15 posts categorized "Mobile Web"

Entry By Jason Brick

Running your small business can feel like working in a vacuum. You keep working your plans, but lack the feedback and example of other players in the game. This is doubly true of mobile marketing -- a promotional field new enough that there isn't a strong data infrastructure to which you can compare your results.

Industry will catch up in good time. Meanwhile, you can draw inspiration from these three wildly successful mobile initiatives:

 

 

Marks and Spencer

British retailer M&S decided in 2010 to take the mobile plunge. Instead of going with a simple app or SMS marketing campaign, they opted to design a mobile portal for retail purchases direct from customers' mobile devices. In less than two years, Marks and Spenser rose to be the number one ranking mobile retailer in the world. Not only are they successfully selling to mobile customers, but they're selling items not normally purchased electronically -- including furniture and large-screen plasma televisions.

Expert analysis identifies three key characteristics behind Marks & Spenser's success:

• A dedicated mobile site -- incoming connections to their website identify the kind of device that will view their page. Mobile devices are routed to an experience optimized for those devices.
• Simple programming for a fast load time -- just over half the time of the average 10-second load for mobile retail.
• Reliable purchasing leading to a 100 percent success rate on attempts to buy. Retailers average about 93 percent -- but losing seven percent of sales can make a big difference.

Pontiac G6

In a campaign to raise awareness, Pontiac offered a place in a drawing for $1,000,000 every time somebody texted a photo of a G6 they found in the field. Responses were immediate and impressive. Although Pontiac hasn't released exact numbers, sales for the year of the promotion numbered over 120,000 luxury cars -- as compared to only 16,000 for the year before.

The Pontiac campaign is an excellent example of eliciting a response from potential clients. It got people who may only have been interested in the prize keep a lookout for the product, raising brand awareness across multiple markets.

The keys to this success included:

• Solid integration of print and broadcast media with the mobile response campaign.
• A compelling call to action that required no immediate outlay of cash from potential responders.
• Simple interaction mechanic -- snapping a photo and sending it to a widely advertised email address.

Nike

In a desperate attempt to inform the remaining three people in the world who don't know what Nike sells, the sports apparel giant has embraced the mobile marketing world with a series of apps. In some cases partnered directly with Apple for the iPod, these fitness apps, like MyCoach, help users plan and execute fitness training regimens. Nike coupled this with real-time response campaigns like their Nike ID initiative in Times Square.

Although they didn't release specific numbers about the campaign's success, their mobile marketing frequently leads lists of the most successful mobile marketing campaigns to date.

Nike's success with their mobile marketing relied upon:

• Multiple mobile platforms and styles, to appeal to a wide general audience.
• Giving potential customers tools that help them use the merchandise they sell.
• Pushing information about the new campaigns through more traditional media sources.

It seems like QR Codes are everywhere lately. We see them on billboards and in storefronts all around New York City. That got us thinking about ways to integrate QR Codes into Ez Texting - which led us to create a a demo that uses QR Codes and Mobile Optimized Signup Widgets for on the go signups.

Check out the demo and let us know if you'd like to add QR Code powered Signup Widgets to Ez Texting in the future.

If you want to do this right now, the demo has step-by-step instructions for generating QR codes that you can use for on the go signups.

If you've ever wanted to log in to your Ez Texting account when you're on the go you know that our full app can take a while to load on a smartphone. Today we're speeding things up, a lot. If you login to Ez Texting using any smartphone we'll automatically deliver a mobile optimized version of our application.

You can't do everything yet but all of our most popular features (aside from voice broadcasting and Keyword editing) are available in our mobile optimized site. In the next few weeks we'll be improving and adding to mobile version of our app, so if you have feedback, please be in touch.

Android is officially the most popular mobile operating system...for new purchases:

Nielsen is adding its voice to the chorus  of research firms confirming the ascension of Android. Nielsen said among recent acquirers of smartphones in the last six months through August, Android was the top platform in the U.S. with 32 percent of new purchases, followed by the iPhone and Research In Motion’s Blackberry platform, tied at about 25 percent.
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The recent purchase numbers from August put Android’s momentum into better context. We can see that even with the boost from the iPhone 4, Apple smartphones are still getting outsold by a flock of Android devices. RIM’s slide is even more pronounced in these numbers as well, plummeting from 35 percent to 25 percent from June to August.

Read more at GigaOM.

Interesting quesiton posed over at Small Business Computing: What is Mobile Commerce, and Why Should You Care?

Mobile commerce (also known as mobile ecommerce, m-commerce and other variations) consists of two primary components. The first is the ability to use a wireless phone or other mobile device to conduct financial transactions and exchange payments over the Internet. The second is the ability to deliver information that can facilitate a transaction -- from making it easy for your business to be "found" via a mobile Web browser to creating mobile marketing campaigns such as text promotions and loyalty programs. 

Head over to Small Business Computing to find out why you should care (you should)!

Being one of the first companies to offer both mobile web and SMS ordering options back in 2009, Pizza Hut is no stranger to the growing popularity of mobile marketing. So far they have offered games to iPhone and Android users, as well as chances to win bread sticks and an application which allows users to order menu items from their mobile phones. This is only the beginning; Pizza Hut expects that the use of mobile will account for 50% of their future sales!

“We want our pizza to become a favorite memory,” Mr. Niccol said. “When I came on board five years ago, Pizza Hut didn’t even have a Web site where people could order pizza. In the future, I see mobile accounting for almost 50 percent of our orders,” he added.

To read the entire article, click here.

To learn more about mobile marketing, visit Ez Texting.

Only days removed from the wildly successful launch of the iPad, and on the eve of the launch of the iAd network, Dan Butcher at Mobile marketer asks, Is Apple’s iAd a threat to competing mobile ad networks?

“With the introduction of both iTunes and the App Store, Apple has repeatedly shown that they want to control the consumer experience of their brand, so I think this latest announcement is just the latest incarnation of that strategy,” said David Gill, Austin, TX-based senior director mobile media at the Nielsen Co.

“Given the hype surrounding the iPad launch, this news should be good for mobile advertising, as it forces advertisers to think about mobile advertising as more than just a ‘mobile phone’ strategy,” he said. “It’s really about connected devices.”

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“I think it’s safe to say that it will draw attention to the ecosystem and probably stoke interest in mobile advertising, particularly if Apple is able to deliver some compelling new ad formats, which is part of the idea here,” said Andrew Frank, New York-based research vice president at Gartner.

Read more (and there is a lot more) @ Mobile Marketer.

Dan Butcher at Mobile Marketer looks at Yahoo's Mobile Search efforts and asks some tough questions:

Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz recently broke up the company’s mobile group and spread out the employees across other departments, leading to the departure of several senior executives. In addition, T-Mobile USA discontinued its search deal with Yahoo, instead tapping Google as its default mobile search provider, although Yahoo is still the default on the carrier’s European networks.

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And despite the fact that it is the early days, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all understand the stakes.

As smartphone penetration increases and brands start to realize the potential of mobile search, revenue will grow quickly.

This all may be moot though:

Yahoo is transitioning its algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally.

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Microsoft’s Bing is the default search engine for Verizon Wireless, which is the No. 1 carrier in the United States in terms of the number of subscribers.

Interesting times in the mobile search space, which is growing rapidly. Read more @ Mobile Marketer.

JP Morgan is out with their 2010 Internet Industry Outlook. If they're right, the mobile world is set to keep on growing:

JP Morgan’s leading industry analyst Imran Kahn released the 328-page Interest Industry outlook which notes that total U.S. mobile advertising for 2009 is estimated at $2.6 billion, up 62 percent, with $2.3 billion of that from text messaging. Just 178 million was mobile search, and $140 million was display. Both of these were up 80 percent last year.

Turn to 2010, and mobile advertising is, according to Kahn, forecast to grow 45 percent to $3.8 billion ($3.2 billion SMS advertising, $253 million mobile display, and $31 million mobile search.)

Read more:
Mobile Marketing Watch
OnlineMediaDaily

Mobile Marketing Watch has picked up on a press release that has huge implications for the future of mobile advertising:

The planned $750M acquisition of AdMob by Google announced earlier this year is stuck in limbo as two consumer groups today began to lobby the FTC to block the purchase, claiming it is anti-competitive and raises privacy concerns.

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With $22 billion in expected revenue this year, the deal, which could help Google become a monopoly in the mobile advertising space in time, needs to be carefully scrutinized by the FTC and anti-trust groups, however, it may still pass. This greatly concerns many involved in the space.

“The mobile sector is the next frontier of the digital revolution. Without vigorous competition and strong privacy guarantees this vital and growing segment of the online economy will be stifled,” wrote John M. Simpson, consumer advocate at Consumer Watchdog and CDD Executive Director Jeffery A. Chester, in a statement.

Head over to Mobile Marketing Watch to read more.