How To Use Mobile Marketing Effectively In Your Inbound Strategy

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In the old days of Mad Men Marketing and three Martini lunches, Television, the first screen, was king and it still remains a very powerful method of marketing today. Then Al Gore invented the internet (Lol JK) and a major shift began, the second screen was born. Just like that a new era of marketing was ushered in. The Martini’s got mixed with Red Bull and the ad world never looked back. From that second screen a new kind of marketing was conceived including SEO, Social Media, Online PR, Reputation management, Search Engine Marketing, Display Advertising and so on. Unfortunately, the rate of change, aka change velocity didn’t let us get comfortable too quickly as we suddenly found ourselves walking wire free with our heads down and our thumbs vigorously typing away on the next screen.

The era of mobile had begun. With this third screen came new incredibly personal opportunities and equally new marketing challenges. Most importantly, the third screen was the missing link we needed to really change consumer behavior and change the way we market

The Convergence

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Today we have a major convergence at hand. The convergence of three incredible technologies which is driving a complete paradigm shift in the world of marketing.

First you have Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Next you have social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Then you have the 3rd Screen, a powerful, portable, wireless device that allows you to access the aforementioned technologies from just about anywhere.

This convergence set off a nuclear bomb in the ad world. The power shifted away from the marketer and to the buyer. The power was given to them by the ability of almost every man, woman and child to conduct voice activated research projects right from the palm of their hand. The kind of research projects that in the Mad Men era would have only been attainable through a research company and cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So now consumers, or in the case of B2B, the buyers are researching every single product or service before they make a decision to purchase. They are not just researching what product or service to buy, they are also researching which vendor to select to provide the product or service. They are SEARCHING for information, answers and solutions. They are then making Data Driven Decisions based on the results of their mini research projects. This is the very foundation of what we now know as INBOUND MARKETING. Inbound is all about providing quality content through multiple channels to position your company or brand as a thought leader, subject matter expert or just a hip company that loves to help people find quality answers and solutions without the intrusiveness of traditional outbound methods.

What is Inbound Marketing?

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Inbound summed up is creating quality, unique and actionable content that will drive more traffic to your site, more leads from your traffic and more sales from your leads. The only problem with Inbound Marketing is that most agencies seem to be forgetting that the vast majority of research is being done via mobile phones and tablets. That means that a large and rapidly growing amount of your “inbound” traffic is originating from a mobile device. For this reason you MUST consider the following:

Is your web site mobile friendly?

This should be your number one priority! Decide first to create a mobile strategy. Ask yourself: What do my prospects, leads, customers, vendors or employees NEED or WANT from my company when mobile delivers just that as simply as you can. Your mission is to create efficiency that make their lives better or their job at hand faster. Then decide how you want to proceed. Weigh the options of HTML5 and jQuery Mobile Web Apps which look and function like native apps but live on the web in place of your site. Or consider adaptive, reactive or responsive CSS which could be easily done using something as simple as a word press plug-in. You could opt to go hybrid and do a version of your site using both which is my preference. In other words have a mobile web app for a home page and key features with all your content navigable as responsive CSS.

Are you detecting mobile devices and redirecting them to a better mobile experience?

Checkout our recent blog about Mobile Browser Detection and Redirects:http://marketing.anchormobile.net/blog/bid/170765/Mobile-Browser-Detection-How-Does-It-Work

Is your landing page “thumb friendly”?

Whether you are driving traffic from Facebook or Google, an easy to use mobile landing page with a super easy form is a must!

Most marketing automation platforms are really lagging the change velocity here. I recommend using a mobile marketing automation platform that specializes in mobile friendly landing pages like ours, or, coding them yourself.

Are your email blasts easily read on mobile?

Again, most platforms are really lagging here. What most are calling mobile friendly are not as robust and cross platform capable as they should be. Test, Test Test! Make sure to test your emails before being sent on iPhone, Android and various Tablets.

Are you including SMS Keywords

SMS keywords and SMS web widgets as a web born conversion tool just like your email signup? We have seen SMS Keyword Calls to Action increase conversion up to 10%!

Are you using SMS auto responders and SMS nurturing

SMS nurturing automation should be used with your mobile prospects.  If they came in via mobile, why not nurture them via mobile? On average it takes 90 minutes for an email to be opened while a text message only 90 seconds. Plus 91% of Americans are within 3 feet of their mobile device 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Make sure to use a trusted partner for your SMS marketing service and stay up to date on Federal TCPA Laws and Carrier Regulations.

Are you optimizing for mobile search?

Google is dominant here with a 95% market share. Google has a separate set of requirements for Mobile SEO. Read more at our 3 part Mobile SEO series here

Mobile SEO Part 1

Mobile SEO Part 2

Mobile SEO Part 3

Summary

In summary, if you are doing Inbound Marketing, you are doing the right thing and will reap the rewards of market share from it. However, if you are not focused on how mobile fits into your Inbound strategy, you could be sending the wrong signals with bad mobile experience that could harm your brand in the long run or you may just be leaving leads on the table by not using mobile conversion tools to their fullest potential. Either way, your action item should be this: Go to your analytics account. Click on Traffic Sources. Click on Mobile. Click on Devices. This will tell you what percentage of your overall inbound traffic is mobile originated and would be a great place to begin creating your mobile marketing strategy!

Text Messaging Killed The Voicemail Star

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In today’s day and age of faster communication, faster information transfer, and faster ways of getting things done, voicemails are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and annoying. Simply put, when you are at work, sometimes you just don’t have the time to be checking every voicemail left on your phone. It’s also important to note that voicemails are becoming less tolerable because we are conditioned as a society to get the information we need much quicker. Voicemails are time consuming, most lasting at least a minute or two, sometimes longer, and create an unnecessary nuisance when trying to communicate. Time is money, and voicemails cut into your time.

According to a uReach Technologies study, 30 percent of voice messages remain unheard for up to 3 days or longer, and over 20 percent of people with voicemails sitting in their mailbox rarely check them. It has been found that adults under 65 years old respond more quickly to a text message than a voicemail, and adults under 30 years old are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message rather than to a voicemail. Ultimately, it takes the average person 6-8 hours to check their voicemail after a message has been left. Leaving a voicemail has essentially become like sending a message in a bottle, someone might pick it up…eventually.

Moving along these same lines, it has become apparent that not only voicemail, but direct mail, telemarketers, email marketers, and call centers are becoming obsolete. People have been bombarded by these forms of advertising and marketing for so long that they have learned how to filter out the noise. This truth is especially prevalent among the younger generation, more specifically anyone under 30 years old. Of course, knowing all this, one has to ask why is this happening?

The truth of the matter is that text messaging has essentially killed the voicemail star, pun intended. The traditional ways of advertising mentioned above are much more intrusive than a simple text message. Through text messaging, people gain a sense of authority and control over what they want to see and what they don’t want to see. They can choose whether to view a text message or not, unlike telemarketers blowing up your phone or email marketers flooding your email. Along with this, even if they view a text message, they still have the option of whether to reply or not, and also the choice of how long they’ll take to respond. Text messaging, especially for business and marketing, has become the forefront of the industry because of the ease and speed at which information is sent and exchanged. If you are still using voicemail, direct mail, email marketing, or telemarketing to drive your marketing, you are doing you and your customers a disservice.

Mobile Marketing Automation & SMS Lead Nurturing

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There is a log of buzz lately amongst enterprise size companies regarding Mobile Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing as it pertains to Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing is based on the concept that today’s consumer, whether B2B or B2C, has the power to regulate what types of marketing they receive. Both B2B and B2C consumers ought to be assessed with the same principles when it comes to inbound marketing. The power of receiving information is given to them by the technology at their disposal and in their hands. This technology is primarily provided through Google and other search engines, and is amplified by the ease of use and mobility offered by using the technology on smart phones and tablets.

The new consumer paradigm is defined as “Selective Consumption”, meaning that the consumer decides when they want or need a product or service, and then begin searching online for more information. This information is delivered in the form of web pages, articles, press releases, social media and online review platforms. It can also include premium online content like eBooks, case studies, white papers, webinars and videos.

The consumer formulates a list of preferred vendors BEFORE making first contact. Inbound marketing is the process of creating marketing that people love via the offerings of valuable, quality and most importantly FREE content online. The company that can do this on a regular basis floods the Internet with good, useful content and will win the heart of the consumer by reaching them at the exact right moment and with the right product information.

This is the key to selective consumption. Once they have selected you as potential vender, they need multiple EASY ways to contact you or request that you contact them. This is known as Calls to Action and Conversion Tools. Once these tools are implemented, the difficult part of engaging the consumer and getting them to come to your business has already been accomplished.

Mobile Marketing is a spoke in the Inbound Marketing wheel. Consumers typically use the mobile device to conduct online query and research. Since mobile devices have become so integral in the customer’s researching process, it is imperateive that mobile marketing be part of an inbound marketing strategy. This includes but is not limited to mobile friendly sites, mobile web apps, QR codes, SMS calls to action, mobile video and more. This will allow for potential customers to be met with relevant, useful marketing in a primary way in which they are apt to receive it.

What most marketers don’t yet realize however, is that Mobile Marketing can be automated, thus creating the need for Mobile Marketing Automation platforms. The benefits of automating these mobile marketing tools is that instead of flooding potential customers with spam, a relevant message is sent to potential customers based on their previous actions.

Examples of mobile marketing automation and mobile lead nurturing include:

  • SMS Keyword Opt-Ins with SMS Auto-Responders carrying links to premium mobile friendly online content
  • Time Release or Drip SMS campaigns triggered by select SMS keyword actions (just like email lead nurturing)
  • SMS Scheduling (the ability to schedule SMS marketing in advance)
  • SMS platform integration with Social Media (so when you release an SMS it also goes to Twitter and FB)

Mobile Marketing Automation can be achieved through the use of Mobile Marketing Automation platfroms. Like any marketing software as a service, you need to focus on training to create efficiency and deliver measurable results. The software essentially is only as useful and beneficial as the worker’s operating it behind the scenes. Furthermore, you must also focus on Mobile Marketing Association best practices, FCC Guidelines and Carrier regulations.