Mobile Web Strategy for Small Business

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Let’s play a game of pictionary here. Let’s say you are a local business and you want to produce a mobile site to draw bigger business in. What do you do?

Do you place more ad’s in the local paper? Do you make calls to your local radio station? What about more television commercials? What about a mobile website?

Aha, there’s that light bulb I’ve been waiting to see. Let me tell you how a mobile website can help your small business and help you gain more customers than you could ever imagine.

For starters, small businesses haven’t quite grasp the concept of creating a mobile presence for their business. Many reasons include, the non-realization of consumers changing their purchasing ways, business owners of small companies don’t understand how mobile marketing functions and how those functions work. They also are not aware of the effect of mobile marketing and what it can do for their company.

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Statistics show, out of all the mobile searches, one in three is of local intent. 61% of smartphone users search for local content. 52% of the local searches result in calls made by the customer. While 59% of customers who search on the mobile web for local places, end up visiting the store they searched for.

Just like pictionary, begin with an objective in mind. How are you going to portray your “secret?” For your business, what do you want to do? Do you just want to bring more customers in? Do you want to get involved with your company and the community more? Generate calls to your business? Have a goal in mind, even if its small. Start small and end big.

Next, create a resolution and design it. How are you going to act out this clue? How are you going to make your goal achievable? Lay it out, create a template or design on what you want included on your mobile site. Now remember, it must be clear content, contrasted correctly, simple to read, easy to load, etc. Have keywords listed, so your company will be easy to find. Make sure your address, phone number, email, etc., is easy to access. Remember a happy customer means a happy owner.

Thirdly, in pictionary you want it to be easy to view (read) so the guesser can figure it out quickly. Same thing with designing a mobile website. You want your site to look great on a small hand held device. Code it so content is visible easily, and updated regularly.

Lastly, in three-two-one LAUNCH that thing. Promote your site so the likely increase of customers visiting increases. With good search content and (SEO) your site will be found more and more over time. The more people who visit and see your site the more likely it is to arrive at the top of a search page. As I said in an earlier blog post, reputation is everything.

Many small business owners have taken such help hints like the ones listed above and have already applied them to their mobile marketing strategy. They are finding rather quickly that results are positive. 69% of small business owners are crediting mobile sites for their business growth and believe that number will rise in the next few years.

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But, what goes up must come down. Unfortunately there is a wide gap seen today between small business who do have a mobile site to those who do not. Over 61% of small business currently do not have a mobile strategy made and are missing out on the consumers that are searching for what they may offer on a mobile device.

Owners are realizing that having a mobile-friendly site provides better service to their customer, attracts more customers even more local customers over time, and they gain a competitive advantage over all other competing stores.

There is hope though, I, and hopefully you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. 64% of small business have said that they have spent more money in 2012 than any other year towards a mobile web strategy. That number is expected to rise drastically by 2015.

We’re getting there fellow mobile friends, we’re getting there.

25 Stats on the Future of Marketing [Infographic]

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Not sure where marketing is headed? Not sure if it’s for you, or if it would work for your company? Check out our infographic below and check out the stats for yourself. Originally posted by Hubspot, we took and compiled recent statistics and made a fancy infographic out of them to bring the information right to you.

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The main categories in these stats are: social media, personal and dynamic content, email marketing, analytics and integration, as well as mobile marketing and apps.

Why all this is important:
Let’s start with social media. Social media is becoming increasingly important in today’s marketing world because so many people use it on a day-to-day basis. Because of this, many more marketers are becoming active in social media. Gone are the days where a company just needs to have a page on a social media website, they actually need to be active on social media and working to engage their audiences. What the stats also show, though, is that marketers and CMOs are looking for one central place where they can do this–instead of having to hop from page to page and outlet to outlet, marketers would love to just have one go-to platform where they can do it all. Also, a need for good social media analytics is on the rise–marketers want to see how their clients are interacting via social outlets and how they can best harness these to work with their customers.

Onto personal and dynamic content, it’s becoming very clear that people want targeted content. They want what’s relevant to them, not a broad based advertisement–they want to see exactly what you can offer them as an individual. Because of this, so many consumers are willing to share personal information such as age and location in order to get more relevant content. Also, though, they don’t want information overload; they want just enough but not too much. Too much advertising is a cause of unsubscribing to or ignoring emails/content. These stats not only show these facts, but also that marketers are looking for a system to help them personalize their communications with customers and to help them to know when to send these communications.

Speaking of emails, let’s get on to email marketing and automation. From the personalization stats, it’s already clear that customization is something marketers need to do. Email marketing has somewhat fought against this, though, as marketers can just draft a base email with a broad advertisement and send it to all of their clientele. What the stats say marketers and advertisers are now looking for is a marketing platform that will help them divide their contact lists of customers into more segmented, customized lists. For example: customers who shop once a month, customers that shop a few times a month, and customers that shop weekly. The system would then help them send different personalized emails to each of these groups. Marketers are also wanting this system to help them send off marketing campaigns on a scheduled basis. Overall these stats show that email marketing today is all about finding what’s valuable to your customers and giving it to them in a way that helps benefit your business.

So if you’ve got content that’s well customized to your clients, how will you know it’s working? That’s where marketing analytics and integration comes in to play. Integration is a key part of marketing success. To be successful and to best create targeted, personalized content, marketers and advertisers need data! That data will help you know where to focus your marketing efforts. After initial data and statistics help target content, user and usage data helps to see how and where your content is working (or not working). Having a system that collects and analyses data will help make sure that your marketing budget is being used efficiently and effectively.

Another must-have for today’s customer is most certainly their mobile phone. In today’s world almost everyone has a phone, and of those that do have phones, a good number of those have smartphones. Many of these mobile users are seeing and interacting with advertisements via their mobile devices. Unfortunately, though, so many websites aren’t mobile friendly. A good customer experience is always a goal that should be kept in mind, especially on mobile. Marketers, though, are also looking for options to simplify the mobile experience. Having a mobile application that allows them to see their data analytics and automation software will help marketers see how their carefully planned out strategies are getting the job done. Having this sort of mobile app would let them stay up-to-date on how many leads are being generated and how many customers are being converted when they’re out and about.

So what exactly are all these stats saying? In order to meet needs, create ideas and personalize them, as well as get these all out to the customer, each of the different parts of marketing need to be brought together. From email marketing, social media, to mobile marketing, each of these has something special to offer, but could likely do it better if marketers were given a platform for each that would help them to know their clients and customize each type of content for them. Each of these can help the other to create an awesome, powerful marketing campaign.

These stats make it clear, though, that mobile marketing isn’t going anywhere but up. Need a little help with your mobile marketing? Give us a yell and let us help you get up and going.

 Click the image below to see the infographic!

25 Stats

Mobile Marketing Statistics 2012

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Gone are the days of traditional marketing techniques as the only means of attracting clients and customers. Sure, traditional marketing still definitely has its place in the world, but marketing companies have seen huge growth in marketing by way of mobile marketing. Not so sure? Come check out our Mobile Marketing Statistics 2012 and see for yourself. Even if you’re not quite ready to take the jump into mobile marketing, these stats are sure to help you see just how big mobile marketing has gotten, and the fact that it’s not going anywhere but up.

According to Hubspot, almost half of all U.S. businesses (more specifically 45%) are using some form of mobile marketing. Of all marketing agencies out there, about 47% of them plan to step up their mobile game in 2013. The most common forms of mobile marketing are as follows: Mobile websites come in first at 70%, Mobile Applications come in second at 55%, and QR Codes come in a close third with 49%. Mobile marketing is expected to account for roughly 25% of overall E-commerce revenues by the end of 2017. By the year 2016, mobile marketing advertising revenue worldwide is expected to expand by over 3.5 times it’s current size.

So how does it work?
For starters, you’ve gotta have that little gadget that everyone is so attached to–that no one can leave home without : their cell phone. Of the four billion cell phones out there (yes, you read that right, four billion), over a quarter of these are smartphones. Of those one billion smartphones, roughly 75% of those are either iPhones or Android powered phones. Over 75% of those total phones have text messaging (sms messaging) enabled.

Think about that for a minute: over 3 billion people can send and receive SMS messages at any time, day or night. What that means for you: the marketing messages you’re trying to get out there could be sent to almost half the world in mere seconds. Another perk of SMS marketing is that those messages are going directly to your clients and customers instead of possibly being filtered off into a spam folder, tossed out, or ignored like some traditional advertising outlets can be.

So with four billion mobile phones out there, what are their owners doing with them? Aside from just talking on them, many cell phone users are browsing the web, checking email, and using apps and mobile codes to help them shop.

Mobile web usage is up almost 70% from where it was in 2010. In the United States, about 8% of all web traffic comes from mobile users, up from 4.7%. Specifically, 14.6% of that mobile internet traffic is from smartphones, and 5.6% is from other mobile devices, such as tablets. Worldwide, mobile web traffic is up to 10%, over 160% more than where it was in 2010.

Of all local searches performed today, about half are done via mobile. Customers also shop around using their phone–either by a search, or by a native application. They’re checking online reviews and doing price checks while in store. One in five smartphone users said they would scan product barcodes, one in eight uses an application to do price comparisons. 29% of mobile users said they would scan a mobile tag, text in a keyword, or scan a QR code to receive coupons or discounts from a company.

Speaking of QR codes: 50% of smartphone users said that they have scanned a QR code. 80% of Americans can identify a QR code when they see one. QR code scans are up to almost 20%, up from under 14% (where they were at in April of 2011) in the United States alone.

Any company can benefit from mobile marketing, and these stats definitely go to show that mobile is here to stay. Hopefully they showed you that you should consider adding mobile marketing to your marketing plans today!