Kara A.
The newest addition to the MOS team in the role of Marketing Consultant and Project Manager, Kara came to us after spending over a year in Brazil where she taught English as a second language!
Tag Archives: Marketing
5 Mobile Fails You Should Learn From
As smartphone sales continue to grow like crazy, especially as we enter the jolly holiday season, it’s no surprise that mobile is the new dot.com bubble. And many companies are paving highly effective ways to engage. Actually we’re all just now figuring it out and grasping the question – how do consumers interact with their mobile devices, what roles do they play in their lives, and how can we tap into that?
So as the learning curve goes, and marketing trial and error takes its course, there are bound to be some fails and missteps. Let’s take a look at five of the mobile fails we can all take a lesson from as we plan our strategies for 2012.
- The dying trend, check-in apps. Daily deal offering sites like Groupon and Living Social met the same fate earlier this year. It was enticing at first, and then consumers get bored with it. Oldest story in the book. Gowalla and Foursquare were cool a year ago, but as retailers started to catch on to the trend and created their own shopping apps with check-in incentives, the enthusiasm began to ween.
- Forgetting that mobile is a whole different animal. In case anyone out there still questions it, you CANNOT just take your web stuff and throw it on a mobile site. No no no. Mobile is a whole new opportunity to interact. There are benefits, challenges and strategies completely separate from your PC web tools. If you avoid the copy and paste trap in re-purposing the web, you can take advantage new capabilities, such as HTML5.
- If you’re doing mobile, do it right. A lot of you are experimenting with mobile tools, such as QR codes and social media, without creating a mobile-optimized destination for visitors. So just when you get them right where you want them, your mobile visitors land on your PC site. Ew! I can promise most of these visitors are not coming back. That’s a lot of lost conversions and sales.
- Agencies aren’t focusing on the big picture. Mobile web and mobile strategies can’t just be an afterthought in your bigger plan. But for this fail we blame your marketing agency. We can’t emphasize enough the significance of the mobile experience in the focus of your brand, and in driving further mobile growth. A lot of brands are still just missing the boat on this one.
- Manufacturers are still playing catch up. RIP feature phones. I can still remember the simple days, when my phone’s buzz alert could only mean a text message. Now it could be an email, Facebook message, tweet, status update, check-in or any of the thousands of other connections. It was a sudden and unexpectedly rapid death that manufacturers were not ready to capitalize on.
(Thanks to our friends at Mobile Marketer, see their original article.)
Easy Halloween costumes for the procrastinating marketer
The air has turned brisk and the still-green grass is hiding beneath a thin layer of auburn-stained leaves that faintly crackle and rustle with each step you take. We’re approaching the final days of October, people, and you know what that means… HALLOWEEN!
So please ignore the glistening trees, shiny ornaments and alluring bows of holly that for some reason already adorn the aisles of your local Target and Walmart, and for a few more days let’s relish in the holiday which year after year gets pushed aside like the inconsequential step-child of celebrations. Halloween is not just for kids, my friends, it’s a serious event!
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3 Things Every Business Should be Doing on Facebook Right Now
Don’t post even one more status update before you watch this!! How to lay out your goals and action plan for your social marketing campaign.
Keep sending in your marketing questions! We’ll answer them in the next video!
We’re Issuing YOU a challenge!
Back to Basics: What is your Marketing Objective?
When it comes to this whole marketing thing, do you sometimes feel like you’re in over your head? Maybe you’re new to the “branding” concept? You hear so much talk about “engaging your audience” via Facebook and social media, but are you completely lost in where to even start?
I’m not surprised. Go ahead, just try Googling “marketing ideas.” You’ll get 40,200,000 search results.
Talk about information overload. No wonder most business owners don’t even want to think about their marketing, so they put it off for as long as possible. I’m thinking you need a little direction. Am I right?
I’m gonna level with you – doing it right is not as easy as it looks. That’s why there are millions of professional marketing firms out there. And for the most part, the professionals will do a good job for you. But whether you’re coming up with the creative ideas, or you’re paying someone else to do it for you, you should NEVER go into your own marketing strategy blindly. It’s EXTREMELY important that you get involved. After all, who knows your clients, your product and your company’s needs and goals better than you do?
So before you delve into the details of how often to Tweet and which keywords to base your SEO around, let’s start with the basics. I just want to get your feet wet and get you thinking. Always start by figuring out what your marketing OBJECTIVE is. Everything else will come from there.
What’s your Objective?
1. Awareness – Potential customers must know of, or be reminded of your existence, your location, your product, your price range, and what makes you stand out from the competition
2. Build Contact List – Your mailing list is like gold. It’s what you rely on for promoting any campaign, and it takes a lot of nurturing to build and keep.
3. Get Involved – Your business is not soul-less. Companies are made up of people, and people like to patronize companies that they know go out of their way to help other people. Your company’s positive image reinforces the perception that you are genuinely caring and sharing.
4. Staff Incentives – A cared for and happy team makes for a harmonious, smooth operation. Customers can tell when your employees don’t want to be there. Think about the grouchy, frowning cashier at the supermarket. Make sure your employees feel appreciated!
5. Excitement – This is the kind of energy and excitement that makes you stand out from the competition. This is when you need to turn on your thinking cap and come up with some really creative promotions.
6. Frequency – When you’re trying to be “the place to go.” This is a brand loyalty thing, and keeping them coming as frequently as possible.
7. Publicity – For this one you’ve got to be interesting and newsworthy. Maybe you’re doing BIG things for the community, or you’re doing something so completely out of the box that it’s a story too good to pass up.
8. Generate Traffic - Simply getting people in the door or on the website is your goal here. Contests are great for this! You want to get potential customers to complete some sort of action, whether it’s entering the contest or downloading a form.
9. Branding – Image is everything. Period. If you don’t define your company and your brand, the market will define it for you. And that’s never what you want!
10. Increase Sales – a.k.a. Up-selling – This is every CEO’s favorite! From the sneaky but ingenious psychological tactics (a la putting candy, gum and magazines in the grocery checkout line) to having an in-depth understanding of how your industry works, there are really unlimited opportunities to do this one.
11. Creating Activity - Most industries have their “slow” periods during the year, but that’s not set in stone. This is where you will get creative to make the slow season profitable.
12. Trial Offer – Who’s gonna turn down a free sample? Come on, you’ll love it. This is when you really want to get those potential customers who are living on the edge to finally make the plunge – but without any of the risk.
(Great list compiled by Tom Feltenstein – And if you’re looking for a good book on the basics, try Tom’s “Encyclopedia of 401 Proven Killer Promotional Tactics”)
Stevenson cashes in on football marketing campaign
There must have been a huge sigh of relief at 11 p.m. on Saturday when, after a nail-biting double overtime, the Mustangs just squeaked into the end zone with a 16-yard touchdown. Celebration ensued amongst the spectators sitting in the brand new 3,5oo-seat stadium, erected on the site of the former Baltimore Ravens and Colts training complex.
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Top 3 Things to do on a Rainy Day – Blogs, Buns and Brownies, YUM!
It’s gloomy, the storm clouds are brewing, and the rain is trickling down your window. Cue the cuddly comforts of a rainy Thursday.
You may have no other motivation than to simply cuddle up in bed all day, but here’s the top 3 best things to do on a rainy day to make yourself feel only semi-productive. Continue reading
You’ve Been A Bad, Bad Ad!
Next month, the FDA will be celebrating the first birthday of their brain child, the Bad Ad Program…
Whaaaat? You mean you’ve never heard of the Bad Ad program? Well, we wouldn’t blame you. Since the program began in May of 2010 there have been over 239 complaints. Nope, not 239,000… but 239 total.
The basic premise of this program is “to educate healthcare providers about the role they can play in helping the agency make sure that prescription drug advertising and promotion is truthful and not misleading” (source: www.fda.gov).
Launched by the FDA’s Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communication, it has commissioned a small secret police, whoops, I mean agency, which takes into account the various sorts of advertising violations. Continue reading
Stop. Now read the next two questions.
Who am I? And why am I here?
These are the questions that circled through my mind as I read Ad Age this morning, as has become my habit to do just about every morning.
I especially love the “Small Agency Diary” articles because most of the things they talk about are experiences we’ve all had in the marketing world. It’s like my pals in Ad Age land have been spending time right here in our office.
But all I could think about as I read Derek Walker’s blog post this morning, “Who are you and why are you here?” was how would I answer that question?
It’s such a simple thing. A straightforward and direct request. Who are you? And now that I start to think about it, Derek is right in his point. You go to so many advertisers and marketers’ websites, and you get no idea about who they really are. What is their perspective and their raison d’etre? What do they think is their most powerful offering?
For goodness sakes, give us a little personality! I mean, as marketers we’re supposed to build brands and deliver messages for our clients. If we can’t tell you who we are and why we’re so special, how could you ever trust us with your own company’s image?
So with all of this reflection I digress. I take a step back to the MOS website and take a fresh look at how we represent ourselves as a company, as individuals, as creatives. And again I ask, Who am I? And why am I here?
