Goals

All companies should have clear goals of what they are looking to achieve, evaluate whether the benefits of using mobile marketing could help you to achieve those goals. So as an example if one of your aims is to increase the number of sales of a particular product then mobile marketing may be one way of educating potential buyers about that product and help them to make that buying decision.

Integration

Does mobile marketing fit in with what you are already doing? We always advocate a consistent approach across all of your marketing activities and so it is important to decide whether adopting mobile will fit in with what you are currently doing and/or how it can compliment your overall campaign. For example, creating a mobile website might be a way to enhance the use of your current website whilst people are using a mobile device as they may be more likely to revisit your main site if they feel they have had a good experience.

Look at the Competition

If you are still unsure about what to do, look at what others are doing. A good first step is to check out the competition and see what they are doing by way of mobile marketing or look at similar industries for inspiration.

According to eMarketer:

• 42% of media and entertainment companies
• 23% of retail companies
• 35% of the automotive industry
• 30% of the travel industry

are adopting mobile marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. There are many many others.

If your competitors or companies in a similar industry are already doing it then you should seriously think about doing it too as this means that your potential customers are using mobile to connect with these businesses.

Mobile devices are personal

Even if you are given a mobile phone or tablet for your work it is very likely that you use it to store personal information, whether that be your contacts, photos, video, appointment information or personal notes. They are also personal in the sense that they tend to have a single owner i.e. you are unlikely to share your phone with someone else. This gives businesses the opportunity of personalising their marketing message to some extent although of course privacy and permission based marketing is all we are advocating here.

They are always on

Most people keep their mobile devices switched on and on or around their person, particularly their phones. It is very rare that someone doesn’t have their mobile on them or switched on. Even when in meetings people tend to turn their mobile device onto silent or vibrate rather than turn it off all together. This means that any marketing messages sent will be most likely read within a couple of minutes of it being sent, but of course this makes the timing of those messages incredibly important. No one wants to be woken up in the middle of the night to receive your marketing information.

They can be used to make payments

The SIM card is a built in payment system it’s just that we have only recently been using them to pay for anything other than phone calls, with apps becoming more and more popular you can use your phone to purchase anything from music, apps to your groceries. People have gotten used to paying for content through their mobile devices too and so things like e-books are a potential way for you to monetise the content that exists within your business.

It’s easy to share

Mobile content is easy to share and therefore can encourage ‘viral’ potential if the content/message/offer is interesting or compelling enough. It is easy and quick to share via mobile and we have gotten so used to doing this via social networking sites that doing this via mobile is almost second nature now.

Easy to Track

Like any campaign, you need to be able to track your marketing activity and the beauty of mobile marketing is that this is very easy to do. Every action can be tracked to a single phone number so it can be easy to measure user engagement. Although there are stringent privacy laws about peoples data and you cannot gain personal information about someone, you can see individuals activity which is vital in measuring success of any campaign.

The amount of internet traffic that comes from mobile devices is ever increasing, in fact according to eMarketer, as of June 2011, 5.02% of all Internet traffic worldwide came from a mobile device. Because so many are wanting to use mobile for so many day to day tasks, companies are working hard to accommodate this, so things like being able to do your grocery shopping or check your bank account will be as easy to do on your mobile device as they are on a desktop or laptop.

Because of this change marketers are looking at how they can harness this opportunity to communicate with potential customers and their existing customer base via mobile devices. Let’s start with the website, most have one now but try and view it on a smartphone and you might get a nasty shock. We are seeing a clear move towards companies having mobile websites that are aimed purely at mobile use so that users can quickly and easily get to the information they want.

According to a recent study*, worldwide advertisers stated the following key reasons why they use mobile marketing:

• 78% said they use mobile because more consumers have access to smartphones
• 61% said they like the ability to target certain demographics based on devices
• 42% said they like the attractive ad formats

* Data is from the June 2011 Google and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) report titled “Global Perspectives: The

Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer” conducted by Ipsos and TNS Infratest.

In our next blog in the mobile marketing series we will be looking at whether mobile is right for your business.

So what’s next? The name mobile marketing has been linked to the idea of sending marketing messages to someone’s phone, but this is just a small part of it. There are many different techniques that can be used with mobile devices all of which have the potential to help companies both increase their customer base and engage with existing customers to make sure they stay that way.

So our job in this blog is to help educate you on the importance of mobile marketing and how you as a business can make the most of the opportunity that it brings. Over the coming weeks we will be issuing a number of blog posts dedicated to this subject so please stay turned to find out more and if you want to know how we can specifically help your business then find out more about our mobile marketing starter packages.

I don’t by any stretch of the imagination claim to have mastered the art of social media time management, but I thought I’d share some tips with you to help minimise the amount of wasted time spent on social media sites without giving up on social media marketing altogether!

• Stick to a schedule – decide in advance exactly what you want to accomplish on each social media platform each day and how long it should take you then schedule that exact time into your calendar. Avoid checking your accounts on an ad hoc basis as this inevitably leads to time wastage.
• Plan cleverly – schedule your social media time before meetings or appointments so you can’t get carried away.
• Minimise the distractions – figure out what distracts you the most and take steps to control it. For instance create a shortcut to take you straight to your Facebook business page without going via your personal account if it’s too tempting to click on those personal notifications.
• Use timesaving tools – using a tool such as Hootsuite or Social Oomph to schedule some of your tweets and updates in advance can help you to go into your accounts less often and thereby minimise distraction. A simple alarm set on a timer can also help remind you when you’ve spent enough time on a task.
• Create content in bulk – sometimes it can be more efficient to create your content in batches, e.g. cranking out a number of blog posts at once or researching several interesting news links to share on Twitter or Facebook, then use a tool like those mentioned above to post them out at regular intervals.

Do you have any other tips to share with us on how to save time on social media marketing?

Sometimes it can be hard to try and distinguish how to use Facebook for personal and business at the same time, well there are ways that you can separate your ‘friends’ so that certain groups can see certain posts but to be honest I use my account for both and post the same information out to everyone. One of the good things about this is that it does force those who are tempted to stop simply posting sales messages, also it can stop people posting things that they may later regret.

Everywhere you go you will see people sat on their mobiles on Facebook, you will hear people talking about it, arranging social events and even ‘Fraping’ each other, so even if you can’t stand the concept it is very difficult to get away from the level of influence that the platform has. One of the best features is that it allows api’s or applications to integrate with the platform. This is the bit that enables you to play games through your Facebook account but it’s not just games there are many apps that are useful for business too.

With the timeline about to hit us all (if you haven’t been already) it becomes even more important to ensure that you are censoring your posts and activity and a good marker it to ask yourself if you would be happy for your parents and/or your boss to see your post before you press the return button. People forget that this is a public tool and that what you post will be there for a very very long time and so just be careful and sensible really about what you are saying and about whom.

If you are looking for advice on how to use Facebook for your business then these posts may be of interest:

Facebook Advertising

Advice for Business Page Updates

Getting more Likes for your Business Page

We don’t often write much about ourselves on this blog, mainly I am a complete geek who spends my life talking about Google or running (my other great passion in life), so as an Essex based business why should you come to us to help you with your SEO? If you have found this article then you may already know what SEO is and you may also have had some experience in the past, many of our customers and indeed ourselves get tonnes of phone calls and emails from so called experts claiming they can get you on page one of Google with as little as £100 per month.

What these people don’t tell you is that they usually use paid advertising to do this and often will target keywords that no one is actually looking for, so it may get you on page one, but will it really do your business any good to be found for things that no one is actually looking for? Of course not and that is why you need a company like ours.

We are a full service agency which means we cover the whole spectrum of online marketing services, we understand how the internet works and we have some very clever technical people that know how to make things work. We also understand how marketing online works and can employ a wide variety of techniques to achieve SEO success. You see SEO is no longer about how many keywords you can fit on one page, it’s a complex process that is ever changing and we are constantly amending the way that we approach things to make sure that we adhere to best practise.

When we first meet with a company we will run a free Webscan report which will basically tell us whether the current website is up to scratch and can be used for Search Engine Optimisation campaigns, in about 75% of cases people need a new one, there is no point driving lots of traffic to a website that isn’t up to the job. Think about your website like a shop, there is a huge amount of psychology that goes into the way a retail outlet is layed out and the same is true of your site.

We will also be completely honest with you, if you are looking to compete against the big brands then you need a big budget but if you have a local target market then the budget doesn’t need to be as big, the same is true if you operate in a less competitive market and have a niche product or service or even a young market online. You can usually spot a young market as you will see lots of directories appearing high up in the search results, this is a clear indication that there is an opportunity to be had and that actually now is a great time to get started before the competition do.

We will also tell you if SEO is a fruitless task as very occasionally we come across a company where we don’t think we can get them a good return on investment and that’s not good for anyone. Not the Essex based customer, not us and not our reputation. Talking of reputation the vast majority of our clients stay with us year on year and a large proportion of our new customers come via referrals from existing ones and I don’t think theres a better vote of confidence than that.

So if you are an Essex based company and are looking for someone to work with you on your SEO then please give us a shout, we are more than happy to have a chat, no pressure selling just good honest advice.

It wasn’t just that the topics chosen were uninteresting, but the grammar and punctuation were so abysmal as to make the stories almost unintelligible. There was also a lot of repetition and very little actual information given. It was quite obvious that providing content was very low on the list of priorities for this magazine and all they were interested in was cramming as many paid advertisements in as possible.

Of course once advertisers realise that the magazine is usually thrown away before ever being read by anyone they’re not going to be renewing and this publication will join the many others that have died out shortly after they first started.

Unfortunately the same thing is happening on the web. So many websites are guilty of just being full of advertisements or sales messages or creating pages and pages of poor quality content that no one would ever actually want to read. It’s the same type of throwaway content as that contained in the junk magazines that get posted in our letterboxes and it’s going to be just as ineffective in the long run.

If companies are going to go to the trouble of putting up a website to attract leads, it makes sense to provide something of value. Think about what your potential customers might actually want to read about or how you can solve a problem for them and then take the time to write something useful.

Google is also getting better at weeding out poor content websites from its search results, so if you want to be found online you need to stop looking for short cuts and start providing what both the search engines and those using them are actually looking for. If writing isn’t your forte then there’s nothing wrong with paying someone else to do it for you, but make sure you choose a service that will provide good quality content rather than outsourcing to cheap writing services.

Please check your spelling and grammar too, or get someone else to do it for you. Poorly written content (even if it is valuable and interesting) reflects badly on your business, making it appear less professional.  Whether you like it or not, bad grammar and spelling can come across as sloppy and unintelligent and that’s the last impression you want to create.  Proofreading and editing what you’ve written doesn’t take much time and is always worthwhile.

Here’s a basic checklist for when you’re creating content:

• Is it relevant to your business industry?
• Is it useful, entertaining or interesting to visitors?
• Has it been proofread for spelling and grammar errors?

There is already far too much junk on the Internet. Create content worth keeping and you’ll already stand out from a lot of other websites out there. It’s an essential part of any effective online marketing strategy.

Firstly you need to be able to write well, if people can’t really understand your style of writing then you may as well forget it.

Here are our top tips:

• Pick a subject that is related to your business, if you have a website all about birds and you write an e-book all about fish then you will end up confusing your audience.
• Look at what people have written on the subject already and look at a different way of tackling the same topic.
• Write a little bit each and every day, it can be very daunting to think about writing thousands of words, but chunking it into manageable pieces makes you far more likely to stick to it. Make writing part of your daily routine.
• Keep reviewing what you have written and keep improving on what you have, check for errors like spelling mistakes. Ask someone you trust to read it too to see what they think.

Once you have your e-book written you need to market it properly, it’s worth having a campaign set up specifically for this rather than simply sticking an ad on your website and expecting that to be enough. Tell people that it exists, write a press release, post your messages via social media. In fact wherever you can and whoever you can send it to then do so.

Don’t charge too much, people sometimes make this mistake. If someone is going to download it then it needs to be affordable.

In this post I will focus on how to optimise your content for a search engine without turning it into something that no human reader can understand.

SEO Keywords

Each page should be optimised for one keyphrase and this phrase should form part or all or be related to the keyphrase and should appear in the:

• web address i.e. www.wsimarketingexperts.co.uk/seo-essex
• Page Name
• H1 Tag (normally the title you see at the top of the page)
• H2 Tag (any sub titles you see)
• Behind any images you have
• Included in the words on the page
• Included in link text on the page – linking to other relevant pages on the site

You can use a keyword density checker to make sure that you aren’t keyword stuffing, there are plenty of free tools (just Google it and a whole list will come up – funny that !) and don’t over optimise either.

If you are unsure what keywords to use, Google have a free keyword checker tool that you can use this will not only tell you how many searches are made for specific searches but will also give you suggestions for other keywords that you might have missed.

In today’s incredibly competitive online space it is also key to go after specific search terms, yes the phrase’shoes’ have squillions of searches but there are also squillions of other companies trying to be found for that phrase and the amount of investment required to beat them is going to be huge. It is much better to go after specific searches i.e. summer sandals, these have less searches but are also less competitive and therefore you have a much better chance on success. Another thing to mention is that the more specific searches are more likely to convert as they already know what they want and as long as you provide what you say you do then you have a good chance of converting someone into a new customer.

Find out more about our SEO Services in Essex