Local Mobile Marketing – 6 Tips for Small Business - Page 2
6 Ways to Enter Local Mobile Marketing If you’re new to local mobile marketing, take steps now to make your business more discoverable. If you’re not ready to invest in getting your own app yet, consider implementing these easy mobile marketing ideas:
- Make Your Website Mobile-Compatible – As an easy entry point, get your website optimized for mobile phones. It’s now easy to make your website small screen-friendly. If you’re using Wordpress, there are several free and premium plugins available.
- Join Mobile Directories – Getting listed in a few mobile directories easily puts your business “on the mobile map.” The new Google Places offers one such opportunity. Also many local mobile marketing
- Create a Mobile Website – Someday soon, every business will need two versions of their website – one for computer users, the other for the mobile / wireless crowd. Services such as Mofuse and Mofuse Premium and mobiSiteGalore offer mobile site design services.
- Build Traffic with Location-based App Marketing – Many local retailers, restaurants, charities and nightclubs tie-in with apps like FourSquare and Yelp to attract mobile customers.
- Start Mobile Advertising – Local mobile advertising on Google is a low-cost way to reach more customers. Bid only on what you’re willing to pay, either paying per click (PPC) or per phone call from a prospect. You can even target multiple mobile devices, ranging from high-end smartphones to standard cellphones.
- Connect via Text Message Short Codes or QR Codes – Most exciting are Quick Response (QR) codes – i.e., the new bar codes. QR codes can be read by mobile phones. We increasingly see QR Codes in magazine ads; on Web pages, billboards, and lawn signs; and even on T-shirts! Once a mobile user scans your QR code, it’s easy to connect in real-time, sending them coupons, event announcements, RSS feed updates, and more.
Watch This: Your Mobile Web Analytics To better meet the mobile crowd’s needs, pay keen attention to your mobile Web analytics. Google Analytics (GA) and similar programs can track mobile Web traffic on a basic level. For finer metrics plus actionable detail for site optimization, use a more advanced SEO platform like Ginzametrics, which complements and integrates nicely with GA, Omniture or CoreMetrics. With Ginzametrics, you’ll discover the exact search terms that “hidden” mobile visitors are using to land on your site. This analytics program also shows details of referred traffic from the top 3 search engines in 35 global markets. The Ginza dashboard even recommends an array of improvements you should make, to better optimize your Web and mobile pages for more traffic. Mobile has become so important in small business marketing that major search engines are now tracking the volume of mobile traffic visiting websites. They’ll soon start ranking mobile-ready sites the same way they do traditional websites. To prepare for this and other local mobile marketing opportunities, first get a sense of how many of these customers are hitting your website, and how they’re moving about while there. You might learn that mobile customers are bouncing off your site in droves. If so, how much longer can you continue missing out on this potential revenue?
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