The Future of Technology and What it Means For Marketers

With all of they hype coming from Google Glasses and potential Apple iWatch coming to surface in the near future, I decided to look at a few of the current and upcoming technologies and devices that will change the marketers and advertisers reach their customers.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is defined as a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented, or supplemented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Essentially this technology modifies your view of reality. A good example can be found in the video sample below in which IKEA has implemented the technology in hopes of enticing the consumer to purchase one of their products for their home.

This type of technology is already being implemented for everything from catalogs, advertisements, and even business cards. With smartphone and mobile device ownership only increasing in the future, look for this to be the next big thing in reaching customers.

Google Glass

Using augmented reality as one of its main components, Google Glass seems to be the next step in mobile devices. The abilities of having what is essentially a hands-free computer on your head seems to open up endless possibilities for advertisers and marketers. One example that I am excited about is the potential use of the glasses to record a "day in the life of" series. Could you imagine a sports star such as Travis Pastrana or Lebron James wearing these glasses during a racing event or NBA Finals? Fans would then be able to literally "walk" in their idols shoes for a day. Once Google Glass becomes available to everyone I would expect a massive increase in videos uploaded to YouTube, similar to when video became available on phones.

Oculus Rift

Similar to the Virtual Reality centers in the arcades of the 90's, but with less hardware and better graphics, Oculus Rift seems to be the next step in how we play games, watch TV and more. With the ability to display a stereoscopic 3D perspective to users, look for this piece of gaming equipment to quickly adapt into a way to surf the internet, watch TV and more. A good example of how this system can help marketing or advertisers is in terms of gaming and exercising. Using the Oculus Rift system, users could run through the New York Marathon route, or bike through the Tour de France without leaving their homes.

These are just a couple pieces of technology and devices that I expect to make an impact within the marketing and advertising world within the next 5-10 years or sooner. As marketers and advertisers it is important to stay on top of  the ever changing technology and social media landscape in order to provide clients and customers with unique and one of a kind campaigns, and I feel that these devices will be leading the way in those categories for the foreseeable future. What other types of technology and devices do you see changing the way we market and advertise? Feel free to comment below.

17% of Global Web Usage Coming From Mobile Phones

In a recent study done by Statista, an online statistics portal, the company discovered that 17% of global web usage and page views were coming from mobile devices. North America alone saw an increase in page views coming from mobile devices rise almost 6% over last year. While this may seem like a relatively small percentage of the overall page views, it is important to notice that it was a 6% increase over the 2012 number of 11% of the page views. As this number is expected to increase as more and more people buy smartphones, it is important for advertisers to realize the potential that this change has for its customers and the way they market to them.

Responsive Design

As noted in previous posts and several articles throughout the web, responsive design is the new trend in web development and design. Built to format to any type of device and format, responsive design allows users to view your website whenever and with whatever type of device they are on. Utilizing responsive design for a site not only allows the advertiser to create one unified template for both desktop and mobile, but also saves web developers time.

Mobile Apps

With the increase in page views via mobile devices, it is important to take into factor a mobile app for an advertiser. A mobile app not only allows you to occupy space on a customer's smartphone or tablet, but also can give them one touch or tap ability to visit your website. With a mobile app, advertisers can also reach their customers through push notifications, text messages and more.

Social Media

As customers increase their time spent on mobile devices, so should advertisers. Social media review and location apps like Yelp and Foursquare should be at the forefront of this development. By effectively creating and branding these pages, as well as promoting them on the website and brick and mortar shops of businesses, businesses are effectively creating a customer generated focus group that allows the business owner to see what their busiest days are, what time that they get the most people and so much more. This type of interaction between customer and business also helps to increase that pages rankings within search results pages, improving the businesses chances of reaching new customers.

With the numbers mentioned above only increasing as the years go on and more people switch to mobile devices over their desktop or laptop, it is important for businesses to adapt to the new platform, just like when the internet was the next big thing. Failure to correctly adapt can and will lead to losses in sales, drops in visits to the site, and potentially loss of page rank and position in the search results pages. 

1 in 3 People Now Own a Tablet – 3 Opportunities to Maximize Reach on Mobile Devices

A recent study conducted by Pew Research, a third (34%) of Americans aged 18 or older noted that they own a tablet computer, which is almost twice the amount of tablet owners than a year ago (18%). If your company has been slow to adapt, or even avoiding the move into the digital space, then now may be the time to show this survey to your peers. As a business in today’s ever changing technology landscape, it is important that you leverage each and every form of mobile technology in order to ensure a profitable company. Some of the ways to help your company maximize their reach on mobile devices are explained below.

Know Who Your Target Audience Is

Most people would assume that since tablets are a relatively new technology that it is being adapted by younger generations (18-34) rather than the older generation, right? Wrong.  According to those surveyed, almost half of (49%) of adults age 35-44 now own a tablet computer, significantly more than the 18-24 age group (33%), and the 25-34 age group (37%). So what does this mean for your business? It can mean that either A) your target audience is more comfortable with the smaller, more convenient smartphone and therefore you should begin using marketing techniques geared towards this mobile device, or B) the need to create a mobile friendly website is definitely something that should be put on top of the year’s digital marketing strategy plan. Know your target market and what type of mobile device they prefer or own can help to create a better understanding of how and where you should market your business, helping to maximize your reach.

Begin Your Move From Desktop to Mobile

While 1 in 3 own a tablet and over half of Americans owning a smartphone, now is the time to begin experimenting, working on, and improving your mobile website and brand presence. Does your website layout change to fit the size screen it is on? Or what about a mobile application for an easier purchasing process for customers on the go? These types of things can help to improve customer relationships, build brand loyalty, and make for an overall pleasant experience for customers.

Optimize Your PPC Campaigns for Mobile Searches

With the large majority of your target demographic owning either a smartphone or tablet, and mobile searches accounting for nearly half of all searches, it is important that your PPC campaigns adjust to reach your target users as well as others looking for your products. With the creation of enhanced campaigns in Google Adwords and Mobile PPC in Bing, you can now create or adapt current PPC campaigns to reach mobile device users. You can decide on whether you want to only appear on smartphone searches, tablet searches or more, allowing for your company to reach the device most often used by your target demographic.

These opportunities are available for all companies to use so that they can help to maximize their reach on mobile devices, and shouldn't be overlooked. As more and more customers begin switching to mobile devices at double the rates of years past, it is important for companies to step back and look at the potential benefits each device has for themselves and their customers, and how they can leverage that into a profitable mobile development strategy.

5 Effective Ways to Build and Maintain Customer Relationships via Mobile Marketing Techniques

Whether you own a business or represent a business as an agency, the importance of creating, building and maintaining customer relationships is something that is always being worked on. Customer relationship programs have varied through the years with the rise of technology and the ways we communicate. First there was the direct mail piece, then the email newsletter, and now we are into mobile marketing. Using these five effective ways of mobile marketing, you can help to promote and maintain customer relationships during the mobile era.

Mobile Applications

A truly customized and unique mobile application for your company can help customer relationships immensely. With a complete and well thought out mobile application, a business can help to create a faster buying channel for its customers, enable them to receive unique and special coupons, or allow them to find a store near them faster, among other things.

Push Notifications

Using a smartphones geo-location technology to promote specials, coupons and send personalized messages to customers when they are near your business will allow you to interact with your loyal customers when they are closest to you and persuade them to come and visit your business, whether they were planning to or not.

Social Integration

Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are just a few of the social media networks that businesses should be integrating into their mobile marketing strategies. These networks can help you spread the word on sales and promotions, as well as give you analytics on who has been to your store, how many times they have been there and when and what day is your busiest days. The knowledge gained from these social networks can help you to create better promotions and sales, whether it is to drive more traffic during slow days or promote a special event via a discount when someone checks in.

Loyalty Programs

 While loyalty programs in the mobile space can range from checking-in to a certain place to scanning a QR code with your phone and taking a survey, the limits can be endless. Send them push notifications for every third time they check-in, offer discounts on special products to those that share your coupons on their social media sites. These and many more options for loyalty programs can help set up a trusted base of loyal customers that are willing to promote and market your products and services to their friends and social networks.

Text Reminders

Text reminders are a basic form of push notifications. These messages can be sent to customers to inform them of new products and services that may be useful to them, or specials that are happening right now. The benefit of text messages is that they can also reach those users who do not have push notifications enabled on their phones.

These five effective mobile marketing techniques can be used together or separately, but whatever way you choose make sure to remember that there is a line you can cross from being “helpful, informative and beneficial” to “immediately deleted, unsubscribed from or ignored”. Listening to customers feedback on your mobile marketing techniques will allow you to fine tune your techniques so you can best serve your customers and gain new ones.

Responsive Web Design: What Is It and How Does It Affect my Website Development Strategy?

Responsive web design is a fairly new concept in the world of website development and design that is fast becoming a necessity in the ever-changing mobile world. With a variety of tablet, smart phone, laptop and desktop screen sizes, it is important that you utilize a website development plan and strategy that emphasizes one design that will adapt to each of these screen sizes, for a better user experience and interface.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design is an approach to web page creation using flexible layouts, images and style sheets so that the viewer of the website is able to see a correct layout of a website without having to “pinch” their fingers in and out. Using the x and y coordinates on a grid of a page and mathematical percentages for images instead of the more traditional fixed-width parameters, designers and developers can create a more fluid design that can adapt to a wide range of displays.

Responsive Web Design and Website Development

Companies and businesses today need to consider responsive web design as an intricate piece of their website development strategy. With over mobile internet usage rising and fewer people using desktop computers to view webpages, it is important that you create a website that will not only be easy to read on a Apple iPhone, but also easily viewed on a Microsoft Surface or Android-powered tablet. Failure to do so could lead to poor customer experiences on a variety of pages on your website. Take for instance a blog page or an e-commerce page showing images of your products, using your old website development and design strategy you create a page that can be viewed perfectly on a desktop or laptop, but users on a mobile tablet or smart phone, will need to “pinch in and out or swipe their finger every few seconds in order to read a story or see a new product.

Responsive Web Design Helps Save Time

Not only will customers appreciate a website that utilizes a responsive web design, but the developers who created will also. Responsive web design utilizes multiple style sheets for the same web page, thereby repurposing HTML code, whereas a traditional website and mobile website will need to have two different types of code to be written for the website layouts, often from scratch. What would you rather choose, a house that has a sturdy frame and only needs to have a few things done to it in order to become your dream home or start with a blank piece of land and work your way up to a home?

With over half of the U.S. population owning a smart phones, it is now time for businesses and companies to consider how their websites are viewed on mobile devices and whether or not it is time to rework their website development strategy and add in responsive web design. Next time you are viewing your business’ website on your tablet or smart phone, take some time and look at the design and layout and ask yourself if it may be time to redesign your website.

Google Welcomes Mobile SEO into Their Algorithm and What You Can Do To Improve Your Mobile Site

As mentioned in several of our blog posts, the time for change in the way you develop and design your website is now, and it was made even clearer by Google in a recent blog post on their webmaster central blog.  As is custom with advancements in technology and search, Google has added mobile SEO into their search algorithms in order to improve their search results for mobile users.

What is Mobile SEO?

Mobile Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to digital content from search engines via natural search results to users entering mobile queries. It is important to realize that mobile SEO is focused on mobile searches, and as such, you should have a website that reflects those keywords and focuses on how a mobile user finds your current website. So what are some ways that Google offered as recommendations to help improve your chances of being found in the new mobile SEO algorithm?

Responsive Web Design

As explained in this post, responsive web design uses flexible layouts of your existing web page so that it can correctly be viewed in any format, whether it is mobile or desktop. Google recommends this type of design because it allows the same content to always be served to the user, regardless of the device that they are on.

Avoid Unplayable Videos

Have a video that you would like to share or already exists on your website? Ensure that it is mobile friendly and able to be viewed on all devices. Google recommends using HTML5 standard tags and to avoid using Flash, as this type of format is unable to be viewed on most types of mobile devices. If you are worried about a video not playing on a mobile device, offer up a transcript of the video as well on the page.

Faulty Redirects

As with all searches done on mobile or desktop devices, a customer expects to be directed to the exact page link they clicked on in the search results. This is not always the case on mobile searches however, as some companies will have a desktop page found on mobile searches redirect to an irrelevant page on their mobile site and Google has recognized this as a problem, and will hurt your rankings if you do not change it. Faulty redirects will also increase bounce rates and customer frustration with your mobile website, only hurting the chances that they will use your website again. To avoid this, ensure that each page of your website is optimized for mobile viewing.

Mobile SEO is something that needs to be done when creating or updating a website, and Google has only confirmed that it will play a much larger role in how and where your site appears on mobile searches in the future. So next time you meet with a client or look over your website for potential improvements, take a look at both your desktop and mobile website.

Does Your Online Brand Presence Accurately Represent Your Business?

In today’s world, not unlike that of the pre-internet era, first impressions are always important when meeting with clients/customers, but now instead of the firm handshake and eye contact, companies are looking at your online brand presence. Clients and customers are searching and finding you via your website, social media pages, press releases and various other multimedia outlets even before the first meeting or call, so isn’t it important to manage, or at least know what you have out there? Below are just a few of the ways you can ensure that your online brand presence is unique and eye-catching so that you will be able to reel in that prospective client/customer.

Be Authentic

You know your company is unique and different than your competitors, so why don’t prospective clients/customers? Research and study what your competitors are doing on their social media pages, blogs, and other multimedia channels and see how you can differentiate from them. You know that your brand has a unique value, and once you discover how to utilize and authenticate this value online, your target customer will soon discover you as well.

Be Consistent

Everyone likes to work with a company that puts out work that is the very best each time, so why not portray that with your online brand presence? Make sure that your social media pages, online directory pages, company website and blog all portray the image you want your company to have. The consistency will be noticed by prospective clients/customers.

Start a Blog

Starting a blog for a company can help you two-fold, 1) It enhances brand visibility and improves chances of getting noticed and 2) It will greatly help improve your sites search engine rank and establishing validity in your industry of work.  Blogging about company culture, relevant news about your industry and other things that relate to your company can help to establish and cultivate customer relationships and other influencers who may be looking to use your company.

Create and Share Videos

Creating and sharing videos can be a great way to establish your online brand, whether through the use of YouTube, Vimeo, Vine or any of the other video sites or applications. Videos can be created using very little to no money at all. On top of that, these videos can help drive traffic to your site, improve the chances of your company showing up in search rankings and help cultivate client/customer relationships.

Participate

Already have a blog, videos and social media pages but not seeing any benefits? Try participating in discussions and comments that are happening on these pages. Sometimes all you need to do is share a customers’ photo that has your product in it and ask a question, (i.e. Susan just completed a 2 mile run using her new Running App, how are you spending your day?). These short but simple shares of pictures, statuses and videos from clients/customers helps to not only build customer relationships , but allows you to engage with the client/ customers and show that if they create something unique using your product that it could have a chance to appear in front of hundreds or thousands of other fans.

These suggestions should allow you and your company the opportunity to create that digital first impression that will help you get prospective clients/customers thinking about your business, and hopefully land you the opportunity for that first in-person impression.

Mobile Apps and Customer Service – A Customers and Business’s One Touch Resolution to Problems

As customers move towards mobile devices for quicker responses and solutions to questions such as “How to repair a bike?” and “How do I fix my flat tire?”, it is important that businesses realize the ultimate potential that a mobile app may have for customer service and helping to build customer relationships. A mobile app centered on customer service will help to ensure that the customer comes to a business’s app first, instead of relying on potentially harmful forums or blogs for solutions to their problems. How should a company go about implementing such an app? Consider the following when deciding if a customer service mobile app is right for your business.

Are Clients Using Mobile Apps?

In short, yes. With 4 of every 5 minutes on mobile devices being taken up by some form of mobile app, businesses can rest assured knowing that customers do in fact use mobile apps. Using this information, we can see that customers use a wide range of mobile apps, from games to social media to health application, and by creating a mobile app that will effectively engage the client using these services a business is helping to create a positive mobile image and relationship with customers.

Have Something to Share?

Integrating social media channels into a business’s customer service mobile app can help to relieve the stress of both the business and its customer service support by streamlining where questions and concerns are answered. Using the mobile app, a customer would be able  quickly interact with the business via verified social media outlets that the company has allowed on the app itself, eliminating the possible chances of a concerned customer trying to interact with an unverified Twitter handle or Facebook page. This will also allow the business itself to create a communication channel that will allow them to share news, press releases, and other pieces of information that may be valuable to the customers.

Collecting Data, Feedback and Customer Data

With more and more customers using mobile devices, a customer service mobile app can help a business to identify areas where there customer service may need work. By creating simple surveys and questionnaires that can be filled out by the customer in the app, a business can begin to transform the way their customer service processes orders and complaints. This in turn can help to streamline the process and help ease customer anxiety and build-up customer relationships.

A customer service mobile app may not be right for every business, but it is important to at least consider the idea of having one available for customers. With more and more channels becoming available for customers to vent their problems on and the potential of these concerns going unanswered, businesses need to realize that a custom mobile app can create a branded, verified way for customers to reach a business in a few quick taps on the screen of their mobile device and receive help and support immediately.