MarketingSherpa Blog

This week’s B2B newsletter article, “B2B Marketing: 7 mobile and social media tactics,” features three industry experts providing insight into mobile and social media marketing. Although there is some overlap in practices, the complex B2B sale involves some channel techniques that don’t completely apply to consumer marketers.

But, luckily for B2C practitioners, one of the experts, Tim Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer, 44Doors, a mobile marketing solutions provider, had a few ideas for the consumer channel, too.

Here are a few quick-and-dirty ideas to hopefully improve your mobile marketing efforts. Some ideas you may have heard about before, and some might be completely new practices.

Getting started

Tim says when you get into mobile, your customers will want to do at least some of the things they are doing on the desktop and will want to have access to many of the same services. The issue from a marketing standpoint is these customer touch points have to be mobile optimized or customers won’t want to interact with your mobile offering.

“You don’t have to necessarily hire a Web design shop or a mobile Web shop to build you a site that is optimized for handheld devices,” says Tim.

By that, he means there are platforms such as WordPress and Tumblr with built-in plug-ins that automatically create mobile-friendly content across multiple devices — iPhone, iPad, Android phones, etc.

He adds that smaller businesses, such as independent retailers, restaurants and law offices, are actually using content platforms like WordPress to build their entire website. Doing this makes their entire online presence mobile friendly because of the available plug-ins.

What does ‘mobile-optimized’ mean?

When talking about “mobile-friendly,” Tim says, “These aren’t the fully functional websites or social networks that you have through your desktop.”

Consider these three specific factors for your mobile sites:

• You can see it on the four-inch screen of a handheld device
• The content loads fast
• Navigation is designed so the user can do things quickly

Being actionable

This means exactly what it sounds like it means — make your customer’s mobile experience about more than just looking at a message.

One way to do this is to offer a coupon or promotional content for scanning a QR code. The customer has to scan the code to get the coupon.

“If you are trying to drive store traffic, if you’re trying to drive purchasing, what better way to do that than to make that experience actionable,” says Tim.

He adds, “I mean that, in a sense, if you give someone a coupon, you’re basically empowering them to go experience some discount purchase and your redemption rate will go up if it’s a mobile-friendly experience.”

He says mobile marketing allows for a new level of engagement between consumer marketers and customers.

In a case study published last March, “Driving Traffic from Print to Web: 50% increase in website traffic in six months,” Mike Seitz, publisher of three editions of Coffee News, provided a behind-the-scenes look at how he used Microsoft Tag, a mobile scannable code similar to QR codes, to market his website (see “Tactic #2” in the link).

He offered a holiday contest that required online registration, and offered a Microsoft Tag that could be scanned for instant entry into the contest.

Mike said Microsoft Tags allow him to see how many people scan the code, and will drive smartphones to the desired marketing piece, including:

• A website
• A video commercial about the product or service in the ad
• A coupon that is returned to the phone in the form a text message

After this promotion, Mike decided to use tags in all future contests, and began incorporating them into the print ads in his publications as well.

Related Resources:

Mobile Website Advice from Taco Bell: 5 Considerations to Reach More Mobile Devices

Mobile Marketing: How Redbox drove 1.5 million texts and added 200,000 mobile participants in 10 days

Mobile Marketing: New program achieves 11% redemption rate on text offers

Mobile Marketing: Get your audience’s attention – wait till they’re bored

Mobile Marketing 101: Should you make the leap to a custom mobile site?

About David Kirkpatrick

David is a reporter for MarketingSherpa and has over twenty years of experience in business journalism, marketing and corporate communications. His published work includes newspaper, magazine and online journalism; website content; full-length ghosted nonfiction; marketing content; and short fiction. He served as producer for the business research horizontal at the original Office.com, regularly reporting on the world of marketing; covered a beat for D/FW TechBiz, a member of the American City Business Journals family; and he provided daily reporting for multiple LocalBusiness.com cities. David’s other media and corporate clients include: USA Today, Oxford Intelligence, GMAC, AOL, Business Development Outlook and C-Level Media, among many others.

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Categories: Mobile Tags: channel integration, mobile marketing, QR codes, social media