Mark - - - > Tennant

It’s On! Our first mobile marketing & social media workshop will be Friday, March 16 at Panera in Mentor, just east of Heisley near Kohl’s. Well worth the time and a ton of info will be shared.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Last night while watching Antiques Roadshow there was a woman who brought in a newspaper from the 1780’s called ‘The New York Advertiser’. The entire front page of the paper was covered with ads. (I know, I said the same thing…”who knew?”)

Anyhow, as I was glancing at the shot of the paper I noticed an ad with a horse drawn carriage, some type of delivery/taxi carriage; and me simply being me thought immediately how important it is if you’re in business these days to have a mobile-optimized web site or some type of mobile strategy.

See? Even the gentleman in the photograph was far ahead of his time and has a QR code right there on his on horse-drawn taxi!!

Here are a few things off the cuff to remember as a business owner when you jump into the world of mobile advertising and marketing:

1. Create a good mobile marketing strategy. Don’t go mobile just for the sake of going mobile. Planning, discussion and strategy are key.

2. Create a mobile web site for your business. It is fairly inexpensive, easy to use, looks great on a smartphone AND most likely it will put you ahead of your competition instantly. There are two ways to go about this; have your web person take the most important content of your web site and consolidate that content onto a mobile page by adjusting the style sheets used to control the look of that page.  Be sure to follow the K.I.S.S. rule during this process. Do this for every page you would like for your mobile site.

Another way to create a mobile web site is to use a third party mobile web site creation tool such as iFlyMobi (http//iflymobi.com). And there are many others out there as well. A quick Google search can assist in locating them.

3. Leverage QR Codes in your advertising to get the most out of your advertising dollars. QR Codes are the little rectangular bar codes that have been popping up on print ads the past couple of years. As of this writing men have proven to react and utilize QR Codes more than women. For example if you are a pizza shop and the QR Code takes the visitor to a mobile coupon for $10 off a large pizza a male ages 25-54 is more likely to scan that QR code and take advantage of that offer. However, and this is a big however, women are very, very mobile savvy and will utilize mobile search for locating businesses, comparison shopping and best of all they have a high percentage rate of buying.

4. Always, always, always when using QR Codes have your mobile-optimized page render and not a traditional non-mobile page. There is nothing more annoying or aesthetically unappealing to someone with a smartphone to have to pull and pinch to see the content of your web page. You’ve already made the person scan a QR Code, make it worth their while by offering a special deal, discount or coupon in a mobile-optimized environment.

5. Test, test and test more using multiple platforms, iPhone, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. Test as many different types of mobile platforms as possible so the look across all platforms is consistent.

6. When a person searches for your business via a mobile device poll the user’s browser or operating system (O/S) they are using to view your site. If it is coming from a mobile device render the mobile web site and if the browser or O/S is from a laptop or desktop computer render the traditional non-mobile site.

7. Place mobile type keywords into the Meta tags of your web site so you increase your chances of being seen on page one of a mobile search.

8. Integrate your social media strategy with your mobile strategy.

9. Measure your results using a variety of tools to justify your time, money and effort and tweak your strategy as you move forward.

Using these techniques (and there are many others) you will hit the ground running when you launch your mobile campaign and most of all, stick to it!