Hasta La Creative!

In just under a decade, mobile devices have morphed from a handy tool that allows people to make phone calls on the go into a users’ primary communication channel and ubiquitous online connection to friends, family, business and entertainment. The rapidly changing role mobile devices play in our lives is evident from a mobile device users’ utter panic if their phone is misplaced or stolen: The loss creates the same physiological and psychological symptoms once reserved for a traumatic event like a home burglary — a sense of disorientation and alienation from what they hold dear as well as profound separation anxiety.

These feelings arise because the mobile phone today is much more than a mere handset: It’s a portal to the digital world we increasingly inhabit. We use it to keep up with loved ones on social platforms, find our way in the real world, catch up on the latest news, conduct personal business like banking and handle production tasks while we make a living.

The smartphone is, in a very real sense, our home on the range, our digital home. And with this change in the way users relate to their mobile devices, this increased dependence, marketers and sales professionals must evolve the way they approach customers to effectively reach out to them in their mobile abodes.

As marketers and sales professionals understand how personal mobile devices have become, they will do well to think about what worked for our grandparents’ generation in the form of the door-to-door salesmen. Before the digital age, successful door-to-door salesmen knew that to make a sale, they had to engender trust in order to gain access to a prospective customer’s private home. Theses yesteryear sales professionals followed commonsense guidelines to gain access to the homeowner and an opportunity to make a sale.

Present a neat appearance: Successful salesmen were groomed and dressed appropriately for the neighborhoods in which they worked.

Use a confident approach: Salesmen were deliberate and confident when they knocked at the door — finding a balance between being too aggressive or too meek.

Make a positive first impression: Salesmen knew the homeowner would peek at them through a curtain or keyhole and prepared a positive, non-threatening look.

Greet customers in their own language: Salesmen studied their target customers and greeted them in a manner and language that was familiar to the listener.

Anticipate objections and create trust: Salesmen created pitches to allay concerns and worked to build trust by addressing pain points and managing expectations.

Involve customers in the solution and tell the truth: Salesmen who achieved long-term success convinced customers that they needed the product with a true account of the benefits.

Follow up and ensure satisfaction: Good salesmen knew happy customers were their most effective marketing channel and that the customer was always the final arbiter of success.

With just a few adjustments in the wording, these same principles apply today when creating mobile marketing strategies. The medium is different: Instead of approaching the door of a residence, today’s mobile marketers are using apps and mobile sites to deliver their pitch directly to the portal of the user’s digital home.

But just as successful salesmen in a bygone era took care to convey honesty by projecting an appropriate and confident image, speaking in the same vernacular as customers, creating a pitch that appealed to pain points while allaying fears and involving the customer in developing the solution, successful mobile marketers should strive to make an equally positive impression in pixels using these very same tactics. Today, word-of-mouth sales might originate from a retweet instead of a back-fence chat with a neighbor, but the revenue generated is just as valuable.

The key takeaway for businesses today is that mobile devices now function as a portable doorway to a customer’s digital home. Successful sales professionals will embrace modern tools, but that doesn’t mean they should leave tried-and-true sales tactics and customer focus behind; they simply evolve these principles onto new platforms.

By understanding the psychology of mobile, how personal and important the devices have become to their users, today’s successful sales professionals can gain entry to prospective customers’ home on the range, their digital home, with the latest technology while generating revenue the old fashioned way — through honest iteration and customer satisfaction.

James Ramsey is the CEO of Fiddlefly, a digital creative agency.

True it’s not rocket science, but getting what you need from your mobile website is not as easy as shrinking down your desktop content and moving it around. Not if you want to drive real outcomes, not if you want your mobile site to shine. Here are six steps to getting your mobile site on the road to greatness:

1. Pick An Outcome

Figure out what it is you want your visitor to do, the task they must perform to create what you need. These vary greatly but every nuance falls into five general categories – revenue, data, brand engagement, promotion, or drive traffic. Figure yours out, and stick to it (maybe two).

– Revenue/Commerce

If your company has items or services for sale directly, then your primary goal on-line is to convince the visitor to purchase your goods.

– Data Collection

If your primary goal is to gather information, build a data base of emails, or collect data for direct sales initiatives, then innovative solutions are needed to convince a data collection weary world to give you their information or participate in your survey.

– Enhanced Engagement

If your company wants to immerse visitors in your brand, then a digital experience that encourages interaction and increased time on site is necessary.

– Drive Traffic

If you want to create foot traffic into your brick and mortar location or sort the traffic digitally directing it to other properties, then a compelling digital pathway in impetrative.

– Promotion

If you are championing an idea, product, movement, or philanthropy, then creating engaging ways to inform and garner support and sharing is your digital mission.

2. Build A Path

Once you understand your objective, the outcome you want from your visitors, build a path and they will follow. Create a clear and direct digital linear pathway for your visitors to follow and put what you want them to do at the end. When your path is built with your visitor in mind you will be astounded by the compliance rates. However, if your mobile path way(s) look more like twisty country roads with infinite possibilities, your visitors will get lost in the Tulgey Wood and never find their way to the Queen.

3. Know Your Audience

Look back, you may have missed a very important point that actually deserves an entire article itself – “with your visitor in mind”. It is of the utmost importance to understand your audience. Just as you must choose one outcome to be effective, it is imperative that you speak to someone in particular. Not everyone, not even most people, speak to a very specific audience. You’ve heard the saying, “When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.” Nowhere is this more true than mobile.

4. Less Is More

What’s true for salt, make-up and feng shui furniture placement is also true for mobile design, less is more. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to fit everything which is on your desktop onto your mobile site. It makes for a cluttered look and lots of scrolling for your visitors – if they don’t bounce first. Choose only content that makes sense with your chosen outcome and cut down on your copy.

5. Use Mobile Design Elements

Elements which are fantastic on desktop do not always translate to mobile. Create new or redesign elements specifically for your mobile site, to work well with mobile sized screens. Three quick examples, of which there are many, would be:

– Simplify and flatten – The nuances of intricately detailed logos, icons, and design features are lost on mobile and can look wonky (yes it’s a real word and perfect for this purpose).

– Symbols not words – To keep your site from looking cluttered, use conventional mobile symbols rather than words for taps to call, connect socially or find the menu.

– Customization creates space – Customized social icons can help create a cohesive look and gives the site a less cluttered look.

6. Freshen Up Often

Just as horses can smell fear and your mother knew you had not cleaned your room just by looking at your face, mobile visitors can spot an old site within seconds. Freshen up your content often and plan on a redesign at least once a year to stay current.

This contributed article was written by James Ramsey, CEO of Fiddlefly, a digital creative agency.

So this is the year of mobile, right? Oh wait, last year was. Or was it the year before? Oh, nevermind. The fact is, mobile is here and it’s here to stay. But as a marketer, are you ready? Is your path towards “going mobile” clear? Do you have a rock solid mobile strategy in place?

In this white paper entitled 5 Myths Every CMO Should Know About ‘Going Mobile,’ you will learn what resources you need to implement a mobile strategy, that a mobile website is just the tip of the iceberg and and that the technological hurdles are more far reaching that how your site renders on the iPhone.

Download this Mobiquity white paper now and learn how to “go mobile” the right way.

Browse through your personal social media feeds – Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Foursquare, etc. It’s very likely that at least one of your friends or connections has checked-in at a restaurant, park, or local venue. Social media today not only allows us to update how we are feeling or what we are doing, but it also allows us to share our location with our friends and followers.

Majority of today’s most popular social media platforms offer some sort of check-in or location tagging option. When location tagging first started a few years back, it seemed a little creepy. Why on Earth would you want to share your location with strangers? However, location check-ins do much more than just tell us where our connections are. Similar to the way businesses use status updates, they can strategically use check-ins to increase visibility of their brand or product, grow their audience, and potentially bring in sales.

Businesses who have yet to create their location or use check-ins and tagging are missing out on a major opportunity to reach their hottest targets at the perfect moment. Users who tag their locations are prime targets for businesses as they are already invested by being present at the location.

Here are five reasons businesses can and should be taking advantage of location tagging and check-ins.

1. Visibility: When users check into a location, their entire audience is now aware of where they are. Perhaps it’s a new restaurant or art exhibit in town – seeing a friend check-in can pique interest in that location, leading to plans to check it out. This means that from one check-in, hundreds or even thousands of other users are potentially aware of or inclined to go to an establishment.

2. Traffic: When a user checks into a business, the check-in automatically links to the company’s page on that platform. One click takes interested consumers to the company page or one dedicated to it so be sure the page is up-to-date with the ideal information for an audience to see.

3. Instant Reviews: Check-ins usually allow a comment or attachment to accompany the check-in so when people tag their location, it’s paired with an instant review. For example, Instagram photos of food at a restaurant often have captions describing how delicious the meal is. Or check-ins at events are often paired with a statuses like “The new exhibit at the SF MOMA is to die for!” The combination of a check-in plus a solid instant review is more than enough to convince curious friends or followers to check it out themselves.

4. Sales: Sites like Yelp or Foursquare allow companies to easily offer coupons or discounts for checking into a location. This strategy works in a couple ways – it benefits those who are already coming to the business, rewarding them and leaving them satisfied enough to return or bring more business in by sharing the deal with friends; or entices those in close vicinity who searched for something similar to check out your establishment instead.

5. Conversation: Perhaps the biggest value of location tagging to a business is the ability to connect and directly engage with consumers as check-ins give businesses a real time view of what people are doing, thinking, or, most importantly, saying. Businesses can then reach out to consumers further enhance a positive experience or offer a solution to a negative one. Developing a relationship with a consumer is a major step in the direction of creating and maintaining customer loyalty.

The advent and subsequent popularity of social media has benefited businesses in ways never imaginable a decade ago. As social media users continue to share their locations and thoughts with their friends and followers, businesses should seize the opportunity and use it to their benefit. There is plenty of opportunity to increase visibility, grow an audience, and rake in more sales when location tagging and check-ins are used strategically.

This article was written by Viraheat’s Eileen Bernardo.

The new iOS 7 release presents an opportunity for your branded app to leap frog the competition and steal market share unlike any other iOS update in the operating system’s history. Apple will be seeking to feature applications that are designed specifically for iOS 7 and users will want to use applications designed with the new UI/UX rather than the older iOS6 look and feel.

This presents an opportunity for brands to capitalize on these factors by being first to market and gaining market share against the competition. This white paper will provide an overview of the key changes that come with iOS7 upgrade, and how to best take advantage of them with your mobile apps.

Download the whitepaper now and make sure your branded app takes advantage of iOS 7.

Did you know that 75% of the companies do not optimize email for mobiles yet? With 43% of the people now reading and responding emails through mobiles — a figure that is expected to hit 50% in 2013 — coupled with the fact 97% of the people view emails once, it becomes clear marketers should design emails to render properly on mobile devices.

Check out this infographic that’s packed with charts and graphs that share how mobile is permeating the email experience.

Here’s an interesting addition to the “brands make products” trend. Audi, with help from DDB Spain is out with a mobile Android app called Start-Stop that mimics one of the features in new Audi vehicles; smart technology turns off the engine when not in use (at a stop light, etc.) and turns it back on when needed so that energy is saved.

The app monitors which apps have been running the longest in the background and sends an alert to remind the user to quit the app, thus saving valuable battery life.

It’s a perfect tie in with the brand and a practical and useful product all in one.

U.S. businesses spend more than $300 billion on advertising each year, but only about 15% of that is spent on online advertising. The other quarter trillion dollars is spent each year not to drive a click but to drive a store visit or a phone call – tens of billions of phone calls each year from U.S. consumers to businesses. And that number is growing by billions of calls each year due to the growth of mobile search and the ubiquity of mobile phones, which results in consumers being connected wherever they are.

These developments have increased the importance of call marketing for advertisers. So, for businesses that talk to their customers on the phone, call tracking is now an essential capability. It allows marketers to properly attribute calls and marketing campaigns to a lead source, providing essential business intelligence.

Call tracking is a technology that is decades old, and it has long been a key component of campaigns involving call centers. Businesses want those calls because they convert into customers at a much higher rate than Internet clicks and also at a higher average order value. But they only want high-quality calls because it costs them several dollars each time they answer the phone. So, for businesses that are looking to fully capitalize on the value of call marketing campaigns, lead attribution is merely a starting point. Call marketing automation is the key to truly unlocking the value of a call marketing campaign.

There is some confusion about what constitutes call marketing automation in the industry, with some initially believing that call tracking and call marketing automation are one and the same. However, call marketing automation is a much more comprehensive approach, of which call tracking is just a single component. The right call marketing automation solution delivers complete campaign management, clear attribution and practical analytics in one end-to-end solution and makes it easy to seamlessly integrate with the solutions marketers already use.

With call marketing automation, many more elements are involved, including quality filtering and routing calls with IVR technology. This enables businesses to ensure that only qualified leads reach call centers and are routed locally, allowing marketers to successfully manage resources and maximize ROI.

Many companies include call filtering and routing processes in their phone marketing campaigns, but most have not yet integrated these processes into their call tracking systems, which ideally include detailed analytics that support lead scoring and campaign optimization. Those who track, analyze and optimize calls are ahead of the game, but there is an even better way to extract the most value from the campaign through call marketing automation. The next step for the savvy marketer is to generate more of the most valuable calls through syndication.

With syndication, marketers can establish complementary partnerships and increase distribution, using a syndication provider’s technology to bundle and distribute offers with their existing platform. With the right provider, this process doesn’t require IT support (and the budget hit that entails). Marketing operations can easily and quickly accomplish syndication using intuitive tools.

The right syndication partner allows marketers to move beyond call tracking and effectively manage operations on a single, easy-to-use platform, growing their business through call marketing automation. A comprehensive solution should include the following elements:

Pay-per-call campaign creation and management
Comprehensive call tracking, including keyword, traffic source and other metrics
Click-to-call capabilities
Call analytics and real-time reporting
True comprehensive ROI optimization
Search keyword call services

This type of solution can be efficiently delivered via cloud technology, enabling the marketer to maintain complete control of the campaign at their fingertips, in real time. It includes call tracking, but that is just one of several elements, including quality filtering and routing, detailed analytics and, most importantly, distribution syndication to generate more valuable calls.

In today’s competitive environment, marketers must find new ways to improve ROI and drive qualified leads to their business. A call marketing automation strategy can be the ideal approach. Marketers who value phone calls and want to grow their business should move beyond call tracking and generate the maximum return on their call marketing investment with call marketing automation.

This guest post was written by Jason Spievak, CEO of RingRevenue

The big question. One many guys are both excited to ask and horrified to perform. Jeweler Helzberg Diamonds, with help from Rosetta, is out with Proposal Pro, an iPhone app that aims to reduce the stress associated with popping the question. The app offers:

– Tips on choosing the perfect ring
– A ring sizer to make sure it fits
– Tips on how to ask her parents
– How to find the best location to propose
– How to write a memorable proposal
– How to share the news with friends and family

There’s even a timeline to tie the whole process together. Sadly, the app can’t guarantee a positive response but it sure can improve one’s proposal skills. Oh, and sell a few diamonds too.

An infographic from mobile ad network Mojiva details the planned behaviors of mobile and tablet users during the Super Bowl. Overall, smartphones will remain a primary mechanism of social activities during this year’s game,Here are some key findings from the research:

– 9% of tablet owners plan to use their device during the game, while 56% of smartphone users intend to engage on theirs.

– 45% say they use their smartphone during the game to post updates to their social networks, while 58% say they discuss the game through text, IM or email.

– Texting (26%), Posting to social networks (21%) and Talking (20%) are the leading smartphone activities during the Super Bowl.

– More then half (54%) of respondents say the Super Bowl has impact on how they feel about a brand.

– At 59%, entertaining mobile ads takes the lead over more relevant (13%) or sponsorship (15%) ads that are displayed.