Why marketers should pay attention to mobile media

Considering the financial events of the past few months, it is clear that a wake-up call is being sounded across the entire business community.

The ramifications are forcing virtually every company to re-think how they do business and determine where they are susceptible to losses and financial waste.

It should be blatantly apparent that the same old methods have not been working for awhile, and now consumers are the ones exposing those weaknesses.
Starbucks, once the shining star for branding and daily decadence, announced that their profits for the past quarter dropped a staggering 97 percent year over year.

This is just a recent example of how all kinds of companies need to address their audience better and make their expenditures go further.

The demand for advertising accountability is climbing faster than a scared spider monkey. Yet media plans remain so focused on traditional areas that lack the effectiveness they once had.

However, sitting on the sidelines is one media outlet that can deliver significant return on investment and strong consumer engagement opportunities. It works well with its traditional brethren, and has great price points.

Let me introduce you to my good friend, mobile marketing.

The time of thinking of mobile applications as just a “fad” has passed.
There is a 255-million-person audience that uses their current mobile devices for multiple purposes.

The visual, audio and interactive elements that are offered directly in a consumer’s pocket are undisputable. It is merely a matter of creatively wielding the underlying technology to engage people, based on the business needs of companies.

The mobile phone can be a business’ strongest direct response channel. It can be a natural extension of existing online and offline services. It can be the avenue to build one-to-one relationships with an entirely new customer base.
Doesn’t this sound like the game plan that companies are currently searching for?

From a financial standpoint, mobile marketing is highly economical in the current marketplace.
As the mobile arena as a whole grew in its hype cycle, it drew a flood of new development and media platform companies. As a result of the new competition, and supply far exceeding demand, prices have dropped considerably, even in areas where companies are not direct competitors.

Companies that offer text messaging campaigns or mobile marketing are being forced down by mobile banner ad networks offering options on the cheap, which then affects the next subgroup, and so on.

Essentially, if companies use the word “mobile” somewhere in their elevator pitch, you can drive them down on price and extend your budget considerably.

The same is not true with traditional media.

Find your favorite research report and they all point out the same thing: network-television watching is down considerably from last year.

In an environment where the consumer can choose from hundreds of channels—if they even choose to watch TV instead of YouTube or Hulu—it seems backwards to be moving media dollars towards network TV ad buys.

However, this is precisely what multiple brands and agencies are currently doing. Economic uncertainty should drive innovation and creativity and not push companies even further back to ultra-traditional approaches.

It used to be that playing it safe kept your job. However, the current tolerance for lack of results is much lower, and accounts and business are lost just that quickly.

Instead, taking an approach that is practical, yet also dramatically increases your brand goals, seems prudent.

For a largeer corporation, $100,000 spend on TV buys may give you a couple of 30-second spots, some DVR-skipping and ultimately diminishing returns.

That same money spent in mobile can create a robust campaign complete with nationwide targeted media and direct consumer interactions, while creating a cornerstone for building customer relationships for the next decade.

Even better, using the two media outlets in an integrated platform can yield results beyond the benefits of each alone.

Adding text message calls-to-action in TV commercials that drive consumers to the company’s new mobile environment increases engagement without increasing costs.
For example, a Detroit car company debuts its new hybrid during an ad spot on the nightly network news. This takes advantage of the wide potential audience that TV still affords, and creates a launching point for consumer engagement.
The spot announces a sweepstakes where the company will give out a new car to one person in every state over the next 50 days, accessible only by sending in a text message.

Consumers respond, and receive a branded text message that further promotes the vehicle, and has a link to the new car’s mobile Web site.

As the brand is clever, the site goes beyond simple specifications, and engages the consumer viscerally, selling the experience of the car itself and enabling the scheduling of a “test experience.”

While the news plays, a concurrent mobile advertising initiative launches with shrewdly-placed mobile banner ads running on sites and applications. All roads lead back to the mobile site.

With this effort, audience reach is both targeted and wide-spanning. And every interaction has tracking and accountability built into it. Media buying just got a whole lot smarter.

The environment has clearly shaped the need for change, and for marketers, mobile marketing represents an easy, smart choice. It is only a matter of getting some good counsel to get started.

There is no reason to begin from scratch, as you can “buy” the understanding of the media from people and companies experienced in the area.
Find your mobile maven, and let them guide you to de-mystify this world. Your marketing dollars demand it.

Small-to-medium sized businesses can benefit heavily from mobile marketing as well. A $10,000 advertising budget for print media can go a long when text messaging or mobile marketing is incorporated into the campaign. The best part is, the mobile marketing piece will only use about 10% of that budget and can increase ROI 10-20 times!

For more information of how Mobile Marketing can provide greater results for your business, visit our website www.505Text.com.

If you are a Real Estate Professional and are looking for a way to take your business to the next level, visit www.ListItMobile.com.

JCPenney adds mobile to holiday marketing mix

Department store chain J. C. Penney Company Inc. has launched an integrated marketing campaign and mobile just happens to be one of the components.

The campaign highlights JCPenney’s affordable gift assortment and invites customers to celebrate in the joy of giving this holiday season. Consistent with its Every Day Matters approach, JCPenney’s marketing campaign communicates to customers that JCPenney understands their financial pressures and is designed to showcase the great value in shopping with the retailer.

“The mobile channel serves as just another way for us to reach our customers,” said Kate Parkhouse, spokeswoman for JCPenney, Plano, TX.

“Starting the week of Thanksgiving we will be letting our site visitors sign up to get SMS alerts to their handsets,” she said.

The mobile alerts will consist of shopping tips, gift ideas and some that will include a link to a WAP site built especially for this campaign. Ms. Parkhouse would not disclose the WAP site's address until launch time.

Additionally, on Black Friday, Nov. 28 - the day after Thanksgiving - JCPenney stores open at 4 a.m. and shoppers can sign up for a wake-up call to their mobile phone.

The company's WAP site will have store-locator functionality and will provide site visitors with the option of checking the weather.

The WAP site only features holiday merchandise. Consumers will only be able to shop the mobile site and not buy.

The campaign will comprise pre-print, direct mail, national television ads, radio, online and email components as well.

JCPenney’s integrated marketing campaign will focus heavily on the retailer’s range of affordable gifts this season.

Building on last year’s effort, JCPenney will once again highlight its “red box gifts” – a collection of 60 of the best and brightest gifts to give and get this Christmas.
Along with providing customers the option to sign-up for a wake-up call the day after Thanksgiving, JCPenney will promote its stores’ 4 a.m. opening through a TV broadcast commercial, “Turkey Tailgate.”

Launching Nov. 26, the spot has a unique approach to the typical day after Thanksgiving tradition of waking up early by featuring shoppers tailgating with their Thanksgiving turkey leftovers in the JCPenney parking lot as they anxiously wait for the store to open.

"The mobile component is meant to get our target audience excited about coming into our stores to do their holiday shopping this season," Ms. Parkhouse said.

For more information on Mobile Marketing for your business, visit www.505Text.com

Real Estate Professionals - take your business to the next level with Mobile Marketing. Visit www.ListItMobile.com.

Phone for Fish - use your cellphone to find an eco-safe fish

Splurging on seafood tonight? Don't forget your cellphone. Technology is making it easier to eat your favorite fish eco-consciously. If you text to 30644 with the message FISH and the name of the fish you are considering having (for example, FISH SEA BASS), the Blue Ocean Institute, a nonprofit marine conservation organization, will text you back immediately with any significant environmental concerns about the fish in question. A red flag is given to any species that is overfished or that contains high levels of mercury, PCBs, or pesticides. Should that be the case with your choice, a better, green-flagged alternative will be suggested.

The Blue Ocean Institute currently tracks more than 90 marine species, including oysters and other shellfish, and it is constantly updating its database. A new sushi guide also is available online to download. How's that for a guilt-free sole? Visit www.blueocean.org for more info on eco-friendly fish.

For more information on Mobile Marketing for your business or organization, visit www.5o5Text.com.

Prove it or lose it: Mobile matters now more than ever

In virtually every direction, there is a storm on the horizon. Prices are up, credit is scarce, revenue is down, consumers lack confidence and marketers are being forced to fiercely defend their budgets.

When times are uncertain, our survival instinct tells us to pull back. Duck and cover. Make ourselves small to avoid being hit hard. If all you want is to survive, this is likely good advice.

However, in the competitive media and advertising marketplace for consumer mindshare and discretionary dollars, if you are just trying to survive, chances are you will not.

There are too many players trying to expand their businesses while you are just trying to protect yours.

So, to survive, you need to focus on deepening your engagement with existing customers and profitably finding new customers.

If you are a marketing executive, you probably agree that would be a lot easier to do if your CFO would refrain from slashing your 2009 marketing budget.

At risk of sounding self-serving, allow me to offer the following one-word prescription for preserving (and improving the impact of) your marketing dollars.
If you’re not tapping into mobile already, you need to.

And if you are, you need to do more. Mobile is no longer experimental “new media” or “alternative” stuff.

One hundred and four million people recalled seeing an ad on their mobile device between July and September.

Sixty million Americans saw a text ad – a 42 percent increase from just nine months ago.

What does this mean to you?

Stick with your outdoor, TV, radio, and guerilla campaigns to the extent your budget permits, but make each dollar work harder for you.

Infuse each of your more-traditional, less-measurable media campaigns with a mobile call-to-action.

Measure and adjust your marketing spend based on effectiveness of the campaigns.
Collect a mobile subscriber list so you are building customer relationships for future sales and marketing efforts.

You would not run an online promotion today and not ask for an email address, would you?

Why not make every marketing dollar spent another opportunity to engage with your customers leveraging this ubiquitous, extremely personal device that no one leaves home without? Marketers who invest wisely now will win big in the long run.

There are plenty of other benefits to mobile, such as the value of establishing personal, two-way relationships with your customers, but it is the media accountability that is winning over CFOs around the world.

The bean-counters are issuing company-wide edicts to control costs and demonstrate value for every dollar spent. Basically, they are saying, “Prove it or lose it.”

Many of us saw this dynamic earlier in the decade. With the economy faltering, marketers were forced to do more with less.

The savvy ones reacted by moving dollars online where they could measure and manage the value of every penny spent.

As a result, when the economy recovered, the efficacy of online media had won over so many converts that the online advertising industry blossomed.
Today, mobile is where online was in 2001.

Mobile is the final frontier in direct marketing and the potential is becoming a reality.

Get going today on your response to the “Prove it or lose it” challenge and you have a great opportunity to be a part of a fantastic growth trend for mobile.

For more info on how Mobile Marketing can boost your business, visit www.505Text.com

A victory for Obama, a victory for Mobile Marketing

How much satisfaction should mobile marketers have today that the man elected to become the 44th president of the United States proved beyond doubt the ability of mobile marketing to effect sweeping change?

For when President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office on that cold January morning, he will have proved to the nation and the world that the combination of mobile and the Internet with door-to-door canvassing can elect an intelligent person to the highest office without regard to color, experience or heritage.

All it required was hope and optimism in the face of daunting challenges ahead, and a willingness to take risk – with an atypical message and powerful platforms such as mobile and the Internet.

The Obama campaign’s excellent use of text messaging and the Obama Mobile Web site at http://obamamobile.mobi or http://m.barackobama.com should encourage not just politicians.

Marketers have a lot to learn from the way the young senator’s campaign harnessed the imagination and stirred the emotions of millions of Americans through mobile. They should study how this campaign aroused passion and anticipation through 160 characters sent at the right time to the right audience.

Voters young and old willingly donated small and not-so-small sums via the Internet to fuel the movement for change and willingly parted with their mobile phone numbers as a show-of-hands for the grassroots effort that the “Yes, We Can” movement required.

Textbook campaign

505 Marketing regularly followed the Obama campaign’s use of mobile. For those who signed up, the text alerts from short code 62262 (OBAMA) were friendly and earnest. It didn’t look like a senator was messaging from on up high, but someone that you would know sending a friendly message asking for your support.

The SMS texts proved that the Obama campaign didn’t take the candidate’s growing popularity for granted. Every opted-in mobile consumer counted, every text endeared with an appealing call to action.

The texts came with familiar regularity: Just before a local appearance, before the debates, before the final primary contest between Senators Hillary Clinton and Obama.

In what will be remembered as a turning point in mobile marketing history – and it is marketing, because that is what politics is, the marketing of ideals personified by the candidate – the announcement of Senator Joe Biden as Mr. Obama’s vice presidential pick set the standard for the excitement that a text message can create.

More than 2.9 million text messages were said to have been sent out on that particular occasion. The Obama campaign has never really released the size of its mobile database, but the Biden announcement goes down in history as the largest mobile marketing push by text, at least to date.

The Obama campaign sits on millions of names in its opted-in mobile database. Many more names lie in its Internet database, accounting for a large chunk of the $650 million in funds that the campaign raised to elect an eloquent and inspiring man to the White House.

Know the code

505 Marketing does not lean Democratic or Republican. It leans ethical marketing and mobile. The praise for President-elect Obama comes not from a plank, but for his understanding that consumers – voters, in this case – want to be part of the story. Mobile is their lifeline to the outside world.

The Republican campaign, for some strange reason, didn’t get that. The Republican Party is known for its grassroots efforts. Its strategists are adept at mining the electoral database to a point of perfection. But they failed to enlist the enthusiasm of consumers through the most powerful medium of communication today – mobile.

In fact, when blogging on the Obama mobile efforts, 505 Marketing tried each time to be fair and see if the McCain campaign changed its attitude to mobile marketing. It never happened. For example, the McCain short code for SMS signups was hard to find on www.johnmccain.com.

The world only became aware of the McCain short code at the party’s convention in St. Paul, MN. And that SMS appeal was directed to donating to the American Red Cross via text for victims of the hurricanes brewing in the South. Even the Obama campaign pitched the same $5 text donations to the Red Cross, so there wasn’t a point of differentiation.

Take the run-up to the elections. Here’s what short code 62262 had to say in a text message at 2:53 p.m. EDT on Oct. 30:

“Less than a week until Election Day on Nov. 4th! Barack needs your help. REPLY to this msg with your 5 digit ZIP CODE for local Obama news and voting info.”

Four days later, this writer received another text message at 3:15 p.m. EST on Nov. 3 from short code 46708:

“Put your country first and vote on Tuesday! To find your polling location visit Gop.com/ElectionDay. Forward to your friends.”

That message didn’t even mention the Republican presidential candidate John McCain by name. Where was the emotional appeal? Why wasn’t there a stronger call-to-action?

Exactly 24 hours later, another text message pops into the box, this time from short code 62262 on Nov. 4 at 3:28 p.m. EST:

Bite the bullet

Long story short, there is a lesson here in the Obama victory for marketers gun-shy of using mobile for customer outreach.

Yes, the economy is slowing. Yes, budgets need to be cut. Yes, Wall Street’s demands for sterling quarterly performance have to be met. But you don’t walk away from the future. You don’t trade tomorrow for yesterday. And mobile is the future, and the future is here.

Consumers have spoken for mobile, just as they have for the first mobile president of the United States.

Inspiring by example

The Obama victory must inspire not just the African-Americans or minorities, but people of all backgrounds. People indeed have high expectations of Mr. Obama and here’s hoping he lives up to them.

Mr. Obama’s election should inspire marketers to take risks and include mobile and the Internet in their media and marketing plans.

There is absolutely no reason why the Fortune 500 brands or even small business should not embrace mobile advertising and marketing, text messaging and the mobile Internet.

The numbers of mobile subscribers is growing nationwide and across the world. Mobile phones are getting more sophisticated. Data plans are more consumer-friendly. Above all, the consumer is ready to dialogue on mobile.

An opted-in mobile database of consumers is gold for marketers and can do for them what it did for a bold man seeking to solve this nation’s problems.

At 12:16 a.m. EDT on November 5th, a text message popped into my inbox. The sender was short code 62262.

“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion to this campaign. All of this happened because of you. Thanks, Barack.”

For more information on Mobile Marketing
Visit Our Site at www.505Text.com

The Future of our Cell Phone - Part 2

Continuing with Mobile Marketing and the benefits to both consumers and businesses. Let's start with the benefits for business.

Businesses benefit from Mobile Marketing in many ways. I could list all the features and benefits as this was a sales presentation, but I will simply things and say that the main benefit for virtually ALL businesses is that they will gain more sales. Isn't that what it is all about? There are individual solutions for each type of industry. The most effective way to understand this information is to visit our website www.505Text.com and check out the Industry Solutions section.

Now, getting to the benefits for consumers. Once again, it is very simplified - saving money!! With the unstable economic outlook, saving a couple of bucks here and there can allow us to still enjoy some of the fun things in life - like eating out, going to shows or weekend get-a-ways. Mobile Marketing allows consumers to receives discounts, offers and promotions sent directly to their cell phone - only from businesses that they want to receive offers from. No more worrying about clipping coupons or searching the Internet for discounts - the offers are sent to you!

505 Marketing of Lancaster, PA has introduced Mobile Marketing (Text Message Marketing) to the Central PA area for small businesses. We are excited about this great new service and are looking forward to provide a great opportunity for businesses to embrace this new technology to increase sales and customer loyalty. We are also excited about the benefits that local consumers will have in being introduced to the convenience of saving money simply by having a cell phone.

For more information on Mobile Marketing (Text Message Marketing) for your business, visit our website www.505Text.com.

The Future Of Our Cell Phone - Part 1

It seems no matter where I go - people have their cell phones glued to their fingers or their ears. That's right, either talking or texting. The intriguing element of texting is that it can take 20 minutes to hold what would be a 2 minute conversation. So what not just call the person? I find this fascinating, but yet it all makes sense in some crazy kind of way. Perhaps it's the realization that we really don't much to say to each other, so we want to make it last. Or maybe it's the fact that we can't hold a conversation at that precise moment, so the text conversation is more discreet.





I doubt that holding a live conversation on a cell phone will ever be a "thing of the past," however the less obtrusive means of communication - Text Messaging is taking our Country by storm and is quickly becoming more than just a way of saying "hello" or "meet me in 10 minutes."





So if everyone has their cellphones by their side 16 hours a day, what type of opportunity might this create for businesses as a means of communication or marketing? The answer - a HUGE opportunity. Such a great opportunity in fact, that many major restaurants and retailers have been using "Mobile Marketing" for the past 2-3 years.





Mobile Marketing? What is that? Quite simply it is marketing directly to one's cell phone. Now, you may all of a sudden have visions of harassing text messages, non-stop incoming calls from telemarketers, etc. But, that couldn't be farther from the reality of what Mobile Marketing truly is. Unlike the days of telemarketing to your home where you couldn't get through dinner or putting the kids to bed without those annoying calls where you said Hello 3 times before the gum-chewing saleswoman asked to speak to Mr. or Mrs. "Scoot" when your last name is "Scott," Mobile Marketing provides complete control of the solicitation in the hands of the cell phone user.





The cell phone user is in complete control because before a business can market to them, they must "opt-in" to receive the information sent to their phone. Businesses can use many methods to attract users to opt-in.....everything from convenience, to VIP treatment, discounts, promotions - the list goes on and on.





So, how do businesses benefit from this? How do consumers benefit from this?





Check back on Monday for the continuation of "The Future of our Cell Phone."





Or you can read more at http://www.505text.com/