Category: Multi-Channel Marketing

I recently read a headline regarding how many people in Canada would rather “hold their cell phone on Valentine’s Day” instead of a special person. Cell phones were the clear winner, at 56 percent! This solidifies the fact that the mobile holds a prominent place in people’s hearts.

For those of you who may think you don’t have room in your media mix for SMS, think again. After all, activated emotions are a key precedent of purchase intentions. Getting right to the heart of your potential customers has never been easier because of the simplicity and affordability of text message marketing.

One of the most powerful ways of using SMS is by adding that interactive aspect to your marketing campaigns, and no matter what kind of advertising you do, there is a place for a mobile component. That’s because including an SMS call-to-action makes it really easy for you to get your customers to engage with your brand. And it gives them a sense of empowerment, since consumers choose who to engage via text.

Text-in calls-to-action can be placed anywhere: On your website, print ads, on outdoor boards, wherever you wish. They offer the ability to provide the instant gratification many people need to become buyers–and are effective vehicles for disseminating product incentives many are looking for in a recession.

This Valentine’s Day season, get to the heart of your prospects: Send a text!

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

Recently the Detroit Free Press announced that it’s going to cut print editions and focus on its digital offerings. The reaction in the stagnant newspaper industry (which I know well, having spent more than a decade in it) was shock. The reaction among digitally-savvy consumers: It’s about friggin’ time!

Honestly, the paradox that is newspaper management–”We must change! But we don’t want to actually do it! So what should we do?!”–is one reason I left the industry. Yet I still have a soft spot for something that used to be my raison d’etre. I want to give some advice to all other daily news publications, speaking as someone who was once one of them. Hopefully, they’ll take some of this to heart and manage to survive 2009 and beyond.

Maintain a relationship with your readers. One reason that newspapers won’t give up the ghost is because of that small but fiercely loyal group of senior citizen readers. Back in the day (that includes when I was an elementary schoolkid, cutting out articles for Current Events class) newspapers strove to be the voice of the community. And the community more or less respected their authority, even if they fiercely opposed an opinion or article from time to time. Today, that relationship between reader and paper is different–especially when most people don’t read the paper from cover to cover anymore.

With SMS or email, you can make the news more customized for the reader. He or she can sign up to receive alerts on stories about “entertainment” or “sports” or “local crime.” The reader will feel like The Daily News Journal really gives him or her the information she or he was wondering about anyway. Plus, SMS or email marketing messages can be easily customized to address the subscriber by name, making them even more personal.

Offer value. There are a great many newspaper subscribers whose main focus is getting those Sunday coupons and sales fliers. Now, they can get coupons via email or, even better, SMS. So why not have the ad sales department at a newspaper start up digital couponing? The advertiser can pay to have their coupons offered in The Daily News Times’ subscription-only coupon messaging service. Consumers would sign up for this service, free of charge to them, to receive coupons for local restaurants, the mom-and-pop cafe, the town’s major shopping mall, etc. National ad sales bureaus could also sell the opportunity to major household or entertainment brands, and work with local newspapers everywhere to distribute these coupons as well.

Milk the multi-channel. Newspapers already own a print medium! So they should use it to their advantage. Most papers reserve a few column inches in which they run “house ads” promoting the publication. So they should use these to promote the shortcode to which they must text in order to subscribe to The Daily News Tribune’s news and coupon alerts. Papers can also promote an email address for consumers who prefer to receive this kind of information via email. Mobile marketers in all kinds of other industries know the effectiveness of a multi-channel campaign. Newspapers are sitting on a gold mine.

Major features can still run. For, like, decades I’ve heard that “the younger generation” hates reading and as a whole are illiterate. That’s not true–they’ll read what interests them, whether a zine by their favorite hardcore band or the sports pages plugging their friend’s Little League team. So please, please don’t dumb down articles or pander to readers by writing what you think they want to hear! Instead, promote the heck out of the news feature or series on which a reporter spent a lot of time and effort researching and writing. Use SMS or email as teasers: “What do the mayor and Hugo Chavez have in common? Find out Sunday in The Daily News Herald!”

It’s almost unbelievable that newspapers haven’t already been doing all this. The newspaper’s struggle has been lengthy, turning to consolidations and JOAs and skeleton crews to survive, and seeing increasingly fewer readers for their efforts. True, cynics might say that the papers’ lack of quality content is to blame. But these days, getting the information into a medium consumers want is just as important.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

We’ve all heard the dire predictions of what 2009 will mean to marketers and make no mistake about it, the news isn’t great. I won’t bother with a rehash of what others have reported because, quite frankly, it’s too depressing to do so. What I offer instead is the proverbial silver lining in this dark, gloomy cloud we’re facing: Digital marketing.

While traditional marketing budgets have shrunk over the past few months, digital marketing has proven to be a much more resilient form of communication in this same time period. In fact, most analysts are predicting at least a slight uptick in overall spending in digital marketing, notably email and mobile marketing, but nothing close to what had been initially projected before the economy was finally deemed to be in a recession.

Still, there are many reasons why companies should not only maintain but increase their digital marketing budgets in 2009, especially within the SMB (small-to-midsized business) space, to take advantage of its unique properties. These include:

Price
Digital is still by far the cheapest of the mass forms of communication. TV and radio rates have not fallen nearly as far as expected, despite the weakened economy; print is in a death spiral and increasingly not a safe play for a decent ROI; and outdoor/out of home is still a niche play at best.

ROI
Digital marketing wins this in a landslide as well. Other forms of mass communication simply do not or are not equipped to give the level of insight that digital can when it comes to ROI. Digital by its very nature is trackable, with more and more sophisticated analytics becoming available on almost a daily basis to even the smallest of companies.

Reach
Digital penetration rates are now as high as more mature forms of mass communication, especially mobile phones, which should reach 100% penetration over the next few years according to most studies. Mobile marketers have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible and although email marketing is much more established, it too still has potential growth opportunities. This is especially true in the SMB market, where there are many affordable digital marketing platforms from which to choose.

Segmentation
Not only can digital provide companies with a way to reach a mass audience, it also works extremely well in terms of market segmentation. Digital marketing is a natural for “narrowcasting” and customization of the message, which isn’t economically viable in the other forms of mass communication. With a solid digital marketing platform, the message can be tailored to a specific audience or even an individual consumer in a matter of moments.

Control
As any seasoned marketer knows, keeping and maintaining control of a marketing campaign is vital to its success. For a small company, this is even more critical because of tight budgets and lack of internal resources. With a digital marketing platform, such programs can be created and managed by even a single individual, while still maintaining the polish and feel of a much larger, more sophisticated marketing firm or company.

The bottom line is that 2009 is going to be rough on pretty much every business, with marketing budgets shrinking in kind. However, savvy companies, big and small, will recognize and embrace digital marketing as a key objective for the coming year. After all, just because the economy stinks doesn’t mean marketing will cease all together. Companies will simply have to be much more selective and expect real results, which is exactly what digital marketing can bring them.

What other unique benefits does digital marketing offer companies? Feel free to list your own and/or discuss the ones noted above. Your feedback is always welcomed.

Steve Chipman, Chief Operating Officer, mobileStorm
Analog thoughts in a digital world

Times are hard.

As a marketer, racking your brain for fresh ideas going into 2009 is probably on top of your to-do list in December. I know it is for me.

I received a CNN news alert yesterday, saying we’ve officially been declared in a recession as of November 2007. Immediately, a feeling of relief rushed over me. Kidding! With the market plummeting nearly 700 points yesterday, I felt no relief.

Today I searched for ways to make myself feel better. Quite successfully I might add, because of these two reasons:
1) This isn’t anything new. We’ve been in this “recession” for an entire year.
2) Email and SMS marketing are where it’s at. For marketers, that is.

You, too, can get some relief from the recession by implementing email and mobile efforts into your 2009 planning. There are two reasons to give this a try.

Activate your customers’ purchase interest: Personalized communication from brand favorites, or even brands that are new to me, makes me feel special as a consumer. In times of drudgery, an email message makes me feel like a company values my business; an SMS message puts a brand forefront in my mind. (Provided the message is relevant, of course.) Sadly enough, the presence of relevant email and SMS messages were lacking in my inboxes both on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Short ramp-up times: We all need some pick-me-ups, and having a little extra marketing firepower on short notice is invaluable. You hit the send button when you want. You can act on marketing gut intuition—and easily track your results. It’s also a great way to execute testing for messaging and segments.

Tell us how email and mobile is working for you! Leave a comment below.

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

The Monday after Thanksgiving has become known as Cyber Monday, officially starting the online shopping season. It’s almost as well-known as Black Friday, the day after T-day that kicks off the bricks-and-mortar shopping countdown.

No wonder that 80 percent of online retailers had Cyber Monday-specific campaigns ready, according to the National Retail Federation. The NFR cites research showing that email messaging is one of the most popular campaigns being deployed–32.7 percent of those surveyed said they’ll be using email to promote their websites and sales specials.

Something that can be adapted to message marketing is the fact that 24.5 percent of retailers said they would be promoting one-day sales. mobileStorm client Ashley Furniture HomeStore enjoyed great success with limited “secret” sales it announced only to SMS message subscribers. If you missed the boat this Cyber Monday, then consider having a one-day sale later this season–and use texts to promote it. SMS gives consumers the feeling of urgency (“I’d better hurry since it’s only one day!”) and personal relationship with the retailer (“wow, they sent me a text!”).

With message marketing (via email, SMS, RSS, or whatever platform you choose) you can immediately nab holiday-busy consumers’ interest, and offer them an incentive to buy from you–and not your competitor.

Grumpy British chef Gordon Ramsey is never kind to the restaurants he’s sent to save. One constant theme is his railing against complex food. Time and again, he shouts that simple is best. That adage could probably apply to messaging, marketing and otherwise. The downside to all the compelling technology coming out on mobile phones–from networking apps to sixth-sense chips– is that everyone assumes they’ll replace SMS. And while a social network is a great way to find old friends and stay up-to-date with current ones, it’s probably not where you’ll find folks being the most receptive to ads, behaviorally-targeted or otherwise–at least, not as receptive as they are with permission-based emails.

While I’ve always had great use for email and SMS, I’ve never cared for IM. To me, instant messaging is the red-headed step-sibling of texting and email: It forces message recipients to reply ASAP even if they don’t have the time or the inclination, by making the message-sender act on the feeling that every syllable he/she sent has the utmost urgency. Sure, SMS seems urgent, but if the recipient is slow in responding, the message-sender doesn’t usually send more texts haranguing the person. Imagine those horrible feelings exacerbated by a marketing message–especially if it interrupts a truly important chat (99 percent of the time I only use the darn platform with bosses and colleagues at work). In other words, IM makes casual written communications too complicated.

Luckily for me, says BusinessWeek, “the end of instant messaging as we know it” is nigh. Instead of being an awkward Nth Wheel on your desktop, the story points out,IM is now embedded in things like Facebook and Gmail (the latter being the only time I use IM for personal communications). The idea is that with instant messaging being a part of the greater experience, it can be more easily monetized. Someone might pay more attention to an ad that seems related to the site or conversation in which the user is engaged.

Sometimes when I’m using my Gmail IM, Google serves up paid ads that are related to our conversation’s content. It’s not terribly distracting because I’m used to that on the Gmail site. Marketers should be glad that I’m probably subliminally influenced by the adverts, even if I don’t stop what I’m doing to look at them.

After all, I don’t stop what I’m doing just to answer an IM that isn’t terribly important.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

Following one of the biggest days in democracy, it seems like a good day to talk about another manifestation of democracy, via the Internet: Blogs.

The ability to blog is arguably one of the coolest, most valuable features the Internet has brought. Blogging itself has completely changed the production of written texts, allowing virtually anyone to speak their mind, and share experiences good or bad, sans censorship.

A new study by Jupiter Research found that not only has blog readership gone up–by 300 percent!–but that blogs influence the purchase decisions of readers. And this influence is far more than that of social networks. None of us here would say it’s much of a surprise. Consider what blogs offer:

1. A real voice for the people. When I was a growing up I always imagined writing a letter to the editor, or if a business gave bad service, reporting them to the Better Business Bureau.  Now I don’t have to; even if I don’t have my own blog, there are countless out there ready and willing to accept comments.

2. Personal and original content. Who wants to read the same old dry perspectives, the corporate pitch, the product specifications, when you can check out blogs and learn about real experiences and opinions?

3. Word-of-mouth builds trust.  Who doesn’t believe what a friend or colleague says about a product or issue? Most of us at least give this more credit than a biased spiel from an organization, corporate or otherwise. Blogs mimic the power of word-of-mouth because they offer a platform to collectively share and exchange experiences and insights.

Do you use blogs in your life, professional or personal? How do you find them the most valuable?  Take a moment to share with us below!

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

I’m a maaan, baby!

At least, in my writing I am.

The other day I came across an application called Gender Genie, which allegedy can suss out if a writer is male or female by studying a piece of writing . I tested several of my own samples, from this blog and others, ranging in topic from text messaging to acoustic music. And every time, the software declared, “The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: Male!” Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again.

Luckily it’s OK to be gender-neutral when writing about marketing technology or underground music. In these cases, knowledge about the subject, and the ability to make it easy to understand, are more important than whether the “voice” is male or female.

But I got to thinking that the Gender Genie could be a useful tool for other copywriters. It could help them make sure content is tailored to the intended audience. That’s something that marketers, especially, must worry about when creating copy–even for websites and SMS/email marketing messages. Recipients sign up to receive the latter; if they don’t feel like these notices speak to them, they will cancel their subcriptions.

My experience with the writing algorithm reminded me of jobs I’d applied for long ago. Gigs for which I was more than qualified, and which were in the city where I lived, meaning it would cost the company nothing to bring me in for an interview. I never got my foot in the door. These positions were at places like gossip websites and mid-scale cosmetic vendors–that is, businesses that catered almost exclusively to women. The person writing lipgloss ad copy or catty celebrity news would likely need to have a certain type of female voice. And according to Gender Genie, that is not me!

Certain marketing experts, especially those selling a product that only appeals to a certain demographic, should see how they can tweak their marketing copy to really speak to that audience. Now, I don’t think Gender Genie is all that. I mean, it categorizes the very common word “a” as male! But since it’s fun to use, copywriters might as well make it one more tool to help craft the tone of their content.

I ran this post through the Gender Genie one more time–and once again, I scored far more male than female. In that vein, I’ll just say: D’oh!

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

After seeing the same corridors and faces for many hours and several days, the most devoted business conference attendee wants to escape a convention site for a few hours. But with a special SMS campaign, powered by mobileStorm, MGM Grand Hotel & Casino was able to boost its database while directing conference customers to its own bars and restaurants

MGM Grand was one of several hotels booked by Prepaid Legal Conference attendees in early September. After obtaining permission from conference organizers, the hotel told the 300 attendees who were staying at the site that they could receive special offers via SMS. Two hundred and eight–or just more than 69 percent–of those conference-goers opted in. Over their four-day stay, they received texts offering various drink specials at the MGM’s numerous bars.

Those who received the SMS alerts were able to forward the text marketing messages to friends as well. This made viral the campaign to keep guests at the MGM Grand instead of heading to other fun spots in Las Vegas. There was a  total of 549 redemptions for offers of free or two-for-one cocktails.

MGM Grand didn’t just enhance its database by capturing information from consumers who opted in. With SMS, it was “successful in keeping attendees on-property during conference downtime and breaks,” as reported on the Mobile Marketing Association’s website.

For more details, go to: http://mmaglobal.com/modules/article/view.article.php/a2133

When I added a burgeoning rock band to my MySpace friends list recently, I got a pleasant surprise: A personal “thank you” that was a bit more than the usual “thanks for the add” that litters MySpaces. Though I already liked the group, this thoughtful attention to detail really made me believe they appreciated their growing fan base.

This wasn’t an anomaly on MySpace, however. These days, lots of bands stay online all day, every day, in order to stay engaged with listeners. At least with the bands I like, it’s not unusual to see comments on pages like “I can’t believe you wrote back! That’s so awesome!” in response to musicians sending a personal “thank you” for a friend add.

Though they likely wouldn’t say it in so many words, these entrepreneurial struggling artists are engaged in the best type of message marketing, keeping it personal between the consumer and the brand, and reaching to the consumer the way he/she wants to be reached. Best of all, they begin the marketing message relationship with a personal welcome–something that ALL marketers should do, especially when someone signs up to receive their messages.

We all know the importance of sending a “thank you” message to a new subscriber: At the very least, it can be incorporated into the double opt-in process, in which the person must click on a link or respond to a message in order to activate his or her subscription. But by saying thank you, marketers also show appreciation to the consumer, especially in light of spam concerns.

Making that message a bit more personal adds infinite value for the consumers. You’ll have them at hello.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”