Increase the Value of Your Facebook Community

As a relatively new and rapidly evolving digital channel, social media is subject to considerable debate among marketers, especially regarding ROI.Undoubtedly, however, social media is becoming more effective in connecting businesses with prospects and customers. It is also useful for gaining user demographic insight, keeping current with trending topics, and addressing customer wants and needs.With over one billion users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. It alone presents a robust opportunity for your brand to reach both potential and current customers. If used correctly, Facebook increases brand awareness and advocacy, lowers service costs, and drives customer loyalty and incremental sales.To achieve those goals, you need to carry out two primary activities:

1. Grow your Facebook community.
2. Engage your Facebook community.

1. Facebook Community Growth

Fan acquisition campaigns are the best way to rapidly grow your Facebook community. Those campaign types vary, but they are consistent in that they must inspire participation via compelling value propositions and spark awareness via targeted paid social media.

Value Propositions Within Social Media

Value propositions are the incentives, offers, or experiences that will prompt users to “like” your page and to share with others. It is a key component that can ultimately determine the success of your social campaign.

Among the types of value propositions that have proven successful are offers, causes, and content gates,

Offers: Facebook’s “offers” include both free and discounted deals. When polled, most Facebook users say they “like” brands in order to receive coupons. Offers not only increase engagement but also sales, because the discounts encourage purchases that may not have been made otherwise.

Kohl’s provides an excellent example below with its coupon for an additional 15% off merchandise.

Of course, a free offer is always appealing to every demographic. As TGI Friday’s demonstrates, sometimes all it takes is a free hamburger and a couple of days to see impressive results—within one weekend, it accumulated 500,000 additional fans on the social network.

Causes: Ideal for stimulating organic friend-to-friend sharing, donation-based causes are successful because the entry barrier is low and the return can be extremely high.

Olga Intimates, for example, collaborated with ZOG Digital’s Creative Studio to honor Breast Cancer Awareness month. A “Virtual Quilt” Facebook application was created, turning every “like” into a dedicated quilt square and money donated to charity by the brand. The campaing resulted in a 400% increase in fan base in less than one month.

Content gates: If your brand already has compelling content—images, videos, or other experiences—a “like” is simple action for a user to take to gain access. A particularly innovative example is “The Society of Good Taste” campaign run by Grey Poupon. It required that Facebook users apply to be eligible to “like” their page, and it put those users pages through a screening “taste test.” The campaign greatly increased engagement, supporting the idea that “exclusivity” is something brands should consider using.

Paid Media for Social Campaigns

For social, the maxim “if you build it, they will come” should be amended to read “if you build it—and spark awareness with paid social media—they will come.”

In particular, Facebook advertising is effective in reaching the right type of prospects because it segments consumers into niche audiences. As Facebook’s ad products continue to evolve, the quality of its user data continues to grow, allowing more targetable and effective campaigns.

You have a choice of four major types of ad units (as of November 2012): standard ads, like ads, page post ads, and Sponsored Stories.

Standard ads: Traditional ad units found on the right side of the page, these ads’ effectiveness is debatable. Although they are not often implemented for a fan-acquisition campaign, they can have value in combination with the other ad types listed here.

Like ads: Similar to standard ads, but designed specifically to drive traffic to a Facebook page and increase likes, these ads achieve increased brand visibility.

Page post ads: With this option, you can take one of your posts and boost it into an ad unit. This is an interesting product to both increase “likes” and drive engagement with fans. Nonfans will have the ability to like your page directly from the ad, while current fans will see sponsored posts.

Sponsored Stories: Sponsored Stories turn your fan base interactions into ad units. They are effective when for increasing visibility, especially in light of recent modifications to the Facebook algorithm. Many types of actions can be turned into stories: page likes, post likes, comments, shares, and more.

Alternative Paid Social Ad Options

Along with the four basic types already listed, three other up-and-coming ad units are worth considering: mobile ads, Sponsored Results ads, and Facebook Exchange.

Mobile growth has expanded enormously, with 14% of Facebook’s revenue in 3Q12 having come from mobile, and 680 million monthly active users using Facebook mobile products via their smartphones and tablets as of December 2012. Click-through rates are 23 times higher on mobile than on desktop ads, and mobile advertising allows businesses to specify details such as the device type in which the ad should appear.

Sponsored Results ads allow companies to place ads in the typehead search results so that they will appear before organic results. You are able to target exact pages and search entries (such as competitors) with this ad unit.

Facebook Exchange, a network-specific form of retargeting, has great potential as well in that marketers can target audiences based on behavior and interests, and bid in real-time, helping brands increase visibility and gain customer insight.

2. Facebook Community Engagement

At ZOG Digital, we define engagement as the quantifiable demonstration—including “likes,” comments, and shares—that generate the attention of your community.

We focus on attention, because it is the fundamental precursor to preference, advocacy, and purchase; moreover, aside from doing secondary research, these types of clicks are a good way to validate that engagement.

Another critical component of engagement is friend-to-friend organic sharing. On Facebook, that activity happens overwhelmingly within posts in the newsfeed. To stimulate engagement, therefore, your brand needs to create ongoing timely and compelling post content.

What is the best way to create post content that will gain the most “likes,” comments, and shares? We’ve analyzed brand and social network content and categorized the most popular posts into four types of content:

1. Topical
2. Visual
3. Expressive
4. Target-specific

By integrating such posts into your posting calendar, you will improve the likelihood of increasing community engagement and will ultimately increase consumer-generated referrals and sales.

Topical content: People tend to share content that is relevant to current events. By monitoring and “newsjacking” events relevant to your audience, you can take advantage of the popularity of these topics to increase engagement.

Oreo did just that in its “Daily Twist” campaign by incorporating topical content into images of it product (The Mars Rover Landing is shown below). It not only drummed up social media mentions and engagement but also garnered significant news coverage.

Visual content: Social continues to evolve into a more visual medium, as illustrated by the rise of sites like Pinterest and Instagram. Images garner higher engagement rates than other forms of posts because of the instantaneous nature of understanding and gratification via images.

In fact, 44% of users are more likely to engage with brands on Facebook if they post pictures, according to Performics. High-quality and high-resolution images in particular further raise engagement. The difference in post engagement with images vs. without is illustrated by WaterPik.

Expressive content: Expressive content refers to content that demonstrates a certain persona or point of view. For example, a brand looking to demonstrate its charitable tendencies may check in at a volunteer event or share its philanthropic donations via status updates and pictures.

This approach is best used when you understand the positive attributes of your brand and you’re able to express those through specific posts. The Humane Society of the United States,  for instance, sees all current events in terms of animals and accordingly posted the following image of its Animal Rescue Team during a hurricane:

Target-specific content: Target-specific content is content that your audience engages with most. To identify what your target group finds most interesting, you have to use Facebook insights and categorize the recurring topics and themes for the posts that tend to get the most engagement.

For example, Healthcare provider TriWest discovered that the most engagement on its page occurred within posts acknowledging the contribution of military members to the United States.

Summing Up

To increase the value of your Facebook community, you need to grow and engage your fan base, which is initially done by way of compelling value propositions: Facebook offers, causes, and content gates.

Those efforts are then accelerated by targeted paid social media campaigns, including standard ads, “like” ads, page post ads, and sponsored stories.

Once you’ve accumulated fans, you’ll want to keep their interest by producing timely, intriguing content that inspires interaction by way of “likes,” comments, and shares.

Incorporated into an optimized Facebook strategy, those tactics can ultimately increase brand awareness, site traffic, customer loyalty, and sales.

If you have specific questions or would like to learn more about our social campaign case studies, strategies, and optimization programs, reach out to us. See our contact info in the author bio.

by Jeff Herzog

Marketing Budgets and Staffing Levels Rising Worldwide

The outlook for marketers worldwide continues to strengthen, according to new data from Warc’s Global Marketing Index. The headline GMI, a metric that combines trends observed in marketing budgets, trading conditions, and staffing levels, registered a reading of 56.2 in February 2013, up from 53.8 a month earlier.

Moreover, the headline GMI has now recorded month-on-month improvement for three consecutive months, with marketers in the Asia-Pacific region registering the strongest improvement in outlook.

The Americas remains the most positive region, with its headline GMI showing a strong reading of 59.5, up 1.5 points from January. The headline GMI for Europe also improved, reaching 53.1 in February, albeit remaining slightly less optimistic than the other measured regions.

The GMI is a monthly indicator of the state of the global marketing industry composed of three components: marketing budgets, global trading conditions, and staffing levels. A GMI reading of 50 indicates no change and a reading of over 60 indicates rapid growth.

Below, other findings issued by Warc in association with World Economics.

Global Marketing Budgets

The index of global marketing budgets registered further growth in February (51.7) with marketers in the Americas recording the greatest confidence (55.5).

Key budget-related findings for February 2013 include:

• Marketers in the Asia-Pacific region registered an increase for the first time in four months with the index rising 2.2 points in February, to 50.3.
• Marketing budgets are still being cut across Europe, but the European index recorded a value of 48.8 in February, up 2.6 points from the previous month.
• Digital channels excluding mobile (74.5) and mobile (68.6) continue to attract rapidly increasing investments, though both recorded slight month-over-month drops in index value, falling 0.5 and 1.3 points, respectively.
• TV gained marginally, up 1.1 points, to 48.8 in February, but continues to register a net budgeted spend decline.
• Radio also recorded a month-over-month improvement in index value, to 42.4 in February, but investment continues to shrink at a rapid rate.

Global Trading Conditions

The index for global trading conditions improved in February and now stands at 59.4 (up 1.5 points from January). That’s the index’s highest reading since April 2012.

The outlook for trading conditions remains most positive in the Americas at 60.9, followed by Asia Pacific at 59.7 and Europe at 57.4.

Global Staffing Levels

The global index of staffing levels, the third component of headline GMI, registered further improvement in February and now stands at 57.6.

Staffing levels continue to rise in all regions, with the Americas at 62.1, the Asia-Pacific region at 58.5, and Europe at 53.2.

About the data: Findings are based on a survey of 1,225 global marketers—experienced executives working for brand owners, media owners, creative and media agencies, and other organizations serving the marketing industry. The panel is selected to reflect trends in the three main global regions: Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. GMI results are calculated by taking the percentage of respondents that report the activity has risen (“Increasing”) and adding it to one-half of the percentage who report the activity has not changed (“Unchanged”). Using one-half of the “Unchanged” percentage effectively measures the bias toward a positive (above 50 points) or negative (below 50 points) index.

by Lenna Garibian  |

Adapt Your Marketing To Include Mobile Devices

Mobile marketing is one of the newest types of marketing, yet it actually incorporates elements of some of the oldest and well proven methods. Many of the same rules that apply to other kinds of marketing will apply to mobile marketing too. However, there are some noteworthy differences. This article presents some solid advice on getting the best from this brilliant advertising medium.

If you are trying to reach out to people through phone calls or even texting, remember that you are in fact reaching out to people. Use common courtesy.

Keep in mind that mobile customers will use a smartphone to view your website, and these people may have difficulty navigating. Make sure that the mobile marketing campaign utilizes easy to navigate, simple websites. Although these may seem boring on a computer, they are perfect for your mobile customers, and they keep the access there for both types of users.

Be sensitive to customers sleeping hours when sending out text notifications. These customers are more likely to be upset with you, than excited about the promotion.

You can use your friends in order to beta-test your marketing efforts with emails, website, banner advertising, and other venues. If you can, hire a professional to test and improve your campaign.

You should make sure that you can view your mobile marketing on all devices. Search out information on all of the devices you wish to target your advertising towards, and take each into consideration when planning your campaign. Your scripting needs to be compatible with all of them for your campaign to be effective.

If you are having a big event or a sale on your site and you have a great mobile marketing list, send out a reminder a couple of hours before the event kicks off unless this is going to fall at early morning hours. It will remind all your customers that there is something major going on, and they should go have a look at it.

Make sure you give A/B testing a try with your mobile page. Testing is vital for the mobile world just like it is for web sites. This is crucial so you understand what’s working incorrectly on your mobile site. For the test, create two separate versions of your mobile landing page–one is A, and one is B–and determine which is more effective for converting customers. Move forward with the most successful of the two.

Mobile marketing requires much more compact usage of space, so you will need to plan your content to be more concise. You need to avoid lengthy page content that just exists due to keyword stuffing, since it’s not saying anything helpful. Mobile marketing success can best be achieved when you keep your content clean and geared towards the sales.

Mobile marketing has great potential, but if not used judiciously, it can irritate people. Utilize the tips in this article carefully and thoughtfully, particularly if you are inexperienced with mobile marketing. You will be rewarded with an expanding customer base and some exciting new avenues for your business to pursue.

Send and Receive Text Messages on Your PC

Text messaging is great–except when it isn’t. For one thing, it’s expensive (unless you have an unlimited messaging plan, which itself can be expensive). Plus, it forces you to type on your phone’s tiny keyboard–not always the fastest or most convenient method.

Indeed, when you’re sitting at your desk and want to text, say, your spouse, do you really have to pull out your phone, navigate to the messaging app, then mangle those cramped keys?

Actually, you don’t. Pinger Textfree Web brings free and easy text messaging to your browser. Using a large, attractive interface, you can compose a message to any mobile number and view the replies. It’s not unlike using an instant-messaging service like Meebo.

Registering for a Textfree Web account is free, and it includes a textfree.us e-mail address. (If you’re an Android or iOS user, you might be familiar with the eponymous apps, which are great for messaging without paying your carrier for the privilege.)

In my tests, messages sent from Textfree Web arrived almost instantly, the replies came just as quickly. And trust me: it’s so much nicer composing texts with a full-size keyboard. Cheaper, too. The service even lets you attach images to your messages, effectively recreating MMS. (If someone wants to send you back an image, it needs to go to your Textfree e-mail address.)

If there’s one downside, it’s that you can’t import contacts, so you’ll have to enter phone numbers manually–at least the first time. Textfree Web keeps a (brief) log of recently sent and received messages, so it’s easy to resume a conversation with people you’ve texted in the last 72 hours.

This is a great service. It lets you keep your phone in your pocket and text to your heart’s content, all at no charge.

Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com, or try the treasure trove of helpful folks in the PC World Community Forums. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

 

By Rick Broida

Advice To Help You Succeed In Social Media Marketing

Do you already understand the power of social media marketing, but are still unsure how you can implement it into your business plan? Social media is always opening doors for new companies, but if you approach it incorrectly it won’t be as advantageous as you would like. You can follow this article’s advice and learn the proper way to create a standing company via quality media.

Do not post irrelevant and trivial posts on your social media profiles. Always keep your posts professional and relevant. No one cares that you got a new cell phone, or that you are standing in line at the movies. These trivial posts should be reserved for your own personal profile, not your business profile.

Sharing content across social media sites is a great way to promote your product and also allows you to gather important information about customer preferences. This is what makes social media marketing an especially appealing way to enhance your business. Don’t pass up the opportunity to connect with potential buyers that Facebook, Twitter and the other social media sites present.

Get a WordPress blog so you can use the WordPress Retweet button. This features allows your visitors to post a link to one of your articles in their Twitter feed in a simple click. You could also add Retweet buttons on your website if you take the time to code it yourself.

Never spam when posting on social media. Posting spam is the quickest way to lose followers and damage you and you companies reputation. Spam posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites make any legitimate marketing difficult. If your posts are just a few words and a link to a product, you are posting spam. Give relevant content or reviews along with any links you post.

To make a social media based giveaway more interesting, come up with prizes that people can’t buy on their own. Create a unique t-shirt, or offer tickets to a sold out event. When you’re the only means people have of obtaining something, they’ll be sure to enter your contest and encourage their friends to do so as well.

Open the lines of communication with your Facebook audience. A large part of social media marketing is the social aspect. Keep that in mind and go out of your way to respond to every Facebook comment, inquiry, or message that is posted for you. You will quickly gain interest on your page when you do this.

When deciding how to implement your social media marketing strategies, it is important to take into consideration the nature of your products and services. For example, if purchasing your products is something that most of your customers would prefer to keep private, then do not put Facebook-like buttons right next to the buy buttons! Eventually, someone will click it accidentally and then get angry at your business.

Social media is an extremely vast and powerful tool. It should be something that all business owners squeeze into their marketing plans, despite their other advertising routes. It will work perfectly with any options you have already started developing and won’t require an entire rework of your core scheme. However, it is important that you follow the advice given and always focus on reaching a better future.

Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?

In general, advertising doesn’t work on the Web , a fact that has been clear to usability researchers since 1997. Users ignore ads because they are contrary to the Web’s basic imperative , which is to let users go where they want and get their information needs instantly gratified.

From the beginning, it was also clear that this indictment of Web advertising had two exceptions:

• Classified ads work because as far as users are concerned, they are content , not advertising: people actively seek out the classifieds when they are looking to buy. This explains the success of eBay, Monster/HotJobs, and many such sites. The superiority of Web classifieds portends dire times ahead for traditional printed newspapers, as their most lucrative income source continues to migrate online.
• Search engine ads work because search engines are the one type of website that people visit with the explicit goal of finding someplace else to go. Thus, if users see an ad for what they’re looking for, there is a high probability that they’ll click that ad. Advertisers can satisfy a user’s immediate needs because they target ads based on the user’s query terms. (This also explains why ads on search engine homepages don’t work: it’s impossible to target the ad to the user’s current quest until the server knows what that quest is.)

Both are examples of request marketing : prospects have explicitly asked for the promotions they are being shown, as opposed to having unwanted messages thrown at them.

Text-only ads on search engines have become particularly successful in recent years, and non-search sites are now experimenting with this format in hope of replicating that success. However, it’s doubtful that their efforts will work because non-search sites lack the equation’s crucial element: users’ single-minded goal to leave the site as quickly as possible.

From Banner Blindness to Box Blindness?

Text-only ads might continue to work better than traditional graphics-based ads for some time to come. Web users have long exhibited strong banner blindness and avoid anything that looks like an advertisement. Text-only ads don’t resemble the designs that people have trained themselves to screen out, and the resulting visibility surely contributes to the success of text-only ads.

Also, text-only ads benefit from a temporary novelty effect , as does any new advertising format that people have not yet learned to ignore.

Over the long term, however, the novelty effect will obviously fade. Users might also develop box blindness , ignoring little text boxes just as they’ve long ignored banner-shaped areas of the screen. Thus, text-only ads are not guaranteed a bright future outside their native search engine habitat.

Communicative Content

Text-only ads might have one durable advantage: because they’re a low-end media format , users might take them more seriously. Being forced to express a message in a few words concentrates the advertiser’s mind, and probably leads to more communicative ads that are better focused on explaining how users will benefit from the product or service.

Although there is no inherent reason that you can’t use text for mindless chatter — like “where do you want to go today?” — there is no way users will click on such ads. Ignoring users’ immediate needs is certain death on the Web.

Companies that run rich-media ads that ignore user needs can delude themselves into thinking that they’re “promoting the brand”; in reality, they’re simply being ignored because they don’t connect with people’s needs. The text-only format more clearly exposes content-free messages as useless, however, and thus might save advertisers from the bad instincts they honed on old media.

After ten years of watching Web users, one clear conclusion is that they are utterly selfish and live in the moment . Giving users exactly what they want, right now, is the road to Web success, and having to write small boxes of text encourages advertisers to travel it.

By Jakob Nielsen’s

Adapt Your Marketing To Include Mobile Devices

Are you adequately familiar with mobile marketing? Have you developed a marketing strategy? Does your plan need improvement or refinement? Are you reaching the largest potential audience with your marketing efforts? Are you confident that you are using your plan the way you should? If you’re admittedly new to mobile marketing, then read on for some valuable tips.

Keep your marketing messages on topic. Do not use mobile marketing for the sake of it. Use mobile marketing as a useful tool to send out relevant messages. Each communication you have with your customer should be directed at promoting your business through the presentation of new information or opportunities for your customers or potential customers. When you are providing the products they truly need, they will reward you with their business.

Many people check their social media sites from their phones, so you need to make sure you are using it for your marketing campaign. Rewarding customers who share a TwitPic or who forward deals to friends is a great way to expand your customer base. This helps people spread the word about your site or company with their friends via mobile.

Craft a mission statement more for your purpose than anything if you want to stay on track in social mobile marketing. This will make it easier to stay focused.

You should be able to give feedback on your ads and find a connection with a customer. Listen to what customers have to say even if it is bad.

Use your own webpage to your advantage. Let visitors to your website know about your mobile apps. When consumers see your site, they can see how to stay connected with you on the go.

Split test the mobile capabilities your site. It’s not only important to test your website, it’s important for your mobile landing page too. This way, you can see what works best for visitors. Use two dissimilar versions of your landing page (known as A & B) to see which earns the most conversions. Of the two, go with the page that performs the best.

Be concise and user-friendly. Keeping the minimum number of clicks feature will help maximize your success. Mobile keypads are quite compact, so a significant amount of typing can be very annoying. Because of this you will need to keep the clicks and typing down to a minimum.

If you think you can be successful in mobile marketing you can limit offers you give to the best ones. This will ensure that your viewers will not get annoyed by your messages.

Create an account, and establish a presence on every well known social networking website. This is vital to drive potential customers to your site. When you start your business social media pages, focus on the basics. You can always branch out later. Be sure to acknowledge your company on Facebook, and create a business page in a website called Foursquare when you start.

Are you more informed when it comes to mobile marketing? Do you have a new plan or a better plan now? Can you now use things that work with your business? Do you know how to properly apply your plan? With any luck, the tips above should have created better answers.

Cap on Mobile Roaming Fees

Finally, the European Commission has finally decided to flex its muscles and attention towards fixing the scandalous mobile roaming charges instead of pursuing metric martyrs and wonky vegetables.

The changes, due to come into force across the EU’s 27 member nations from July 2009 will not only affect call charges but also data charges which are directly associated with web browsing. The commission is seeking wholesale caps for data roaming with a proposed €1 per megabyte safeguard limit for wholesale data roaming fees which is hoped will stimulate competition and transparent retail prices.

For many years supporters and advocates of mobile web services, including Commercetuned, have been frustrated with the slow consumer take up speed of mobile web having been restricted by high prices for data as operators tried to claw back revenue from the ill fated 3G bidding process. We recently reported figures from Nielsen on the increase use of internet services via mobile phones and the potential impact it could start to have in shaping web search.

We work in a globalised society and the European Union has always tried to model itself as an efficient unified trading block. Therefore it has been ridiculous that on most tariffs in the UK consumers are given unlimited web data access in with operators such as T-mobile (a German owned operator) but if I visit Germany and want to use Google (on T-mobile) to find local information then we are whacked with roaming data fees in excess of £3 per MB or €3.6. We therefore fully endorse this proposal and greet this reduction in data costs as an exciting next step towards a prosperous mobile web….wherever you are.

by Paul Rudman

Mobile: CRM’s Next M?

The Time Is Right To Integrate Mobile Marketing and CRM. Here’s Why.

“As the world goes social, CRM has to get more personal. We can no longer keep our customers at arm’s length. For years we have focused too much on the management of our customer relationships, and we now need to focus much more on the relationship part, we need to collaborate, we need to inject a sense of mutual benefit into everything we do with our customers.”—Jim Davies, Research Director, Gartner

When you think of customer relationship management, it’s likely you think of large implementations of expensive enterprise software from the world’s largest technology companies. Or perhaps you eschew software and think about some of the cloud-based CRM offerings. But most likely you think about some form of technology for managing various customer touchpoints—process-driven, rules-based technology.

And while this classic definition (rooted in the late 1990s) still has some merit, the “social CRM” movement—moving from transaction to interaction—has pushed it into the 21st century.

While CRM has been about managing cross-channel, online and offline touchpoints, by and large it has excluded mobile marketing from the mix. In its nascence, mobile marketing was siloed, primarily campaign-driven, and loosely integrated within the marketing mix. However, smart companies are recognizing the benefits of using mobile as a foundational element of a multi-channel marketing strategy, and are tightening the connections between CRM systems and mobile-marketing platforms.

Why do mobile and CRM work so well together?

• Value In. Value Out. Mobile can be utilized on both the front-end and back-end of a CRM database. On the front end, it can contribute vital customer information based on mobile interactions; on the back end, the intelligence within a CRM system can be used to generate highly-targeted marketing and advertising communications.
• More Responsiveness=More Data=More Action. With mobile, brands are communicating with their customers on a highly personal medium, their mobile phone. This intimacy builds a direct connection that is more immediate, and thus, more responsive (and the opt-in nature of mobile ensures this responsiveness; if brands are hitting customers with irrelevant content, they will simply opt out). The increased responsiveness allows for rich, deeper interactions and the collection of actionable customer data.
• CRM: Conversations, Relationships, Mobile. More than any other customer communications medium, mobile engenders conversations—and conversations are critical to building customer relationships.

Let’s use a major retailer as an example. The company has a robust CRM infrastructure and already touches its customers and prospects across the usual channels: broadcast; print; online and display advertisements; hardcopy mailings; e-mail and an online store. Bringing mobile into the mix provides a number of valuable features and benefits:

• In-Store “Calls to Action” Create Conversations and Actionable Data: An in-store display invites customers to participate in a giveaway via SMS or QR code. The customer has a chance to win valuable prizes; the retailer gets valuable data by passing the registration information straight into a CRM system. The CRM system generates a PIN for the brand’s Web site, and the customer registers for the site and sweepstakes, providing further valuable information. It’s important that the customer get something of value—in this case, the chance to win a sweepstakes—that is worth in their mind the personal information they must share to enter.
• Mobile Provides Real-Time Data for Multi-channel Data Aggregation, Acquisition and Analysis: The retailer publishes various micro-sites and drives customers to them via SMS campaigns using various calls-to-action in different media. The micro-site usage data is captured and reported to the retailer’s CRM system for cross-channel marketing analytics. The retailer captures SMS campaign user opt-in via Web and email, conducting further campaigns to opted-in users.
• Making Changes in Real Time: Aggregated data can also teach valuable, timely lessons: the retailer can optimize campaign elements based on results and consumer behavior. What content was most compelling? What elements drove the most consumers to opt out? What day and what time of day did they respond?

In the age of Social CRM, smart brands are integrating mobile, the most social of all marketing channels, into their CRM systems. Mobile adds tremendous value on both the front-end and back-end of CRM by quickly creating new conversations that feature critical, actionable customer data that can’t be replicated through other channels.

by: Eric Harber

A Beginner’s Guide To Learning Mobile Marketing

Today people are doing more than you would have dreamed possible with their cell phones. Smart phones keep getting more and more popular, and their capabilities are growing, almost as fast. If you are running a business, you owe it to yourself to investigate how you can make these, ever more common phones, work for you.

Mobile marketers should be mindful of the importance of aiding existing customers in sharing their subscriber status with their friends and acquaintances. Be sure to encourage customers to pass text offers onto others, and you will immediately have the power to expand your reach beyond the customer base you already had.

If you have multiple people working in your business on mobile marketing, it is important for each person to understand the plans and goals behind your company, to that everyone is working on the same page. Your team should be knowledgeable enough not to put your business in a bind, should a customer ask a question.

To keep customers from opting out of your text messages, be consistent! Let them know how often you’ll send messages, when you’ll send them, and don’t deviate from that. When customers know when your messages are coming, they’re more likely to look forward to them, and less likely to be irritated by them.

Make sure that your emails are mobile device friendly. An increasing number of customers are reading emails only on their mobile devices. If your emails are not mobile friendly, they might never be seen by a significant portion of your clients. This means that valuable advertising dollars are wasted, and your campaign will not be successful.

Track and analyze all of your mobile marketing campaigns. By doing this you can find out which types of ads are working and the type of audience they are appealing to. You can then adjust your ad campaign accordingly to ensure your marketing budget is being spent on campaigns that deliver results.

You should research the habits of the customers you reach through mobile marketing and tailor your communications and special offers to their needs. Treat them as a special subset of your customer base and learn all that you can about their buying habits. The offers you send out to cell phones should have a special appeal to your mobile customers.

Make sure your mobile ads are compatible against all platforms, cellular devices and more. Your business must stay accessible to as many mobile users as possible. By ensuring compatibility on all platforms, you maximize your exposure and your business’ ability to reach more customers via the devices they use the most.

When using mobile marketing, build your database the right way- get permission first. Don’t just add cell phone numbers without a confirmation. Give customers an opt-out option where they can click either yes or opt-out to confirm . This way you will have fewer complaints from users who don’t want the advertisements.

These are just a few of the ways that you can turn the omnipresence of smart phones to your advantage as a business owner. Having a phone-friendly marketing strategy is the same today as an internet marketing strategy was ten years ago. Mobile marketing is a burgeoning field. If you get into it now, you can start reaping the rewards that much faster.