Tag : ROI

  • Retailers Use Mobile Marketing to Attract More Customers

    Posted Jul 21st, 2011 By 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 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.

     

  • The State of Social Media for Business 2010

    Posted Nov 22nd, 2010 By in Business, Social Media With | 1 Comment

    SmartBrief, Inc. has released an extremely valuable tool to add to your social media collection — The State of Social Media for Business 2010. This report is the most comprehensive study I have seen on social media.  It is filled with goals, opportunities, threats, and tactics of social media. Approximately 6,500 executives shared everything about how their companies are adopting, integrating and utilizing social media in this benchmarking study.

    This excellent survey was designed to provide a benchmark of current trends and ways of tracking the following:

    • Who is using social media for business
    • What social-media tools and channels are being used
    • What goals are being pursued
    • What tactics are being deployed
    • What obstacles are standing in the way of adoption
    • How companies assess their own social-media strategies

    Some key insights from the report include:

    • 66.5% of businesses have adopted social media in the past 18 months.
    • Less than 15% of businesses are measuring the ROI of their social-media efforts.
    • Only 14.2% of businesses find their social-media strategies to be “very effective” — and only 7.3% consider them “very revenue generating.”

    The data also shows that despite some early innovators, most companies are in the burgeoning stages of social media adoption. The report shows areas that are underleveraged and still have enormous potential for expansion.  The following trends highlight how most companies are just scratching the surface of social media potential for business:

    1. Many companies are new to social media and have used the channel for a year or less.

    2. Companies rely heavily on five major social-media platforms.

    3. Awareness of other social-media platforms is low.

    4. It takes time for social media to become effective for companies.

    5. Most companies use social media to broadcast information to customers and prospective customers.

    6. Most companies have not yet cracked the code on how to create an engaging, creative or effective social-media strategy.

    7. Most companies do not have an expectation of social-media ROI, and social-media measurement is not yet the norm.

    8. There is a big opportunity for companies to distinguish themselves in this arena.

    You can download the key takeaways in a FREE topline or purchase the 145-page State of Social Media for Business report.  I highly recommend the latter.

  • 15 Paid Monitoring Tools That May Be Worth Every Penny

    Posted Sep 24th, 2010 By in Business, Internet Marketing, Social Media With | 11 Comments

    You’ve heard social media gurus say that you must listen online before getting involved with social media, but you don’t understand what that means.  So, what does it mean to “Listen” in social media? To listen also means to monitor, to lurk, or to observe what is going on online because it is essential to do your homework before you leap.

    A couple months ago, I listed 25 monitoring tools that will not cost you a penny; however, there are tons more that may be worth including into your budget.  Below are 15 monitoring tools that have a price, but will help you ensure that nothing online will escape your radar.  They are listed in no particular order.

    Radian6: One of the most comprehensive tools out there, Radian6 allows you to listen in on conversations that involve you and gives you the opportunity to put the information into quantitative formats, which allow you to create an action plan to improve your strategy.

    Visible: This platform comes in at the higher end of the spectrum of social media monitoring services in both price and functionality. Get not only updated trends on online conversations, TruCast will make you aware of all the influencers that people listen to when looking for new brands to try out. It also offers very strong customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities.

    Trackur: One of the more affordable social media monitoring solutions. Trackur provides conversation trending, email alerts, custom filters, a nifty AJAX dashboard and the ability to monitor brands, execs, employees and competitors. (more…)

  • 25 Monitoring Tools That Will Not Cost You a Penny

    Posted Jul 6th, 2010 By in Business, Internet Marketing, Social Media With | 5 Comments

    Your brand, industry, and competitors are being discussed online whether you use social media or not. Actively monitoring what people are saying about you, your brand, your industry, and your competitors has many benefits, including protecting your brand reputation, discovering what customers want and need, learning of new opportunities, staying on top of competition, avoiding disasters, and measuring ROI.

    Below are 25 monitoring tools that won’t cost you anything to use, and will help you gain a wealth of knowledge about your brand, influencers, prospects, customers, competitors, and much more.

    1. Backtype – Get alerts of where your competitors are promoting their website and who they are interacting with.
    2. Bit.ly – Shorten and track how many clicked on and retweeted your links.
    3. BlogPulse – Get data from blogs, news posts and other online content that include you or your competitors in the conversation.
    4. BoardTracker – Search forums and discussion boards or set up alerts that will tell you when and how often people mention a particular search term.
    5. DomainTools – Get a report on a website’s domain information.
    6. Google Alerts – Set up email alerts of target keywords or phrases that are important to you, your brand, and industry.
    7. Google Analytics – See where your website traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited, what keywords are being used to find you, etc.
    8. Google Video – Find videos on a specific topic, competitor videos, etc.
    9. Jodange – Track consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
    10. Klout – Measure who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.
    11. Knowem – Check and reserve your brand, product, personal name or username on social media websites.
    12. Monitter – Find out what people are saying in real-time on Twitter.
    13. Oodle – Discover competitors’ plans for the future by monitoring the types of jobs they post online.
    14. Quarkbase – See traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity about websites.
    15. SEO for Firefox – Find out a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, if it’s listed in certain directories etc.
    16. SEOPro Link Checker – Find out which sites link back to your website as well as your competitors’ sites.
    17. SocialMention – Check and get alerts on what people are saying about a term across different blogs and social outlets.
    18. Technorati – Find industry bloggers, influencers, and monitor who mentions you or your competitors in the blogosphere.
    19. Trendrr – Find out how your brand or product is trending in real time compared to others.
    20. Tweetburner – Shorten and track URLs on Twitter and Friendfeed.
    21. Twendz – Track conversation and user sentiment on Twitter in real-time.
    22. Twinfluence – Measure the combined influence of tweeps and their followers.
    23. Twitter Search – Using keywords and phrases, search what people have discussed on Twitter.
    24. Xinu – Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics
    25. Yahoo Site Explorer – Discover who is linking to you and your competitors.

    Of course, it does not stop with these. There are hundreds of tools out there! In another blog post, I will discuss the paid monitoring tools.

    What tools do you use? Which free tools did I miss?

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