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How to Develop Successful Mobile Apps
Posted Sep 7th, 2011 By Mirna Bard in Mobile With | 1 Comment

While there are already hundreds of thousands of mobile apps out there, this new medium is really still
in its infancy, which means the door is wide open for new ideas. What makes a successful app? Why is
Angry Birds the all-time highest seller on mobile platforms? There isn’t a perfect formula for creating the
next smash hit, but there are a few common attributes all the best apps share.

This is the golden age of the mobile app market. Most customers aren’t clamoring for more advanced
and futuristic apps (devices yeah, apps no), they just want something useful and/or fun they can use on
what they’ve got. If your great idea will only work on the iPhone 12, it’s probably not such a great idea.
So here are some things that make an app successful.

Make it useful

The greatest apps to date have been those that do something we think we need, although we may not
realize we need it until we see it. If your app makes people think to themselves, “Whoa! I can totally
use that! Why didn’t I think of that!” you’ve probably got a winner. Whether it’s Genius Scan for taking
better notes in class, or SwiftKey or Dropbox, if it makes life more efficient or allows me to do something
on the run I previously had to do at a computer (or even worse, by hand), it has a market. (more…)
Retailers Use Mobile Marketing to Attract More Customers
Posted Jul 21st, 2011 By Mirna Bard in Mobile With | 2 Comments
As a customer, you’ve probably experienced the benefits of mobile marketing to give you discounts, specials, and freebies from your favorite brand. Right? Well, as a business owner, you can use this same type of hands-on mobile marketing to reach customers more effectively than ever before.

Even the most popular fast food chains like Subway, Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Wendy’s started marketing to customers with text marketing, iPhone apps, and mobile coupons just a few years ago. Many of these mobile apps will allow a customer to place an order online and pick up their food moments later. Simply brilliant.

Even large retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy stay connected with customers via text for holiday specials and discounts and have introduced iPhone apps to give customers more options. Instead of visiting the official website, customers can read reviews, order products, and create a gift list directly through their mobile phone.

As a business owner, you can take your mobile marketing campaign beyond just the standard text message. You can get creative with the following ideas:
- Mobile Payments: Starbucks recently introduced Starbucks Card Mobile payments available at more than 1000 Safeway locations via the Android App. Customers can load up their Starbucks card on their mobile phone and use their phone to pay for their coffee at their convenience. This means that Starbucks mobile payment is now available on 90% of all smartphones to make it virtually impossible for a customer not to connect with Starbucks through their mobile device. (more…)
Mobile Marketing Trend: Texting Is Mainstream
Posted Jul 13th, 2011 By Mirna Bard in Mobile With | 1 Comment

If you’re a small business owner who already uses text message marketing, then you’re on the right track. But it’s still important to stay up-to-date with the latest mobile marketing trends to ensure that you too can stay ahead of the pack.

Currently, there are four times as many mobile phones in the world as opposed to PC users. Roughly 20% of houses in the US are mobile only without a landline.

When you consider that we send 130 billion text messages each month, mobile marketing can be incredibly lucrative for small and large businesses if it is approached correctly. This is precisely why so many businesses have embraced text message marketing wholeheartedly as the most popular form of mobile marketing. Which is why text messaging is now becoming more mainstream than ever before.

To best grasp the concept, text messaging should be compared to e-mail marketing and can be used in the same way that you would create an e-mail campaign. Of course, instead of encouraging your customers to give you their e-mail address for a newsletter or a coupon, you’ll be asking for a mobile phone number to send the same type of condensed updates to a mobile phone.

Yet mobile marketing provides an even greater benefit. You don’t have to go to the trouble of creating a fancy e-mail campaign with images and video because you’ll only be using 160 characters of a text message. Even if a customer doesn’t make a sale the first time, 97% of your customers will still read your text message because it’s so short. You can’t beat those odds!

Businesses have been using text messages to reach out to customers for several years. A Comscore study has confirmed that 25% of all mobile phone users have signed up for anywhere from 1 to 10 text messaging programs on a monthly basis. This means that customers are ready and willing, and you can reach them with your marketing message at any time away from home.

And the text marketing trend continues. People of all ages are using texts for communication, meaning that businesses can use text message marketing for all generations. More and more customers are searching for mobile coupons as our economy recovers from the recession and programs like Groupon rise in popularity. As a result, a number of retail stores, grocers, and restaurants have launched mobile coupon marketing programs to reach out to more customers.

Last but not least, the result that can’t be beat in text marketing is the impressive ROI. A text message will normally get seven times the response rate as an e-mail, meaning that the same message sent out to the same group of customers via text versus e-mail will be much more successful to generate even more sales and revenue.

Guest Author: Bethany Ramos is an expert in Internet marketing and social media marketing, and she also co-owns her own e-commerce website, The Coffee Bump.
Mobile Payment Processing and What it Means for Small Business
Posted Jul 5th, 2011 By Mirna Bard in Mobile With | No Comments

Since the first point-of-sale terminals hit retail and restaurant locations around the country in 1979, credit card processing technology has continued to make large leaps forward with both advantages and disadvantages to business owners. The latest jump has been gaining traction in the last 24 months and promises to revolutionize the merchant services industry in the near future.

Credit card processing firms, fortune 500 companies, the nation’s largest banks, and a number of enterprising entrepreneurs have been pouring billions of dollars into a new technology called mobile processing. The idea of mobile processing is simple: allow a merchant or individual to process, pay or manage their payments on the go and from their mobile devices.

Mobile Processing for Businesses

One of the simplest applications for mobile processing comes from the co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who in 2009 started a new company called Square (www.squareup.com). Square allows an individual or business to accept a swiped credit card using nothing but their iPhone/Android phone and a little card reader that attaches directly to the device’s headphone jack. The unit is no bigger than a silver dollar and allows credit card transactions to be processed at the cheaper swiped rate versus a keyed in card.

Square mobile processing is unique because it carries with it fixed rates regardless of the card type. Small business owners who have had bad experiences with processing firms and are tired of dealing with difficult to understand processing statements may find the simplicity refreshing. However, Square’s limitation comes from the total processing amount allowed per merchant. The initial limit is only $1000 per month, which is a very small amount for any organization operating full time. (more…)
How to Make Quick Gains from Location Based Mobile Marketing
Posted Jun 28th, 2011 By Mirna Bard in Mobile With | No Comments
Under the broad umbrella of mobile marketing is location based marketing. Savvy smartphone users everywhere can pull up local search results on their phones at any time. These same smartphone users rely upon location based apps and social networks to share, interact, meet, and even recommend certain places to their online friends.

Some top location based networks for mobile users include:
- Foursquare
- Gowalla
- Loopt
- Yelp
As a business owner, the first step in the process to maximize this mobile marketing platform is to understand how each location based social network works. Most users will rely on the above apps on their smartphones to check in to certain locations to alert their friends of their whereabouts. The same feature can also be used with Facebook Places.

In order to get acclimated, download all of the above apps to your smartphone so that you can understand how each is best used.

The next step in the process is to set clear goals for what you hope to accomplish with the use of location mobile marketing for your business. Perhaps you want to increase local traffic to your retail store, raise awareness about a new shop that has opened up, or even bring back repeat customers to support your business. (more…)

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