The Cutting Edge of Mobile Marketing

How your personal branding benefits from mobile  marketing

Mobile marketing changes fast and keeping up with those changes is daunting. What the latest for small business owners? New mobile marketing advances are in-store mobile offers, targeting consumers using public transport, and putting more emphasis on intelligently tailoring mobile ads to appeal to specific target markets.

The Growing Role of In-Store Mobile Offers

Today's marketers know they need to utilize geotargeting (a strategy that involves taking into account the target audience's real time location to make more effective ads) to get the most mileage out of their mobile marketing efforts.

Still dominating the geotargeting world is Foursquare. Foursquare is famous for helping people connect more intimately with businesses they are interested in. As a business owner, Foursquare is a potential goldmine for you. With it, you can send mobile offers to participating customers when they are in the vicinity of your store or business. This is an extremely powerful marketing strategy.

By targeting customers that are physically close to your place of business, you increase the odds that they will respond to your ads by visiting your business in person which increases your likelihood of a sale. Customers that actually visit your business are much more likely to buy something than those that do not. Even in the digital age, physical location is very important.

Public Transport Time: A Hidden Goldmine

The results of a huge research project recently conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) revealed that one of the times consumers are most likely to respond favorably to mobile ads is when they are using public transport. Partially because people using public transport have available time and are more open to read/review things that they wouldn’t normally have time for in the day. If you can reach people in this state of mind, you stand a reasonably good chance of making more sales.

How do you effectively target people using public transport? You have to use a combination of intelligent geotargeting and marketing savvy. First, plan on targeting cities that have well-developed public transportation systems. Next, make sure that you send out your ads during hours when people are most likely to be commuting.

Designing Ads More Effectively

It isn't enough to find out who is in your target market and targeting them. You have to tailor your ads to their individual wants and needs effectively. When mobile marketing was first starting out, a lot of mobile marketers made the mistake of ignoring important principles of human psychology and crafting overly simple ads. Since mobile marketing is more competitive now, you can't afford to make those mistakes if you want to be successful.

Take Advantage of the Desire for Instant Gratification

One of the most basic principles of psychology is that the vast majority of people would rather have something good now than later, even if by waiting they can net a greater reward. This principle has been widely used in most forms of marketing, but a lot of mobile marketers have failed to apply it adequately. To successfully apply it to your marketing efforts, make sure all your mobile ads emphasize an immediate payoff for your potential customers. Use discounts and other special bonuses  and even giveaways to satisfy that need for instant gratification and stand out amongst your competition.

Build Your Brand, Don't Just Sell Products

Ads that only sell products are never as successful as ads that also help establish a brand. You always have to keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to build up your business as a whole, not just to sell a particular product or service. Try to give potential customers a consistent presentation of the kind of business you have, your service, your benefits and really drive home your value.   If you do this, you will help make your business more memorable in their minds. Using distinctive slogans or catchphrases can really help assist with this process.

Mobile marketing isn't easy, and it's been getting harder. As more mobile marketers target a limited number of potential customers, more people are learning to ignore ads that they get on their Smartphone’s.  It’s important with every tool and with every promotion that you stay on brand and work towards communicating what your brand value is.

Questions to Ask Yourself to Help You Get Ahead with Mobile Marketing

1. Do I have a specific plan for using in-store mobile offers successfully?

2. What cities near my area have good public transportation systems that a lot of people use?

3. Do my ads do a good job of appealing to peoples' desire for instant gratification?

4. Am I trying to build a brand and not just sell a product?

Add Variety to Social Marketing With Tout

Add variety to your social marketing with Tout

Let's face it, the business world is far different than what it was a decade ago, let alone before that. Today, we cannot function without adapting our company an online presence, bringing business to a whole new level of clientele.

Social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others, have become some of the greatest ways to promote businesses online. One new social network, called TOUT, has taken online social marketing to a whole new level. Find out how!

What is Tout?

TOUT was actually initially launched as a free iPhone application in mid-April. What Tout does is it allows users to record a 15 second video from their iPhones, and then easily post it to their Twitter or Facebook accounts. While being a third party application, the video also gets posted on the user's personal TOUT account at the TOUT website page.

Several well-known personalities, like Shaquille O'neal and Mitt Romney, use TOUT to express updates, allowing their followers to watch them, instead of just reading their Twitter or Facebook statuses.

Ever since its launch, TOUT has been gaining popularity, today being used by hundreds of thousands.  It’s grown into a major factor and a big opportunity for many businesses to promote their brands. Much like what Instagram did for photos, Tout does for short videos.  Business owners, who had to promote their businesses in the past via status updates, can now promote their businesses via 15 second video updates, which would reach thousands of their followers.

How you can you use it for your small business?

TOUT is of great use to small business owners because visual content is more noticed by potential consumers. Just think about it, how many times do businesses try to promote their current prices, deals and products via videos? On top of that, it’s easy and fast without a huge cost or production investment. This is HUGE for small businesses, allowing them to advertise greatly without spending a fortune!

Not only is it easy to use, TOUT makes reaching potential customers as easy as a Facebook post.  Businesses are able to save on monthly advertising bills, allowing them to focus their budget on improving the product itself.

TOUT is without a doubt a whole new social marketing experience. With hundreds of people researching this new engaging market and releasing tutorials and e-books on how to make use of it, TOUT is definitely knocking on Facebook and Twitter's backdoors, putting a whole lot of pressure on their powerhouse competitors. So, got a small business and looking to promote it in an easy, fast, and affordable way? Then try TOUT!

Native Versus Web Based Mobile Apps

Improve your personal branding by going mobile

It can’t be denied that mobile apps are here to stay. Practically everyone has an iPhone, an Android, or another smartphone that enables them to connect with their favorite brands whenever and wherever they are. They have changed the way people interact with brands. No need to have a laptop or a PC anymore – all you need is a mobile phone that allows you to connect to the World Wide Web and access apps.

As a personal brand or small business owner, you should definitely consider adding “mobile” to your marketing mix. It’s another “social” way to market your brand, since people access their smartphones all the time. But if you’re considering mobile apps to your promotional campaign, then you need to consider which is best for you: native or web based mobile apps.

Native Mobile Apps

A native mobile app is basically an app that’s designed to run on a specific device’s operating system. It needs to be developed for different systems. The two most popular systems or platforms are the Apple App and the Google Android, and the apps can be accessed through the iPhone/iPod and Android devices respectively. As a small business owner, you can develop your native mobile app and then offer it in the Apple App Store or the Google Android Market so that people can access it. You can also create your own system that the user will download and use.

Some of the advantages of native mobile apps include:

• Easier to monetize
• Easy to download and install the app
• Ability to access the app even without Internet
• Fast, reliable and powerful
• More ability to control the user’s experience
• Access to APIs not available to web apps

Disadvantages include:

• Expensive and more difficult to develop
• High upkeep
• Specific to the device it runs on, so one has to develop another app for it to run on another platform
• Less accessible to everyone

Web Based Mobile Apps

Web based mobile apps, on the other hand, run in the mobile phone’s browser. The data is downloaded while you’re on the web. So you have to be online to access them.

Some of the advantages of web based mobile apps are:

• Easier and cheaper to develop
• Works on all devices, since you only need to connect to the Internet
• No need to download anything to your device
• More accessible to everyone

And here are the disadvantages:

• Lesser flexibility in terms of developing the app
• Cannot use when offline
• Lesser user experience
• Can become slow and unreliable, depending on the person’s Internet connection

So which among the two are better and best for your brand? Well, if you’re a small business owner with a bigger-than-most budget, and you really think that mobile apps are an excellent way to connect with your customers, then go for native apps! On the other hand, if your budget isn’t really that big, and you’re still on the fence, if mobile apps can work for your brand, then perhaps you can start with more affordable, web based mobile apps first.

Truly, the more important question is, what do your audience and customers want? Do you think that mobile apps can provide them a better experience of your brand? And once you’ve answered those two questions, you can then proceed to choosing between native and mobile apps, and deciding which will work well with your personal and small business brand.