Yesterday I was out at the ballpark watching one of my favorite teams play.  During the game, I received a promotion to fill out an online survey for a chance to win money.  To see just what was involved in the promotion, I pulled up the website on my phone and tried to fill out the survey right then and there.  3 innings later, I was still trying to complete the survey.

So what went wrong?

1. Site wasn’t optimized for phone platforms: When I got home, I pulled apart the survey’s code and found that it was running too many things in the background, keeping my phone’s browser from being able to display the information on the page until everything in the background had run its course.

2. Too many questions: There was page after page of survey questions, a lot of them being redundant or of little value to any marketing team.

3. Filling in the blanks was difficult: Once I got through the survey, I had to enter my information.  Unfortunately, it took me 5 minutes to enter my phone number because that field had difficulty registering the input from my phone.

Keep these things in mind when you go about designing your own surveys.  The ability of customers to use their phones to access the web means that you have to think about how to apply surveys to this new technology to get better data from your customers.

Share

Tweet

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released new figures on teenagers and text messaging.  Here are some interesting stats from the study:

• 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones
• 88% of teen cell phone users send text messages
• Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day
• One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day

So what does this mean to marketers? That the cell phone has become the direct marketing channel for the next generation of consumers. If you can develop a campaign that capitalizes on the small screen that 75% of teens today carry with them at all times, you can capture tomorrow’s consumer.

Granted, this is only one piece of the marketing pie, but its importance can no longer be ignored or denied. It’s time to start thinking mobile now so your company is ahead of the game tomorrow.

Apple announced the launch of its new advertising network for iPhone and iPad applications. This new network is exciting to digital marketers, but has a cost that clients might not want to pay.

The great thing about this network is that clients can be assured that advertisements will display properly on Apple’s devices. Providing a consistent experience will go a long way to improving brand recall and drive purchases whether it’s on the iPhone or iPad. Clients can be assured that the money they spent on creative will be money well spent.

But on the flip side of the coin is Apple’s business model for placing ads on the network. Apple says it will share profits with application developers in a 60/40 split. That means that for every dollar your client spends to put an ad on the network, the application developer (who would be considered a third party on the deal) would make 60 cents. Clients may not like the idea that 60% of their money spent to deliver advertising to customers is being handed over to someone they don’t think of as being part of the process.

Don’t get me wrong, I think developers need to be paid for their hard work. Without them, there wouldn’t be any applications to deliver ads on. But the sticker shock to clients may dissuade them from placing advertising on Apple’s mobile devices, despite possibly lucrative returns.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about evaluating building a mobile application for your company. But with the mobile space clearly expanding (smartphones, tablets, e-readers) determining a mobile strategy is important.

So how should one start to develop a strategy for your company? It starts with finding out what your market looks like in the mobile space.

Once you understand where your customers live in the mobile space, you can start to figure out what channels you can reach them on.

One of the most effective tools to reach customers is SMS. The reason being that most of the people in the country, despite the growing smartphone market, have simple cell phones that don’t have Internet access. Through simple SMS campaigns, you can get customer buy-in through promotional campaigns. But remember, customers need to opt-in before you start sending them messages.

You can please some of the people some of the time, but when it comes to frustrating mobile web browsers you’re probably already doing that in spades.

The image below is how much real estate the average Internet enabled phone has to view your webpage:

That’s not even large enough to view this entire blog post, let alone the graphics on the page.

Does your website have a Flash intro, or does it rely heavily on Flash elements?  If you said yes, guess what, no one with a mobile phone can view your page.  iPhones are unable to display Flash, and mobile Flash (for Andriod phones) won’t display certain elements and animations.  Plus, the large files associated with Flash will cripple most mobile phones trying to access them over their carrier network.

Thanks to server side technology, most IT departments can code a specialized site for mobile browsers that will display properly, and will be redirected to by your homepage when people link from Google or other search engines.

But the key question becomes: what is it that you want your mobile friendly website to accomplish?  Is it to educate, build awareness, or drive actions?

Does your phone have GPS technology in it?  Can it pinpoint your location using wireless networks?  Can you use it to access the web or download applications?

If you answered yes, yes, and yes then welcome to the world of Location Aware Marketing.

Using geolocation technology to find your phone’s physical location, web and mobile applications can broadcast your location to your social network, or be used to trigger location based events.

Location based events are things like receiving a coupon from Starbucks when you’re within a 2 block radius of your local Starbucks.

The power of geolocation is when location based events are tied to a CRM database.  With the CRM tied to a location based database, you can implement a loyalty program that takes into account how frequently a customer visits a store location, or how often they travel between locations in a given area.

I’ve personally worked to develop a custom location aware system, and with a conservative budget, companies can take full advantage of a custom solution for them.

Do you recognize what the image to the right is?  It could be one of the most important tools in your next print campaign.

This is a QR Code (otherwise known as a 2D Barcode).  If you have a smart phone, there are applications you can install to view the encoded information in these tags.

You can embed hyperlinks, email addresses, contact information, and plain text into one of these.  For instance, you can put your contact information into one of these and print it on a business card to make it easier to share your contact details with new clients or customers.

But the true power of one of these codes is when you use it on a print campaign.  You can embed a unique hyperlink to a tracked website so you can find out how many people saw your ad.  Now you can determine how many people saw your advertisement and took action without having to wait for sales figures to come back.

Having delt with the headaches of developing an iPhone app before, I figured I’d share some insights into the “need” for a company to have a dedicated phone application from a marketing perspective.

Things to consider:

1. Where your audience lives: Are they on an iPhone, Android platform, Windows Mobile, Palm, or other device?
2. What data will you collect via the app: Number of downloads, requests to the server for updates, IP addresses, or something else?
3. Why an application: Could a mobile optimized website achieve the same result?

After answering these three questions, ask yourself one more:

Is this application about pushing data to customers, or is it about an engaging customer experience? People won’t interact with an application if it’s just a repackaged commercial. They need to get something out of it.

At the end of the day, the customer decides the success or failure of whatever your company offers. And as we’ve heard over-and-over again, in the customer’s mind, content is king.

Share