Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Research Shows Need To Develop Mobile Marketing Strategies

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

A major American research company has found that most companies have no real measures or understanding about how well they are doing at implementing their mobile strategies.

Researchers recently talked to over 200 global companies to find out how they were measuring their mobile strategies, and what their measures of success were. The study found that media, travel and financial services were most likely to have an established mobile strategy, but the numbers were low.

The research found that 57 percent of organizations either did not have any mobile strategy or policy, or were only in the early stages of developing it.

Of those businesses surveyed that did have some form of strategy in place, only 30 percent have had the strategy in place for more than a year. A further 10 percent only had some kind of strategy in place for less than a year. Researchers believed the low numbers are a result of the relative newness of the mobile marketing platform.

Customer engagement was listed as the most important goal and a key longterm strategy for 52 percent of the businesses surveyed. Businesses said they see mobile marketing as an important way to attract and interact with customers, alongside retaining them.

One third of the businesses surveyed do not have a dedicated executive in charge of developing mobile strategy, and over half of the businesses have one full time equivalent fulltime staff member or less dedicated to mobile strategy. Even though most businesses do not have the staffing resources dedicated to mobile strategy development, most of the businesses have already increased their mobile budget for 2011, with around 25 percent of businesses doubling or even tripling their spend.

Research showed that the shift towards mobile marketing is seen as important, but the ways to ensure they are getting the most out of their advertising spend were not as easy to establish.

Visit www.txt2get.com for advice on developing successful and measurable mobile marketingcampaigns.

Starting A New Business? Use Mobile Marketing

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

Starting a new business can be a terrifying prospect, with the thought of having to do the hard yards setting up the systems and establishing a customer database. When a business is just starting out, there is often not a lot of money in the marketing budget, and huge print and television campaigns are out of reach. Businesses need customers to survive, but how do you get them in the first place?

Mobile marketing allows a business to attract attention, and more importantly customers, with a much smaller budget. Mobile marketing is flexible, and with some added creativity, businesses can use it to attract new customers quickly and easily. A teaser campaign, a competition or early sign up offers are all easy to create, and all attention grabbing when done properly.

Customers love competitions and they are a great way to encourage customers to try something new. All of these options create interest in a new business, and paired with mobile marketing to capture customer information, they can help a business hit the ground running.

The low cost and more importantly, highly cost effective mobile marketing platform is accessible even to businesses with the smallest of budgets. The high cost of producing print ready advertising can be prohibitive, but a mobile marketing campaign can be set up quickly and easily. Mobile marketing companies offer a variety of packages, and can help a new business owner decide which one will work best for them. Mobile marketing professionals can offer advice about how to use mobile marketing to create a thriving business, right from the first day of operation.

Mobile marketing is not just for the established players. The cost-effective mobile marketing option can be embraced by even the newest business. By capturing the interest of the customers, and then using mobile marketing to capture the information of the customer, a new business can start strong with a healthy customer database.

Head over to www.txt2get.com for more advice on how you can set up your business with mobile marketing.

Tips To Have The Most Out Of Technology

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

Electronic gadgets are highly reliant on electricity as well as their battery life. So, if a gadget runs out of batteries, then problems are sure to surface. This is the reason why people are trying to find ways to conserve battery life and get to the nearest possible electric supply. But, what happens if you cannot find one. Well, here is a list of things that will help you solve that problem.

Remember the time when you are talking to someone on the phone while travelling and you end up having a dead phone battery. Well, good thing you have your own power packs. These would really come in handy during this kind of situation. They cost around $20 or so and some are chargeable through solar power.

Always have an extra ink cartridge on your desk. You might never know when you will run out of ink while printing all the papers you need for work. You can get cheaper ink cartridges over the internet rather than those sold at stores.

Cameras and memory cards go hand in hand. If you do not have any memory card for your camera, then you will not be able to store pictures. For this reason, you need to find a larger memory for your memory card so that you can take all the pictures you want. Purchase an inexpensive card now.

There is nothing worse than having to sacrifice some pictures for you take new ones.

Phone chargers are also very essential for businessmen. They are often on the phone and would instantly drain their phones. So, by having an extra phone charger at your desk, you are able to charge your phone instantly.

Laptops are another problem when it comes to battery life. They are usually drained faster since they are used more often than cell phones nowadays. So, having a power strip with USB is an essential tool to prolonging your laptop’s battery life. At around $20 each, you can continuously enjoy using your laptop.

You can take it with you inside your home, at the hotel, or even at the airport.

Besides lifestyle, this author also frequently publishes information on used compact tractors and wooden step stool.

SMS Provider – The Difference

Friday, November 26th, 2010

Businesses needs to keep up with the trend of the technology in order to be actively engaged with their customers. One of the methods they use are SMSes as it is one of the fastest and most effective way to communicate and engage their customers.

When businesses require to send large amount of SMSes for marketing purposes or promotional activities, they are often met with the question of how are they going to do that. The best solution would be to find a online SMS provider that allow you to send out bulk SMS to your existing database so you can easily send our the text messages online and your database is kept online.

With the SMS provider online, you can then market your products or services easily online with just a few clicks. All you need is just few minutes to import your database and you will be good to go.

However, not all the SMS providers are the same as there are also good and bad ones around. As a customer it would be hard to know which are the bad ones until you have tried them. The good SMS providers are usually the ones that are well connected to the various telecoms and the not so good ones are those that route your messages through international communication networks which takes very long for your message to arrive to your customer. There is also possibility that your customer do not receive them as they are dropped during the routing. If the providers are directly connected to the telecoms, the text messages usually reach your customer within the minute the moment you send them .

SMS marketing is one of the most effecting marketing tool as more than 90% of the people read their text messages when they arrive.

It is important when it comes to choosing a good SMS provider. Make sure that the SMS provider are well connected to the international telecoms, this will ensure that your messages arrive timely and not after hours or even days. Another thing to note is that, it will be good to choose a SMS provider that provides international coverage instead of just your local telecoms as you might also want to expand internationally in the future possibly.

Jimmy is a experienced marketer using SMS marketing as a primary tool for marketing. Check out the Premium SMS Provider at www.msg2send.com

The Unsurpassed Key To The Issue Of Waiting

Friday, November 26th, 2010

No matter how much surprising it could seem, practice has demonstrated that the common customer wastes 2 years of his life waiting. Isn’t it too much? That is correct that we miss so many things when waiting in a line. Customers lose their personal time and get angry. Restaurateurs, shopkeepers, doctors, business-owners miss their clients and consequently their revenues.

However, there is possible a key to the question – paging systems. It has proved highly useful in actually cutting down your visitors’ queuing time.

In what way can queue administration system work? Why, it’s extremely simple. Customers should go to a system manager, which requests their mobile phone number. Afterwards, the specialist puts the people in an imaginary line. Therefore, as soon as the thing they wanted is vacant, they get a personalized page saying they may come for it.

When establishing the customized message type for your customers, you are able to choose among several options which this queue managing scheme offers you. As long as a great number of companies oblige you to select from text, voice message or text to voice guest paging, this line managing system proffers you all of these options at the same available price.

As a whole, using this queue managing service, you gain a great lot of profits. Here are illustrated the major of these.

1 – Diminishing blocking. This line managing service assists you with planning every visitor’s call. Moreover, informing you for sure who is likely to come and who is not, it significantly reduces cancellations. As a result, your visitors come to your place just when you’re ready to proffer services to them.

2 – Enhancing employees working capacity. If you choose this line organization service, you’ll help your employees not be disturbed from the job they’re performing. Consequently your employees will have the possibility to concentrate on providing good service to your prospects. No more bother or noise coming from blocked waiting areas!

3- Reducing or eliminating queues. The line managing service aids you change existing queues by invisible ones. The moment when a client is registered, he gives his cell phone number to the specialist and consequently waits to be informed. Nevertheless it spares him from the necessity to factually stay in one place in a physical line. Therefore the client is informed when the service he wants is available for him, and only then he comes for this.

4 – Diminishing contagion risks. The line organization service is highly successful in reducing or even eliminating contamination hazard with visitors during epidemics. As soon as being registered in an invisible line, visitors are able to move whatever place they desire. They only come back when the needed service is prepared for them, therefore eliminating contagion hazard.

5 – Gaining extra revenues. Since contented people grow into constant clients, the line managing system offers you substantial extra revenue. If you figure out how much you may get for a year, it seems a really good sum, that is certain to make your business a gainful one. More than that, repeat visitors may bring new guests. Therefore, you in quality of business owners get increased revenues from prospects who never stop to come.

Mr. P. Rodichev is considered to be a specialist in marketing systems like queue management, SMS marketing and other server and PC based software. He pays special attention to Healthcare Paging.

QR Codes – Are You In The Know?

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

The QR code or Quick Response code is a matrix barcode – a bit like a paper-based hyperlink. Used widely in most Japanese cities, the country where they originated, they are now starting to gain momentum in the US. Unlike a barcode which uses only vertical lines, the QR code has the two-dimensional code operating vertically and horizontally and can thus store far more data encryption; also readable from any angle.

The QR code originated in Japan in 1994 where it was created by Denso-Wave, a subsidiary of the Toyota Company. It was originally created to track parts in vehicles and allowed its contents to be decoded at very high speed, hence its QR title! Today the QR codes have a much wider usage and a broader context.

QR codes can be used to add a v-card contact to a user’s device (a file format standard for electronic business cards). It can also be used to display text to the user, open a URL or to compose email or text messages. Users can also generate and print their own QR codes which other users can then scan and use by visiting a free QR code generating site of which, several are available. Many of the new Android phones come with QR readers installed. More recent versions of Blackberry phones can also scan QR codes. Similar software can also be downloaded on phones readying them for this phenomenon as it truly takes off.

QR code usage is widespread throughout the media and QR codes which store URLs or addresses can be seen in magazines, on billboards and signs, on buses, business cards and anywhere a user might look to find out information. Relatively easy to utilise, the user scans the image of the displayed QR code with his camera phone and the text or contact information will then be displayed or alternatively the appropriate webpage is opened in the user’s phone browser.

QR code usage is becoming widespread throughout the media and QR codes which store URLs or addresses can be seen in magazines, on billboards and signs, on buses, and business cards. It could well revolutionise the marketing industry.

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Windows Phone Comes To Challenge IPhone

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Now that software giants Apple and Google have created the world’s first super-smartphones, Microsoft has apparently made the decision to join their efforts to bring users the best and greatest of smartphone technology. With their new windows phone about to go on sale, Microsoft is set to enter the market that has been dominated by the iPhone and the Droid for the last four years.

Although there were previous versions of the Windows phone, these devices have been out of date for years now, in a business that is all about the newest and greatest. Windows Mobile 5 was considered buggy and ill-conceived, and although Windows Mobile 6, 6.1 and 6.5 were received as great steps up, they have all been surpassed in popularity by the new and fancier iPhones and Droids.

Lacking some abilities that users might find essential, the latest windows phones have been reviewed as solidly put together, but perhaps not up to beating the competition. Windows 7 phone edition doesn’t feature either video calling or the ability to tether another device (that is, use the internet through the phone on a computer or other electronic device).

The name of the game is beating the competition. Because the iPhone and the Droid both have established app markets, it will be up to the new windows phone to create a demand without these all-important add-ons. Over time, the app market will grow, but for the moment, this could be a major disadvantage to users. The draw of unique software on the phones, such as Microsoft Office, may snag some users, but there are apps to replicate the abilities of Office and other Windows programs on iPhones and Droids.

However, with exceptions such as a desire for a shortcut to the top of the Start screen, the new phones have been received as cleanly designed and easy to use, with superior search capabilities. There is also special camera launch that allows the camera to be used quickly even when the phone isn’t on. The phones are solid and capable, but all that won’t matter if the other options are better.

Super-smartphones are defined by their ability to do many things, and the reviews of the windows phones make it clear that this one can keep up in the number of programs on board. With opinions on internet browsers, music players, calendars, games and more, reviewers illustrate the point that users are bound to differ on their overall opinion of the product.

Flash player is not native to the phone, but it is not native to iPhones either. Of course, on an iPhone you can download an app for playing flash video, and Droid does come with flash. Microsoft’s re-entry into the game of big business super-smartphones is about to be launched, and only time will tell how well the project will go.

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Comparing Windows Phone 7 To The Apple IPhone

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

Many Windows fanatics feel that the Windows Phone 7 will be able to be a true competitor to the iPhone. With many phones trying to compete, the iPhone has always stayed on top. Windows, however, has really come up with a product that is on the same level as the iPhone.

As popular as the Apple iPhone is, there are many disadvantages of the product that some have overlooked. While the Windows Mobile phone is available to almost all carriers, Apple iPhone is locked solely to ATT Wireless. Windows 7 Phone will be available to both GSM and CDMA carriers while the iPhone is just starting to consider partnering with CDMA. A physical keyboard may be the feature that is a deal breaker for most people and the Windows Phone has that.

As with the iPhone, Windows has a stream lined and neatly organized home screen. Each folder and icon on the home screen is called a Hub. Windows is able to fully multi task as well. With the iPhone, when you close most programs to open a new one, the program truly shuts down. It cannot run in the background.

The iPhone is marketed to anyone who can use it. Businessmen and women, teenagers, young adults, middle aged women; Apple markets to a wide array of different people. The WP7 is being marketed to those teenagers and young adults who are completely social networked with friends and colleagues. They want the usage to be from those who message, IM and tweet often. That is because the phone has great social network integration. They are fully connected with all of the networks. Some models of it’s phones will contain Motoblur. Motoblur is a program that will bring all social networking accounts onto one screen.

ZuneHD is Microsoft personal music player just as the iPod and iTunes go with Apple. Both phones have integrated their home music products into their phones. Apple has with much success and I am sure that Microsoft hopes for the same. The one thing different about both phones, is that WP7 is going to be more of a gaming phone than iPhone. WP7 has XBox Live integration that will make for a great gaming experience on the phone and off. The iPhone is not a gaming phone, even though it is able to download and play games.

When you have an iPhone and lose it, you have to have a MobileMe subscription to try to stop the thief or potential thief at all. MobileMe is a hefty subscription to their service yearly while WP7 has it free of charge. With Find My Phone, your phone will ring, lock itself and track your phone with it’s sophisticated GPS service. It does all of this remotely. This is something that Apple lacks.

Apple has felt so safe for so long because none of the smartphones out in the market compare to the precious iPhone. With the release of WP7 and it’s very competitive interface and system, it will really give Apple a run for it’s money. Windows will launch it’s first WP7 phone around the end of 2010.

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Are Text Responses Increasing Advertising Effectiveness?

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

Text response is being used more and more in advertising campaigns, replacing traditional mechanisms of response such as 1300/1800 numbers and websites. The ease of audience engagement with text response is its greatest advantage.

Case studies show that text response typically doubles, or even triples, ad reception. Aus/NZ mobile marketing experts TXT2GET supplied this result to Sydney’s 2UE radio station. Rebecca Coleman, Promotions Manager at 2UE, says of text response: without a doubt, TXT2GET more than doubled the response we achieved.

A further advantage of text response is its ability to provide an exact measurement of ad response. Also, its live reporting feature exposes trends in response over time. Finally, future communication with respondents is opened up, leaving an invaluable database of consumers.

Traditional response mechanisms such as phone numbers and websites are based around the same concepts as text response: they are just the evolutionary step before it. Text response is effective where other forms of response-seeking fall below expectations.

The launch of 1300 and 1800 phone numbers in Australian advertising had similar aims to text response. These phone numbers were included in advertisements to make it easy and cheap for audiences to respond, and so reached moderate success. But what’s holding this method back is accessibility. When most of the audience is on-the-go, calls to 1300 and 1800 numbers happen from mobile phones. This means that the call is no longer local, costing the average person more than they care to pay. A text message, on the other hand, is cheaper and also requires less effort than a phone call.

Another popular response mechanism is website links in advertisements. While links to social media can be effective in garnering audience response, this technique is limited by its low user-friendliness. The action of remembering a website address and returning to it later does not effortlessly occur: initial interest is hard to retain over longer periods of time. Furthermore, even once browsing a website, the audience is not left with anything tangible to encourage further engagement with the business or brand. When audiences spend hours browsing websites; an advertisement needs to be remarkable to leave an imprint days later. The solution? Provide them with a concrete result: a text message.

When compared to traditional response methods, text response is more effective, due to its ease of use for both the marketer and the audience.

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All Yours Needs Met With Windows Phone 7

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

The introduction of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 has created quite a stir within the smartphone community. The advent of a new, capable handset is nothing new in the world of cellular technology, but the new Windows Phone proves to be a challenging competitor. Features that offer connectivity to other Microsoft software allows the user to constantly be in touch with documents, friends, and even games.

For individuals with diverse software needs, the ability of the Windows Phone to connect to other Microsoft programs is made clear. By having constant access to media and documents on the mobile device, there are more ways to stay current with assignments and projects.

For gamers, having Xbox Live on their handsets is a great way to stay connected even after leaving the house. Achievements and rankings are shown, as well as a track-record of wins and losses experienced in games.

Office is one of the main factors in the connectivity of the device. Documents processed and viewed on the device are stored and edited through their mobile counterparts. Word documents can be created and saved, as well as the viewing of Power Point slideshows and Excel spreadsheets.

Microsoft’s own app store is also present in its new handset. While not as large or well-known as Apple’s App Store, there are tons of free items, and the ability to “try before you buy” is present. Customers can pay by credit card, or even have transactions added to their phone bill at the end of the month. Other payment methods are also available.

Microsoft’s Zune media player is an integral part of the multimedia experience provided by Windows Phone 7. Having the Zune interface makes returning customers more comfortable when downloading and consuming music and movies to their device. By purchasing Zune Pass, a monthly subscription service, a customer may download an unlimited number of songs to their device. Videos can be stored on the device for viewing on the go as well.

The handset’s capability to post pictures taken directly from the camera to Facebook is a gigantic leap forward in media sharing for smartphones. The Pictures Hub creates an area where images can be stored and shown. Again, Facebook connectivity allows for the viewing of friend’s recently posted images, all through the Pictures Hub.

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