5 Ways to Rock Mobile Marketing

[ad name=”Adsense3″]Anyone with a smartphone, business manager or not, can tell you why smartphones are so important to small business marketing campaigns.  You would have to be completely out of touch with modern marketing tactics — and if you’re a business manager, hopefully you aren’t — to not know that we use our phones for everything, from snapping pictures to finding deal on things we love.

Given that one of the most effective ways to market to customers is simply to put ads where they look most often, it’s clear that to not have a mobile campaign is marketing suicide.  Still, knowing that you need to have a mobile presence and knowing how to develop that presence are very different things.

It doesn’t matter what your business is — even construction managers need to stay in touch with their customers.  So if you need to give your mobile presence a make-over, here are some ways to start:

Texts

Text messaging is the simplest form of mobile marketing, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.  Texts are a great way to communicate with your customers, because they allow you to send out a brief reminder of your services and/or sales without taking too much time.  But you can’t just look through numbers in the phone book and start messaging people.  Before you start sending messages, ask customers to opt-in to your text-messaging list.  Services like eztexting.com are a great help in this process.  After you’ve opted some folks in, then send out messages.

In addition to texts, you can also send MMS messages, which are basically the same, but with audio, video, pictures, or just a lot more text.  These can be extremely effective, even for our construction managers, because people respond more positively to visual cues than to text.

Searches

When you are on your smartphone in public, you are probably on Facebook, or you’re trying to find something.  As a business owner, you want to take advantage of this fact and post mobile-friendly directions, links, or apps on your site that lead the customers to you and your business.  Furthermore, you can ask customers to “check in” on Facebook or Twitter when they arrive at your store or “share” their purchases when they buy something.  Friends of your customers will see the shares and the idea is that they will be prompted to visit you as well.

Internet Ads

Of course, you probably have ads all over the internet for your business, but make sure to also include links to your mobile site or a mobile barcode (QR code) that does the same.  So many business have mobile ads that link to full versions of their websites — this is a mistake.  Viewing full web-pages on a smartphone can be disorienting, and besides, what’s the point of having a mobile site (and you definitely should have one) if you don’t link to it?

Apps

Not every business needs a mobile app, but if you can find an excuse to develop one, do it, and then push marketing messages through the app.  It’s extremely important, if you have an app, to make it searchable and easily found on app markets, so that your app actually gets downloaded.

Special Content

Develop special content for mobile viewers and browsers that is activated by links or QR codes.  This content can be videos, images, coupons, or any downloadable material that you link to — whatever it is, just make sure it sends a message about your business.  (Yes, even for construction managers.)

This is a guest post by Kristie Lewis from construction management degree. You can reach her at: Kristie.Lewis81 @ gmail. Com.