10 Digital & Mobile Marketing Tips to Transform your Business in 2013 – Part II
January 10, 2013 1:05 pm
Welcome to part two of Text Republic’s ‘Ten Digital and Mobile Marketing Tips to Transform your Business in 2013’. If you missed last weeks first installment then you can catch up by reading them here. So again in no particular order here are the remaining five.
6. Get Your Head Around Local Search FAST
In 2012 all three of Silicon Valley’s big players released locally centric products in the form of Google + Local, Apple Maps and Facebook Nearby. In terms of the technology adoption life-cycle, 2012 was the year where ‘The Innovators’ and ‘Early Adopter’ business owners made hay with local search. 2013 will be the year where the ‘Early Majority’ and perhaps even the ‘Late Majority’ begin to realise its importance.
Explaining how to perform well in local search is an entire blog post in itself but if you’re still unsure about the importance of local search then just digest these two stats:
- 70% of online searchers use local search to find offline businesses. (Source – Kelsey Group)
- 20% of Google searches are for local information. (Source – Hubspot)
7. Use Web-Links and Landing Pages in Bulk SMS
When most people think about sending a marketing text they simply think about a straight forward bulk text message. A plain ‘text only’ SMS message staying within the 160 character limit and a totally one sided conversation. The sender sends the message and the receiver reads it – end of story. That was OK a few years ago but now there is so much more that can be done with Bulk Text Messaging which goes beyond the 160 character limit. Simply sending a standard bulk text message, while still effective is a massively wasted opportunity. There are several things that can be done to enhance the value of an SMS marketing message but one of the most obvious is embedding web links within the text of the message.
Nowadays well over half of mobile phone users have web enabled browsers and can click on embedded URLs. If you are not doing this you are wasting a great opportunity to drive highly targeted traffic to your website. As discussed in an earlier article on this blog – SMS Click Through Rates – CTRs of 20% are common place when using bulk SMS which easily outshines the 4% you can expect from email. If you are aware of another more cost effective way to drive highly targeted quality traffic to a website we would love to hear about it.
8. Hire a Quality Content Writer
As the internet gets more and more social and as the Google Algorithm puts more and more emphasis on quality original content then so should your business. Writing and distributing great content benefits your business in two distinct ways –
1. You are much more likely to get found online, and;
2. You are much more likely to influence a consumer to choose you over the competition. (Studies have shown that most buyers will digest three to five separate pieces of content before they make a purchase decision.)
Therefore if you are going to get found and then persuade a consumer to purchase you must put your case out there over and over again. There is a famous quote from one of the founders of 37 Signals that said their most important hire was their content writer. Heed those words – hire a quality content writer and then put the structures in place to enable him or her to churn out great content week after week.
9. Make SMS a Two-Way Conversation
SMS is a great way to both illicit feedback from your customers on their past experiences and to engage them about your future plans for new products. A lot has already been written about the power of SMS in feedback management but not much is ever said about engaging customers before the fact via SMS. A FMCG client of ours recently engaged their current customer database with an SMS based campaign to get their thoughts on a new product they were planning to launch. A massive 54% of those contacted via SMS responded with their thoughts on the new product – we knew from experience that the response rate would be high but even we were surprised by a figure of over 50%. Needless to say our client was both surprised and very happy.
Trend firm Trendwatching have reported that the era of the ‘Presumer’ is only beginning and SMS is a great first step to fully engage your customers in the new product launch life-cycle.
10. Stack the Deck before Spending Big Marketing Money
Most great sporting teams don’t win championships on the playing field, they win it in the days and months prior to ever taking to the field. In short, they stack the deck in their favour. The same goes for the business world – Groupon or Dropbox or Hubspot didn’t become world class companies by performing brilliantly when their final product was already known worldwide – they did it by stacking the deck in their favour months and months before they ever pressed the button on the big marketing spend.
Henry Ford once famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In today’s world this is still true, however that doesn’t mean that a business should spend millions marketing an unproven product to the world. What they should do is try and market and sell their new product to a small segment of the world, take their feedback, reiterate, and then move onto the next small segment. Soon they will get to the point where their product is loved by a large percentage of their current customers, i.e. they will have reached ‘Product/Market Fit’. It’s not until they have reached this point that they should spend millions marketing their product worldwide.
When companies do this correctly during their test phase they are essentially stacking the deck in their favour for when they finally push the button on the big marketing spend. They already know that their target audience love their product and they have taken almost all of the chance out of the game. Stack the deck by ensuring you have ‘Product/Market Fit’ before you spend big and go for growth.*
OK that’s it for our two part digital and mobile marketing tips. We hope that everyone got at least one thing which will help them in their marketing efforts throughout 2013. If you are enjoying these posts then feel free to subscribe to our RRS feed using the widget on the right of the page. Until next week.
* (A special note of thanks goes to Sean Ellis of Qualaroo for all the coaching on this particular point.)
Categorised in: Digital Marketing