There’s a high-potential marketing platform that’s slowly and surely attracting corporations, small business owners, advertisers, and marketers alike. Observers say that this is a big one – an avenue through which one can reach a good portion of billions of consumers. It’s called SMS. You know: text messaging. No, you’re not reading an article from our 1998 archives. This is 2010 all right, but you know what? In the age of tablet computers, flashy apps, smartphones, and social media, SMS marketing has indeed become one of the most viable and important platforms for businesses today. Here are some numbers: An estimated 3.5 billion text messages are sent and received every day. 57 percent of all cell phone subscribers use SMS on a regular basis. According to the New York Times, 97 percent of text messages are opened, and 83 percent of these are opened in less than an hour. Despite the explosive growth of smartphones and mobile technologies like the – Read the full article
A business today needs to be mobile. Your customers are using their cell phones to access business information. If you aren’t easily accessible on their mobile phones then they’re going to start overlooking you in favor of businesses that are. Here are the tools that you need in order to go mobile with your business: Reinvent your website for the mobile platform. You may have a really amazing Flash website with a lot of interactive features that looks terrific on a desktop computer. However, that’s not going to work correctly on most mobile phones. You need to also have a mobile version of your site. (Lakeshore Branding has a list of really sweet tools here.) Each different mobile platform offers a browser WebKit to help optimize sites for the web. It’s worth it to work with a professional who is knowledgeable about making your website ready for mobile devices. Do local search engine optimization. Doing SEO for your website means taking – Read the full article
Facebook, the world’s largest networking site with over 500 million members, launched a new messaging system Monday, taking various communication platforms like E-mail, SMS, instant messaging, and chat and integrating them into what is called Facebook Messages. The system is a result of a 15-month engineering project, considered by many as the largest Facebook has undertaken. Facebook Messages is actually a revitalization of its current messaging system, and – despite industry observers and news media hyping the new feature as an “E-mail killer”, intended to rival Google’s highly popular Gmail – it isn’t technically a new E-mail platform. “This is not an E-mail killer,” said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say they are going to shut down their current E-mail accounts.” What Facebook Messages does provide are three unique communication features, which served as the highlights of Zuckerberg’s Monday announcement. Seamless messaging: Facebook users will be able to send and – Read the full article
There is a multitude of ways that a company can catch the attention of their target audience. More and more, companies are turning to social media outlets to gain the attention that they need for their brands to increase in popularity. These programs can be taken even a step further through the use of mobile marketing as well. The first thing to know about marketing through mobile services is that there are laws which surround this. You are not allowed to use leads which have been purchased as you have to have permission to send messages to clients. If you do not have permission, you face legal difficulties due to the FCC anti-mobile telemarketing laws. There are ways that you can make sure to have a lucrative marketing through the mobile market and a lot of it has to deal with social media marketing. This is because when there is a good social media marketing plan, you can reach new – Read the full article
As a small business owner, you may find yourself going crazy over the number of things you have to do for work. But don’t worry: if you own an Apple iPhone, you’ll at least have some apps at your disposal – apps which can truly help you stay connected to your business and hang on to a little bit of sanity. While the iPhone is a fun device, it can also make for a great business tool – especially if you’re always on the go. Here are several Apple iPhone apps with which you, as a small business owner, cannot go wrong. Money matters A number of apps let you keep track of your expenses and finances. These include BalanceDo, a productivity app through which you can send customer invoices, track receivables or billings, and manage payments through PayPal. If you want to perform credit card transactions with your iPhone, check out MerchantWare Mobile. (You’ll need a Merchant Warehouse account.) – Read the full article
So I thought since I was taking the week off I would put the focus on google. We all know that google will eventually take over the free world but many people are not aware of some of the free services that they offer, because they have so many! So I will take some time this week to talk about some of the services that can help small business and that are kind of cool. For todays post I am going to talk about google text. This amazing SMS technology brings google search right to your phone. Not everyone out there can afford the internet on their phone but many of us have splurged for the unlimited texting (my self included). You can ask google the weather in your zip code. Try it right now text weather (your zip code) to 466453 (‘GOOGLE’ on most devices). It sends an instant reply with the local weather. You can search for local – Read the full article
