Mobile marketing is a fast growing marketing avenue and many companies are starting to invest heavily in it. Mobile marketing is not usually cheap but can grow your business very quickly if done properly. Adobe have launch a product called Adobe Solutions which will help businesses venture in to the mobile marketing world, from building mobile friendly websites to creating mobile apps and mobile messaging services. The claim to have a very comprehensive system that will give you stats about your mobile marketing, advice and software to increase mobile interaction from SMS marketing and also how to get your app downloaded and shared. You can choose to take one element of the Solutions package or buy the complete suite. Prices are not advertised on the website but I would imagine it’s not cheap. This said, if it works as well as it says you should be able to make your money back quickly.
Using social media as a marketing tool
Social media is used by many of us on a daily basis. Some use it for personal use, to keep in touch with friends and family but others use it to promote a business. Social media is a great way to market your brand or company and most of it is free too, which is a massive bonus. Although you do not have to commit to a certain level of activity on the social media sites, it does require a level of input to get anything out of it. Social media works very well for a number of companies in different industries and depending on what you want to promote, will help you decide what platform to concentrate on first. If you deal direct with the public then Facebook can be an amazing online marketing tool allowing you to connect with individuals, send them special offers, latest news and keep them informed of any new products / services that you are launching.
Ensuring your data is up to date
When carrying out direct marketing you want to make sure that the database that you are going to be using is up to date. This may have to be done manually by contacting each person or business on the list and confirming contact details with them or it may be that you send out an email asking people to confirm that this is still the correct email address for them. When it comes to mass mailing, you need to ensure that all contacts have opted in to receive the information you are sending them such as a newsletter or promotional voucher / code. The better quality your data is the higher your response rate will be. If the database is updated regularly then it can be a relatively easy job, but if it has not been done for years you may find it takes several members of staff a reasonable amount of time to cleanse it.
Web design – don’t take it personally
When having a website designed you always need to bear in mind who your target market is. Far too many companies have a site designed entirely on what they like and want and forget that it is actually the customers that will be using it. Of course any business owner or manager needs to like the website that the designer has come up with, but sometimes you need to take a step back and view it as an outsider. It can be sometimes be useful to obtain feedback from your existing clients or even friends and family as to what they want included on the site and then from this you can prioritise what to build in to the design. It is very easy to get too personal with website designs, but for it to work for the end user, you need to ensure it is what they want to see not so much what you want.
Mobile friendly websites favoured by Google
Google announced that as of the 21st April 2015 they will start to globally roll out the mobile friendly algorithm update. This update is basically going to start to take in to consideration if website is mobile friendly when it decides on where to rank it in the search engine result pages (SERP’s). Google currently has an algorithm that it uses to determine which sites rank number one, two three and so on when a search is carried out on the search engine. This algorithm is highly confidential although they do give advice on how you can rank your site higher. The algorithm is constantly changing and they often have big updates that will mean many sites literally fall 10 or 20 places, for example, overnight. When a large update is done by Google, they will explain briefly what the changes are and why they think they will help the end user who is searching on Google.