March 23rd, 2011 by Rene LeMerle
Okay, let’s start with the obvious – “the mobile market is booming.”
So if everyone knows that the mobile market is booming, then the question is “What have you done to take your marketing mobile?”
The answer for most small businesses is “nothing”?
So with a huge opportunity available through mobile marketing for small businesses, here’s 4 essential ways to capitalise in the boom.
1. Mobile Friendly Version of Your Website
Navigating the web is obviously more difficult from a mobile device, especially via smart phones. The first step in mobilising your marketing is developing a mobile version of your website.
For some of you, the cost involved in developing a mobile specific version of your website might not make sense. In such cases, there’s online tools to help you mobilise your web presence for free:
2. Localised Search Engine Marketing
Search engines provide some great ways to leverage the growth in mobile. The likes of Google were onto the mobile wave, well before most of us. Here’s some of the ways to use SEM to mobilise your small business marketing.
- Google Places & Geo Services
Mobile devices are one of the core drivers in the growth of local search. With more and more people searching on the go, it’s vital that you claim and optimize the local/maps listings that search engines offer such as your Google Places listing.
The main search engines are also releasing several geo driven services which compliment their local listings (e.g. Google Hotpot). Ensure you optimize your business through these services, as the benefits will filter through to your local listings.
- Search Engine Advertising – Mobile Targeting
Most of the major search engines now offer mobile targeting in their advertising programs. So now you can set up specific campaigns targeting mobile users.
When you’re setting up “mobile” focused campaigns, remember to think of the context when developing things like keyword focus or ads (e.g. ads for mobile campaigns will probably be more successful with phone numbers in the ad text).
3. Location Based Apps (Geo Apps)
The location based app market is also booming thanks to the number of smart phones on the market. If done cleverly, these geo apps and tools can be great marketing tools. Some of the mainstream geo apps worth exploring include:
There’s plenty of niche based geo apps that might work more effectively for your industry e.g. (Urban Spoon for restaurants.)
4. Apps for Your Business
Developing more interactive apps specific to your business, while generally more expensive, can be a very effective marketing tool if done well.
Generally I would recommend taking your app ideas to a seasoned app developer as they can be quite complex to create, especially the more involved ones. But if you feel you have a bit of tech know-how, then here’s some resources for the DIY app developers out there.
There’s plenty more App builders out there, so if you use one that you think is worth a mention, share it via our comments below.
Of course there are other ways to promote your business on mobiles (e.g. SMS marketing), but the one’s above are probably the easiest for small businesses to explore.
If you’ve tackled mobile marketing for your business, we’d love to hear how it’s worked and what you’ve done.
About the Author: Rene is the marketing manager of ineedhits.com - a global search engine marketing company. He also leads the marketing for Gooruze.com - a web 2.0 style community for online and digital marketers. Rene has been in the industry since 1997 with much of that time spent helping businesses embrace the best of the internet and digital world.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 at 8:30 am.
