By: Gail Goodman
People love their smartphones. Whether you’re walking down the street or inside a shopping mall, sitting in a coffee shop or at the airport, half the people around you are looking down at their cellphones.
Eighty-three percent of American adults own a cell phone, and 42 percent of them own a Blackberry, iPhone, or a similar smartphone, according to a recent Pew Internet Project report. The study also found that 87 percent of smartphone users access the Internet or email on their device. Two-thirds of smartphone users do so daily. Increasingly, just as how the home broadband connection remains always on, the mobile connection seems to be ever present.
Today’s apps-savvy consumers want business information delivered concisely and available for reading on the fly. Thanks to the explosion of Internet-enabled mobile devices, you and your customers can communicate on the go. Here are six easy ways to deliver on mobile devices marketing that encourages customer interaction.
1. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly
Whereas delivering email marketing that can be read on mobile devices used to be optional for a business, now it’s essential. Keep a message’s subject line short and place high up in the message your brand name, the offer, and the call to action.
Keep your email design simple and light on text, and offer a link to your company’s website or Facebook page so a reader can find out more.
2. Give Mobile Customers What They Need
Forty percent of U.S. smartphone owners compare prices on their mobile device while shopping inside a store, according to HubSpot, an Internet marketing firm in Cambridge, Mass. If you do not optimize your site for mobile users, you may miss sales opportunities. The most sought-after information (a company’s hours, locations, and directions) and popular features should be front and center where customers can easily find them. If mobile consumers cannot find the information they need to guide their purchasing decisions, they may click — but then take their business elsewhere.
3. Invite List Sign-ups via Text Message and Quick-Response Codes
Customers entering into your retail establishment probably are carrying their cellphones on them. Build your contact list by inviting patrons to send a text message (if your email service provider offers this feature) or scan a QR code. Put a sign at your cash register to encourage such activity while the shopping experience is still fresh.
A savings coupon or special offer can sweeten the deal for any customers who sign up via text message or QR code. And you end up building your list without having to manually enter email addresses after deciphering handwriting on a sign-up sheet.
4. Build Your Fan Base
Your socially active customers have a Facebook or Twitter app loaded on their smartphones. A sign or poster that encourages them to connect with you in the social media sphere can propel significant growth of your network — and expand your company’s visibility to the contacts of your new followers. Be sure to give customers a good (and fun) reason to like or follow you.
5. Tap Location-Based Services
If you run a brick-and-mortar business or host an event, encourage people to check in on location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, or Where. You will gain information about your regular customers and how often they visit you. It also lets your customers share information and tips about your business with others. A unique special offer can encourage these regulars to check in more often.
6. Encourage Reviews on the Run
Encourage customers to share their thoughts about their experience while they are still at our place of business. Post a sign that says, “How’d we do? Let us know!” You can even direct customers to sites like Yelp, Where, Google Places, or TripAdvisor, where you would like them to offer reviews of your business. Make sure you post your company’s Twitter handle, so customers can include it in reviews and follow your business on Twitter for updates. Be sure you stay on top of any customer reviews posted about your company.
More mobile technologies are springing up, enabling businesses and customers to stay connected, regardless of location. Remember: All these gadgets and apps can support your marketing but they should not drive it. You still need to focus your message on how your company provides great products and services. Know who and where your customers are. Then bring the goods to them. Mobile strategies let you package your marketing to better reach them.
By: Bob Darabant
Webinars are a great way to demonstrate a VAR’s expertise to a targeted audience: Existing customers and prospective customers. However, in our conversations with VARs we have found that many are reluctant to host their own webinars. They are either unfamiliar with the procedures involved, or simply lack the necessary technical resources and expertise. Here are some quick tips to help VARs host webinars.
They include…
Don’t make it sales focused
This is the biggest mistake a VAR can make when hosting a webinar. No one is going to sign up for a webinar titled “Why our Product is the Best” or “Why you should Buy our Product.”
The types of webinars people will want to attend are the ones that have some benefit to that person, besides buying the VAR’s product. Therefore, one of
VARs should think about who they want to attract to the webinar, (titles, company size, and vertical) and then research the issues facing these industries today. Once you’ve learned about a few major problems that your target audience is dealing with, find a way your product fits in, and that is your topic. For example, Astaro has hosted several webinars targeting the healthcare industry discussing how hospitals can take advantage of the HITECH Act. The presentation had a section on security but Astaro’s products weren’t the main topic. Though catering the topic of the webinar to your audience is a good start, another way to attract even more viewers is to…
Do Promote in multiple ways
Marketers have become over-dependent on email, and while this is still a great way to invite people to webinars there are plenty of other ways to drive attendance. In addition to email you can post a link for registration as a Google Ad, as a Tweet, or on your Facebook wall (don’t have Facebook or Twitter? Read this post on how to use social media for marketing). Be creative, and post a link to the registration whenever and wherever you can. That said, you should still…
Do Refine and add to your email lists
Of course you should always send a registration link to all of your clients and prospects via email. Be sure to refine your list so that only the relevant targets receive the email, and add to it by purchasing new lists if you don’t have a large enough database.
Do Have guest speakers from multiple organizations
To have outside speakers involved. Your organization may not have a lot of expertise on the topic that draws in the most audience members, so bringing in a well-known guest speaker can help you earn some credibility on a difficult topic. Furthermore, having an expert present can help improve and expand your webinar’s content. Talk to your vendors to see if they can provide a speaker or if they know of anyone who can speak on the topic you are considering. Having more than one speaker can make the presentation more interesting.
In some cases you may be forced to pay for a guest speaker. The money you spend will be well worth it because the speaker will probably want to promote the webinar for him/herself as well, helping you reach an even larger audience.
Do choose your platform
There are several great webinar platforms that allow VARs to host webinars, create registration pages, and compose invitations for meetings. Some good choices are Go-to-Webinar, Cisco WebEx, or Microsoft Live Meeting. Ask your vendors what they are using and see if you can take advantage of their subscriptions. Upon starting the webinar, you’ll want to…
Do allow your audience to participate
Allowing webinar attendees to ask questions makes the webinar more engaging and may bring up opportunities to mention your product. However, when a webinar is live, permitting uncensored questions can be risky. In order to ensure the webinar stays focused and appropriate, use a platform that allows audience members to pose questions directly to the meeting organizer via a chat feature. Then have the moderator read the questions that are appropriate.
Do follow up
Like any good initiative, you should always follow up with attendees, as well as those who registered but did not attend. Only after you’ve followed up can you determine if your webinar was a success by comparing the results to your goals.
By: Jerome Young
Are you wondering why everyone in the business world is so agog over LinkedIn? If you’ve been avoiding LinkedIn because you think it’s probably just a more boring version of Facebook, you’re missing out. This professional networking site has become a very powerful tool for job candidates who want to increase their visibility and showcase their best qualities.
- Update Your Status ASAP
If people know you are job hunting, they are often happy to help you out. When you post to let your network know about your job search, put a positive spin on it. For example, “I’m starting on my job search today. The years I spent at (name of previous company) have prepared me well to advance my career through this transition. I’m excited to see what’s available on the job market. If you know of anyone who’s looking for a (name your job title) with (name a couple of your top skills), let me know!”
2. Get Relevant Recommendations
Former managers, direct reports, coworkers, clients, and vendors can be great sources for recommendations on LinkedIn. When recruiters view your profile, they are very interested in what other people are saying about you. Don’t spam your network with requests for recommendations. Instead, ask about a dozen people who have worked closely with you to post feedback that is specific and focuses on both your character and your job skills. See my recommendations as an example.
3. Find Out Who You Know
Use LinkedIn to get the inside scoop. Run a search on LinkedIn for a prospective employer’s company name cross referenced with the name of your high school, any colleges you’ve attended, and your past workplaces. That way, you can pull up anyone you know who is or has been involved with a prospective employer. You can pump them for information about the company’s culture and how they were successful in getting a job there. It’s even better if they know the recruiter or someone else in the hiring decision-making chain. Friends of friends may also be able to hook you up with an inside connection.
4. Use the Job Search Function to Boost Your SEO
Finding posted jobs is only one of the reasons to spend time browsing the job search area of LinkedIn. This is where you will find out what skills recruiters in your industry are looking for. These are the keywords you will need to add to your LinkedIn summary and your resume so recruiters who are looking for jobs that aren’t posted can easily find you.
5. Do Unto Others
Stay on the lookout for ways to assist people in your network in their job searches as well. The more you give, the more you get back on LinkedIn. For example, if you become active in a professional group geared toward your area of expertise on LinkedIn and start sharing your job search tips, you stay at the top of people’s minds when they become aware of a job that would be right for you. When you post helpful advice online, it also makes you look like a team player in the eyes of recruiters.
from:PRnewswire.com
With more than half of smartphone owners using mobile devices to enhance their shopping experience (source: iModerate Research Technologies), savvy retailers are leveraging smartphone capabilities to drive sales and increase shopper loyalty. OpinionLab, the pioneer and leader in voice-of-customer (VOC) listening technologies and mobile feedback solutions, today unveiled five tips to help retailers engage with brick-and-mortar shoppers via smartphones.
“Smartphones are rapidly transforming the retail landscape and blurring the lines between online and in-store customer experience,” said Rand Nickerson, CEO of OpinionLab. “With many retailers generating greater revenues in the store compared to online, using mobile initiatives to incentivize in-store purchases will lead to improved sales. And, with millions of shoppers now engaging with retailers via mobile devices, brands have greater opportunities to listen, understand, and react to customer feedback through the mobile channel.”
OpinionLab’s patented methodology and recognized [+] symbol have helped many of the world’s leading brands collect, understand, and manage actionable VOC feedback across all customer touch points, including brick-and-mortar locations, mobile channels and apps, websites, and social-media properties. Based on insights generated from the feedback of mobile consumers, OpinionLab offers five essential tips to help brick-and-mortar retailers provide a more complete multichannel shopping experience.
Extend the aisle to keep customers engaged. Shoppers in the information age like to research before they buy, and 46 percent of consumers have used their phone to get product information while in a store (source: Briabe Media). Put in-depth product detail at your customers’ fingertips, and you can mitigate their need to perform additional research and boost the likelihood of a purchase. Add quick response (QR) codes to in-store displays to draw customers directly to branded mobile sites that provide one-stop access to far more information than traditional brick-and-mortar aisles can provide: comprehensive product information, comparisons, and more.
Win the price war through exclusive incentives. Consumers today are shrewdly cost conscious, and 25 percent have used smartphones to compare prices while in a store (source: SmartRevenue). Take a proactive approach by pushing incentives through near-field communication (NFC) technology. For example, as a customer browses the outdoor furniture section, send an instant discount on patio umbrellas to his or her mobile device. Exclusive promotions appeal to savvy mobile consumers, and highly targeted offers encourage customers to take action on special deals related to their shopping needs.
Embrace product reviews and demos. According to a Nielsen survey, 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online. Embrace this trend by making peer reviews and demos easy to access in the brick-and-mortar space. Keep shoppers in your brand backyard by linking them directly to reviews through QR codes on store displays and including store-made videos showing products in use.
Use games to engage and reward loyal customers. For the first time in history, the number of loyalty memberships in the US exceeds two billion, netting out to more than 18 memberships per household. That’s up 16 percent from the almost 1.8 billion memberships counted in 2008 (source: Colloquy’s Loyalty Census). Enhance loyalty programs by adding a social twist: invite shoppers to compare points with others or introduce customers via Twitter, Sonar, etc. based on buying patterns. Weave NFC or mobile geolocation technology in with such promotions to push special offers to shoppers who take certain actions, such as visiting a dressing room, filling a basket with $100 worth of merchandise, or spending a certain amount of time in the store.
Always be listening. Give consumers 24/7 access to customer service through their mobile devices and leverage social media to respond to questions and service inquiries via Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Most of all, make sure your customers can send open-ended feedback directly to you at anytime, from anywhere using simple, opt-in mobile comment cards.
Siemens, Hilton, and Target are using games to train workers and improve how they design and market products
By: Rachael King
Siemens (SI) is pinning high hopes on Pete. A cheery fellow, Pete wears a yellow hard hat with his name emblazoned across the front. He’s polite and eager to lend a hand. He’s also animated: Pete the Plant Manager stars in a new online video game from Siemens called Plantville that simulates what it’s like to run a manufacturing facility. The aim is to take three dilapidated factories and make them more efficiently meet customer orders by hiring employees, redesigning layout, and buying and installing new Siemens equipment.
Germany’s Siemens, which makes power plants, scanners, and trains, created the game to fuel equipment sales and foster greater employee knowledge of its products. “Employees are sometimes siloed in their business units and don’t see the breadth and depth of our portfolio,” says Tom Varney, head of marketing communications at Siemens Industry. The company joins a growing roster of enterprises as diverse as Hilton Worldwide’s Embassy Suites hotel chain and German software maker SAP (SAP), which are using technologies that make games interesting in order to interact more effectively with customers and employees.
The trend, known as gamification, lets businesses weave elements of games into applications that otherwise have little to do with playing. The market for gamification will grow to $1.6 billion in 2015, from $100 million in 2011, according to Wanda Meloni, founder of M2 Research, a consulting firm that researches the gaming industry.
Companies such as Cold Stone Creamery and United Parcel Service (UPS) have for years used games for such tasks as training workers. Gamification is now letting managers push aspects of gaming into marketing, product design, and everyday work experience. It’s also helping companies compensate for shortfalls in traditional forms of advertising and marketing, says Gabe Zichermann, chief executive officer of Gamification, a company that runs workshops for businesses that want to implement a gamification strategy. “What we have is a crisis of engagement,” he says.
Nissan’s “eco mode” dashboard service
Nissan Motor (NSANY) brought gamification to its new electric vehicle, the Nissan Leaf. The automaker uses the technology to help drivers conserve fuel. When the car is driven in so-called eco mode, its accelerator contains a counter push-back control mechanism that is activated when it detects excess pressure. The feature informs drivers that they’re using more power than required. An online portal connected to the car’s dashboard also lets drivers know how well they’re conserving energy, compared with other drivers in the region. The most efficient drivers are given virtual bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medals.
Similarly, cashiers at Target (TGT) receive a score each time they check out a customer. The score is based on the the transaction’s speed, with the checkout system also calculating the cashier’s success rate over multiple transactions.
Companies need to guard against adding a superficial gaming gloss to applications—for instance, by creating meaningless leader boards that have little lasting impact on employee behavior, says Aaron Dignan, author of Game Frame, a book published in March that explores game mechanics in the workplace. “My hope is that it grows beyond that into a real discipline that’s more rigorous than it is today,” Dignan says. Managers also need to be alert to such possible unintended consequences as hacking or employees putting too much emphasis on the wrong aspects of play. “People could pay too much attention to things that don’t matter or too little attention to things that do matter if the game is designed poorly,” he says.
U.S. Companies Helped on Plantville
Siemens spent a year designing Plantville, working with such companies as Eugene (Ore.)-based game-design company Pipeworks Software, advertising and design firm Shaw Co. in St. Louis, and Fusion Performance Marketing in Plano, Tex. The game can be downloaded at Plantville.com and Siemens is using advertising, social media, and employee communications to get the word out. While the game hasn’t been out long enough for Siemens to have amassed results, Varney says early feedback from employees has been positive.
Hilton’s Embassy Suites is using game techniques in a customer loyalty campaign. Created with a marketing company called Maritz, the campaign targeted 50,000 of Embassy Suites’ most loyal guests, then solicited their participation with 10 different approaches, including direct mail, e-mail, and asking customers to play a game. The game option proved most effective, says Christian Kuhn, director of brand marketing for Embassy Suites. The 5,000 people targeted by the game were most likely to open e-mails and later spent the most money, Kuhn says. That group accounted for about $200,000 of the additional $1 million in revenue generated by the campaign, he said.
Games may be more effective in marketing because they offer the gratification people experience when surprised and rewarded. An unexpected reward releases dopamine in the brain, giving beneficiaries a pleasurable feeling, says Barry Kirk, a vice-president at Maritz. “We don’t think you can gamify something without understanding the human brain and neuroscience,” Barry says.
Game designers are good at creating psychological hacks into how the human brain works to determine what motivates people, says author Dignan. That’s why gamification can be a good fit for companies seeking to better engage workers. “It’s about managing motivation and energy level and commitment,” he says.
SAP’s Games for Corporate Directors
Software maker SAP is turning to gamification to help corporate board members prepare for meetings. Directors typically must slog through thick binders full of documents or dashboards that feature key performance metrics. SAP is developing an application for Apple’s iPad that boasts game elements such as progress bars and leader boards to get directors “more engaged in consuming various pieces of data,” says Reuven Gorsht, senior director of strategy and global pre-sales at SAP. “We’re dealing with very high-ranking executives that sit on six or seven boards and may have a full-time job running a company,” he says. “Their time is precious and their attention span is fairly low.” he says. The app should be ready in three to four months, he says. SAP is also looking at other ways to use game mechanics to make its software easier to use and more engaging for employees.
Traci Sitzmann, an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado’s business school, says games can make employees better at their jobs. She spent more than a year examining 65 studies and data from 6,476 trainees in a study due to be published in the journal Personnel Psychology. Those using video games had a 14 percent higher skill-based knowledge level, an 11 percent higher factual-knowledge level, and a 9 percent higher retention rate than trainees in comparison groups, Sitzmann says.
Siemens is looking to games, not only for retaining current employees but attracting future ones as well. “With Plantville, we think there’s a big educational play with colleges and high schools,” says Siemens’ Varney. He says he hopes the game can help make manufacturing more attractive to young people. “We have about 3,000 jobs posted in the U.S. at Siemens, many in technology or manufacturing,” he says. “We’re hoping to inspire a new generation of plant managers.”