Online content marketing is a valuable tool for marketers looking to connect and engage with consumers. Building a content marketing strategy helps increase your brand’s identity, increase traffic and build links.

According to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) 2013 survey, 86 percent of B2C (business to consumer) companies are planning to keep or increase their current content marketing spending this year. Fifty-four percent of B2B (business to business) companies are planning to increase their content marketing spending in 2013. With a demand for content marketing increasing, it’s worth considering building a content marketing strategy and learning more about the opportunities content marketing can bring to your website.

“Content creation and distribution is booming. We’ve never seen brands more active in developing content to attract and retain customers. Our latest research tells us that more than one in every four marketing dollars is spent on a content marketing initiative. Yet, almost no one has a concrete strategy for the deployment of those content assets,” wrote Joe Pulizzi in Chief Content Officer Magazine.

So what exactly is content marketing? According to the Content Marketing Institute, to engage in content marketing is to create and distribute “relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience, with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” In simpler terms it’s when business and brands communicate with a target audience through informative and valuable content that doesn’t sell to the consumer.

To build a content marketing strategy means including blogs, social media strategies, e-books, press releases, whitepapers, case studies, newsletters, reports, custom publications, podcasts, videos, webinars and infographics on your website. The most successful content marketing campaigns involve several of these platforms, all working together to communicate a consistent message. Keep in mind that the audience will each engage differently with your brand, so incorporating several different platforms and techniques ensures that your content marketing strategy reaches the widest possible audience.

When building a content marketing strategy, you want to make sure that you’re publishing quality content that is easy to read, engages the viewer and provides real value – this will, in turn, allow the user to interact with your brand and bring about a call to action, which is the ultimate goal. You may find that you need to skew content for each platform to appeal to a broad audience. For example, your fitness blog may appeal to the more serious athlete while your social media outlets may appeal to an audience who is committed to working out three to five times a week or as time permits.

Content marketing is an invaluable tool when it comes to influencing the way that your target audience perceives your brand and in the way that they choose to interact with your products and services. Before you start putting content out there, you must develop a well-executed content marketing strategy. Pulizzi offers these steps before creating content:

• Start with “why?” With content marketing, there are a number of possible business goals you can have. A few to consider are lead conversion/nurturing, customer loyalty/retention, customer up-sell and passionate subscribers.
• Build your audience persona. Before you start any content program, you need to have a clear understanding of who the audience is and, ultimately, what you want them to do. What do you need to know about your audience to build the right persona? The easiest way to find out is by asking the following questions: who are they? what are their needs? why do they care about us? Your audience persona doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be detailed enough so that your content creators have a clear understanding of who they are engaging.
• Define the mission. This has nothing to do with the products and services you sell — it’s all about the informational needs of your persona, and should include the core audience target, what will be delivered to the audience and the outcome for the audience.

How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency

Small business owners can easily get too involved in the day-to-day operations of their business to spend any time brainstorming marketing ideas to stay competitive and reach new customers. In a hyper-connected world where a strong online presence could mean better growth opportunities, 2013 looks to be a year of significantly increased online investment for small businesses.  

According to the 2013 AT&T Small Business Technology Poll, which surveyed 1,000 small businesses nationwide, 66 percent of small businesses plan to invest as much or more in digital marketing – websites, social media and online advertisements – as they did last year. The poll also revealed that a vast majority of small businesses will expand their online and digital presence through the company website and email blasts to customers.

Small businesses are not ignoring the shift that has taken place in consumer consumption habits thanks to mobile. Seventy-one percent are “somewhat” or “very likely” going to increase budgets for marketing via mobile devices.  And nearly one-third use “mobile-friendly” websites – those easily viewable on smartphones – as a way to engage with customers.

As a small business owner you need to get – and stay – actively involved in your company’s marketing efforts. Take a lesson from big business and see how they utilize social media, online advertising, email marketing and their own website every day to stay ahead. Following the same practices will help you grow your online presence and your business.

Social Media: be sure your company is engaging on a daily basis with Facebook Page, Twitter, LinkedIn and social viral sites like YouTube. Post about company-related topics and encourage interaction. It’s also important that you respond to questions, concerns and complaints. Amberly Dressler of websitemagazine.com suggests small businesses set social media guidelines to include ones that are in-line with company goals and ethos. Don’t type something on a social media page that you wouldn’t say directly to a consumer, in-store. A business’s customer service hat should never come off, even in the comfort of the digital space.

Advertising: Advertising online has become a popular strategy for small businesses. According to Local Consumer Review Survey (2012), 85 percent of consumers search online for local businesses. If you aren’t participating in SEO tactics or SEM programs, you are losing opportunity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines like Google and Bing via “natural” (organic) search results for targeted keywords.

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, promotes online businesses and websites by increasing visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) by the implementation of paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion. Search Engine Marketing strategies provide organic results, where the consumer is consciously seeking out your services, without there being any direct or intruding marketing force from your business. Doing so yields a higher conversion rate, lower cost and most importantly, a higher ROI. The realm of SEM encompasses the range of all activities involved in performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO), managing paid listings within the search engines, submitting sites to directories and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations and individuals.

Email: Email marketing is a highly effective method for customer acquisition and customer retention. Email campaigns produce granular, measurable results by providing a direct, personal message to customers. Email marketing is so much more than just sending your customers emails each week. It’s about building relationships. The email channel not only drives strong ROI in customer acquisition, but it increasingly powerful to engage consumers. Marketers looking to make an impact among subscribers are increasing their use of triggered messaging, also known as automated messages. As a small business, the benefit of triggered messaging is that you can build a program once, tie that offer or message to specific customer behavior and let the automation take over. Since the program is built once and used in a repeatable manner, it creates efficiency. Additionally, when combined with monitoring and optimization, these programs can advance the effectiveness of mailings by improving click and conversion rates. Examples of triggered campaigns include welcome messages, cart abandonment programs and inventory in-stock reminders.

Geofencing Advertising: A new marketing favorite, geofencing allows you to capture a target audience within a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. Geofencing advertising allows you to set up “triggers” so when a device crosses a geofence and enters (or exits) the boundaries defined by the administrator, an SMS or email alert is sent. Setting up a geofence allows businesses to use not only the ability of reaching a consumer anywhere, but the ability to know in real time when a customer is in a prime area to be engaged.

Website: Take a good look at your website. Is it user-friendly? Is it attractive? Does it offer valuable and engaging content in the form of blogs, video, podcasts and infographics? Does it showcase your products or services and provide detailed information about the business, products and services? Content is the soul of your website and should be taken seriously. Be sure to add blogs, videos and images to the site, and make sure the content is search engine optimized.

Does your company have a effective internet marketing strategy?  Let Blue Interactive Agency know in your comments below! We help your business establish an effective internet strategy to help market products and services online. For any questions, call us at 954-779-2801.

Marketing Ideas, Business Marketing Tactics is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency

In today’s digitized world, digital marketing and social media advertising continue to be popular avenues to reach consumers. Developing and implementing effective internet marketing strategies to help your business grow means knowing and understanding how to use the latest marketing practices and tools. But before you begin developing an online marketing strategy, Jim Joseph of Entrepreneur Magazine suggests you first need to define your brand. He suggests that “when defining your brand, put as much clarity as possible into how the brand and business is described, so that you can build a specific brand experience to match it.” Joseph offers three steps to help:

• Make an inventory of your skills. List out what you are especially good at and what you want your customers to think of when your brand comes to mind. Your unique set of skills will form the basis of your brand definition.

• What are your customers’ needs? From your list of skills, identify those that your customers particularly need. Think through the kinds of things you do that your customers will come to you for. You should define your brand based on your ability to fulfill such demands. .

• Focus on what differentiates. It’s important for your brand to be different than other similar options available to customers. Of course your brand experience will ultimately differentiate you, but being unique starts with deciding what attributes set you apart from others.

Your goal is to be different and better than your competition. Once you have defined the brand, you want to start developing effective internet marketing strategies to help your business grow. Consider incorporating these marketing strategies into your online marketing plan:

• Use link building strategies to enhance your results. Creating relevant, engaging and frequent content can help drive traffic to your site. Likewise, linking your site to other valuable and trusted websites can help boost results.

• Use SEO content. Carefully chosen keywords will organically improve your ranking within search engines and are at the top of the list for SEO competitor analysis. These words and phrases should emphasize what your company is about and be specific to your product or service. Use them in the website content, in blogs and articles.

• Use all the tools in the toolbox to build a better site. Social media, SEO, web analytics, blogging strategies and content development can work together synergistically to help make any online marketing program successful.

• Incorporate mobile marketing. Mobile continues to play a big role in marketing strategies and new technologies. Mobilizing simply means making it easy for customers to interact with you via mobile and determining the best way to reach out to them via mobile with relevant information for them. To be effective in mobile marketing, be sure to create a mobile version of your website that offers visitors an experience that is customized to their device. Also, expand your use of mobile emailing, but be sure to keep it simple in design with less graphics that take too much time to load or don’t properly load. Consider building an opt-in SMS (short message service) text messaging list, making content relevant and engaging. To make sure your mobile marketing strategy is on point, consider using metrics to monitor peak usage times so you can add fresh content at those times.

• Incorporate “Pay-per-Click” (PPC) programs. Pay-per-click is highly effective and considered one of the most cost-effective internet marketing options available. Because it’s results-oriented, PPC programs can help produce immediate results in increased traffic to your site. PPC marketing is also highly measurable – you can track the number of hits from your ads, enabling you to calculate ROI. PCC marketing also gives you control with keywords, bid prices, advertising copy, campaign offers and website landing page content.

Does your company have a effective internet marketing strategy?  Let Blue Interactive Agency know in your comments below! We help your business establish an effective internet strategy to help market products and services online. For any questions, call us at 954-779-2801.

Effective Internet Marketing Strategies to Help Your Business Grow is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency

Social media may be the media darling, but when it comes to implementing a successful online marketing strategy there is still no substitute for email. Email marketing is so much more than just sending your customers emails each week. It’s about building relationships.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing returns more than $40 for each dollar invested, which makes it not only the most lucrative form of online marketing but the most profitable marketing means of all, on or off the web.

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails. In order to take full advantage of the benefits of email marketing to increase customer engagement and boost sales, you should be integrating three critical types of email marketing messaging strategies:

Transactional emails
Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. Transactional e-mail marketing works best with impulse-buy commodities or well-known products that simply require reminders. Because it’s relatively inexpensive to “batch and blast” thousands of e-mails to meet reach and frequency goals, it can be confused with spam.

Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, purchase or order confirmation emails and email receipts. The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that triggered it. Because of its high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are a golden opportunity to engage customers; introduce or extend the email relationship; anticipate and answer questions; and cross-sell or up-sell products and services. Sending a customer an email to inform them that they have abandoned their cart while presenting a motivational incentive to return and complete the transaction has been implemented with great success by thousands of e-commerce companies.

Loyalty
A crucial part of running any successful business comes down to the customer. Without customers the business would cease to function. This is why consumer loyalty is a key factor in email marketing. A loyal customer is one who will continuously use your products or service. He/she will also provide good ratings and promote your business through word-of-mouth.

Loyalty-focused campaigns can span the entire customer life cycle, from the initial entry to program renewal notifications and reminder messages. Loyalty programs enable you to collect significant amount of data about your customers, such as their addresses, phone numbers, demographic information and buying behavior.

Loyalty programs can be complex, but email campaigns that target loyalty program members are more successful at engaging their audiences, generating higher open rates, transaction levels and revenue per email, according to a report by Experian CheetahMail. Among email campaigns studied, mailings targeting loyalty program members boosted transaction rates 29 percent over bulk campaigns sent to the same clients and such programs increased revenue per email 11 percent. Among various types of loyalty mailings, emails announcing rewards arrivals perform best, generating open rates roughly 5 times higher than loyalty promotional mailings.

Overall, most loyalty mailings generate strong click rates, including welcome emails, reward statements, redemption reminders and surveys. They also tend to perform better than standard promotional mailings in terms of customer response and revenue. In fact, compared to bulk campaigns, emails targeted to loyalty program members have 40 percent higher open rates, 22 percent higher click rates, and transaction rates and revenue per email that are 29 percent and 11 percent higher, respectively. Even mailings targeting prospects with an invitation to join a loyalty program tend to outperform the promotional mailings for the same businesses with a 28 percent lift in transaction rates and 25 percent higher revenue per email.

Relational
A relational e-mail marketing campaign is about the database. Relational email marketing allows you to easily speak to your customers (and prospective customers) in a very personalized and intimate way that is not possible with other marketing channels. Relational email marketing presents many opportunities, including

• builds trust and professionalism
• creates a sense of personal touch that people respond to
• people are more likely to click through your offers
• people are more likely to complete your surveys and share buying experiences
• it can be easily monetized
• helps generate repeat sales

Emailing a monthly newsletter, articles, videos and podcasts, helps establish your company as an expert and keeps you on your customers’ radar. Not only can you send personalized email with your user’s name or login name, but you can add targeted information. In addition, you can segment your customer list into smaller lists and send very personalized messages. And because you can segment your database with email, you can send extremely targeted marketing campaigns that will result in increased sales conversions simply because they are so specific. For example, if you sell flowers, you can find everybody in your database who ever bought tulips and send them an email in April when the first tulip shipments come in. By using your customer database to put the most relevant message in front of customers who are most likely to respond to it is what good marketing is all about.

If you have questions regarding email marketing, Blue Interactive Agency offers full service email marketing with tracking and reporting for optimized results. We design custom email campaigns including all services from strategy to list management for interactive marketing solutions that drive ROI.

Email Messaging is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency

With today’s global reach, advertisers are faced with the challenge of delivering a clear, consistent message across all communication channels – unified message marketing. No matter if online or offline, delivering consistency in the look, feel, voice and language of the message helps improve the opportunity to build and maintain solid relationships with consumers.

When Apple prepared to launch the iPad in 2010, it very quickly became clear that it understood one of the key elements of messaging – consistency. From every platform, consumers and retailers consistently heard that Apple’s newest piece of technology was “magical and revolutionary,” building a perception of a product to which no other could compare.

Here’s how Apple got it right:
• The company kept it consistent. From press releases to website copy, every communication about the new iPad carried the same message, word for word. Repetition of a powerful message strengthens your brand’s perception.
• The company made it compelling. Apple’s brand promise wasn’t just a clever catch phrase. Though messaging should have tone and feeling, it should exhibit value as well.
• They didn’t let tactics define their messaging. Apple clearly formulated product benefits into a key message instead of jumping into developing marketing materials. Allowing your communication vehicles to drive your messaging needs will almost always result in a message that is, at best, disjointed.

Three years after the launch of the iPad, Apple continues to use this strategic approach to messaging around its products. Press releases and advertising still use the term “revolutionary” to describe the products and App Store. In fact, the unified message marketing is paying off in consistent earnings: the company reported Q2 2013 revenues somewhere between $41 billion and $43 billion (compared with $39.2 billion in that period the previous year).

This is just one example of how unified messaging marketing plays an important role for any brand, across any marketing platform. When done properly, unified message marketing produces a generous return – return in customers, return in market share and return in revenue.

Unified message marketing must work at both the local and national levels. Local is no longer a nice add-on option. Today consumers use 7.9 different media sources when shopping for products or services locally. Brands and national marketers need a comprehensive and integrated local strategy that spans traditional and new media. According to BIA/Kelsey, by 2016 local media advertising will grow from $136 billion to $151 billion. While this total includes local TV, radio and newspapers, as well as mobile and online advertising, it’s no surprise that a major digital shift is happening. In 2012, for instance, 18% of the total local media advertising was digital; by 2016, 26 percent, or approximately $39 billion, will be spent.

National brands recognize this trend and are going local in a major way – utilizing hyperlocal marketing channels as a way to reach consumers in their markets. According to a survey by the CMO Council and Balihoo, half of U.S. brands are now managing their local marketing efforts at the corporate level, and one-third say they expect their local efforts to continue growing through 2013.

The biggest challenge large brands face when utilizing local marketing platforms is keeping their marketing messages consistent. Sixty-four percent of brands surveyed are looking for ways to eliminate the customer confusion that can occur when different marketing messages are sent out across competing platforms, and 81 percent say communicating a consistent brand message is their top priority for the upcoming year. Streetfightmag.com offers five ways that brands can do just that:

1. Maintain unified creative. Maintaining branding and consistency at the local level starts with unified creative. Large brands can generate a corporate-approved template, and then localize information for specific stores. They can even go beyond standard localization by including local reviews and photos. By making creative for each of their locations, large brands can save time and money. They can also maintain consistent branding, as well as control of the message across the board.

2. Understand the motivations of local audiences. As a channel, mobile offers an excellent outlet to reach local consumers at scale. When operating a new channel, however, brands need to think beyond simply reformatting their creative and buying banner ads. Messages need to take advantage of the local medium and their capabilities, including understanding the motivations of the local audiences. Forward-thinking brands should consider the way mobile users consume information, and content needs to be optimized as such. If done correctly, the overarching message can be retained with a strong call-to-action.

3. Engage in a channel- and geography-specific way. The channels over which brands engage with consumers each have unique nuances. For example, local Facebook communities respond well to photos, while Twitter communities are link-oriented. Far more insightful is understanding the sentiment and mood of each channel. Brands can measure things like how Instagram communities respond to brand messaging, versus other channels like Foursquare or Google+ Local. This can inform the marketing strategy for each campaign. This applies similarly to geography. A recent campaign showed how a specific geography received 4x the results of any other geography. Upon investigation, the brand found that the local operator in that area had executed the campaign slightly differently, and those slight localization tweaks had a huge impact on ROI.

4. Set boundaries with local managers. Brands should be clear about how much control local-level managers can have, and enlist the right tools to accomplish that. Giving local-level managers corporate messaging to share, in addition to allowing them to interact on a local level, will ensure basic branding with a local twist. To retain more control, brands should utilize an approval tool where certain content can be sent in for approval to corporate before publishing.

5. Measure what works. As the saying goes, if you can’t measure it, don’t do it. The same is true with local advertising and marketing. Both successes and failures happen on local and regional levels. Brands that are not measuring in a location-specific way are missing meaningful trends and opportunities to do better with each iterative campaign.

Unified Message Marketing is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency

One of the greatest benefits of the rise of the internet was (and is) the ability to use email to communicate with people. The evolution of email is fascinating. It began in 1965, when the concept was introduced at MIT. In 1971, the first email was sent via network. And in 1976, Queen Elizabeth is said to be the first head of state to send an email. In 1983, the first MCI mail was offered to the public and in 1996, Hotmail was launched as the first free web-based email system. Suddenly, email was available to anybody who had a computer and access to the internet.

Fast-forward to today, and email is still dominant, playing a vital role in the marketing mix. Today there are more than 3 billion email accounts across the globe, and approximately 294 billion emails are sent per day. As technology continues to evolve, more consumers are switching to smartphones and tablets (mobile) to access the internet and their email.
Mobile marketing is fast-becoming one of the most powerful ways to engage with customers. According to Digiday, mobile now accounts for 12 percent of Americans’ media consumption time, triple its share in 2009.

Consider some facts:
• More than 80 percent of mobile users prefer locally relevant advertising and 75 percent are more likely to take action after seeing a location-specific message (Source: Mobile Audience Insights Report from JiWire, 2012)
• Of the 70 percent of shoppers who used a mobile phone while in a retail store during the holidays, 62 percent accessed that store’s site or app while only 37 percent of respondents accessed a competitor’s site or app. (Source: ForeSee, 2013)
• Retailers’ apps with store mode gather five times more engagement. (Source: Point Inside, 2013)
• Last year, 12 percent of consumers bought anything through social media. (Source: PwC, 2013)
• The number of U.S. mobile coupon users will rise from 12.3 million in 2010 to 53.2 million in 2014, driven by the rapid adoption of smartphones. (Source: eMarketer, 2013)
• Retailers’ apps take up the most of consumers’ time at 27 percent, followed by online marketplace at 20 percent, purchase assistant at 17 percent, price comparison at 14 percent and daily deals at 13 percent. (Source: AdMedia Partners, 2013)
• Consumers spent six times as much time in retailers’ apps in December compared to a year earlier. (Source: Flurry, 2013)
• Time spent with mobile apps starting to challenge television: consumers are spending 127 minutes per day in mobile apps – up 35 percent from 94 minutes a day in the same time last year – and spend 168 minutes watching television per day. (Source: Flurry, 2012)
• Last year, 24 percent of consumers used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site during Thanksgiving and Black Friday, up from 14.3 percent in 2011. (Source: IBM, 2012)

In 2012, interactive marketing emerged as one of the hottest marketing trends. Forrester Research predicts that marketers across all industries will spend nearly $77 billion, roughly 26 percent of all advertising dollars, on interactive marketing by 2016. B2B interactive marketing is expected to reach $5.7 billion by 2016, with mobile marketing accounting for much of that rapid growth.

Smart email marketers know that leveraging customer data is the key to creating relevant and effective email marketing campaigns. By tying into customer databases, email marketers can target emails based on key demographic and preference data. Integration with e-commerce systems can help trigger relevant messages based on past purchases. And web analytics data is key to delivering relevant messages based on page visits and shopping cart activity. But is that enough?

According to Email Institute, the email channel not only drives strong ROI in customer acquisition, but it increasingly powerful to engage consumers. Marketers looking to make an impact among subscribers are increasing their use of triggered messaging, also known as automated messages. According to the Q4 2012 North America Email Trends and Benchmarks report, “triggered messages resulted in a 70.5 percent higher open rates and 101.8 percent greater click rates when compared to Business As Usual (BAU) messages in Q4 2012.”

As a marketer, the benefit of triggered messaging is that you can build a program once, tie that offer or message to specific customer behavior and let the automation take over. Since the program is built once and used in a repeatable manner, it creates efficiency. Additionally, when combined with monitoring and optimization, these programs can advance the effectiveness of mailings by improving click and conversion rates. Examples of triggered campaigns include welcome messages, cart abandonment programs and inventory in-stock reminders.

As well, you can’t discount social media to build an online integrated marketing campaign. Social media, SEO, web analytics, blogging strategies and content development can work together synergistically to help make any online marketing program successful. First, you need to define your intentions and goals within social media. Then you have to outline how all the channels can effectively work together to get your message across. Internet marketing veteran Matt Bailey suggests organizing your message with:

• Narrative: Narrative is creating the story around your brand or product that will best communicate with your consumers.
• Development: Once you have your story outlined, the next thing is to develop the right message and then develop it to the right people in the way they wish to digest the content.
• Interaction: Talks about how you will interact with your consumers across all platforms. Blogging, email and social media are all different mediums and messaging should be unique to those platforms. Don’t forget to capture and build email lists from your blogs
• Planning: Developing content calendars and looking at trends should be a part of your marketing activities. This is done so can you deliver timely content to your consumer when that topic or idea is in the top of mind.

We offer tips for helping with social media integration, be everywhere your prospects are – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, etc.

If you have questions regarding email marketing, Blue Interactive Agency offers full service email marketing with tracking and reporting for optimized results. We design custom email campaigns including all services from strategy to list management for interactive marketing solutions that drive ROI.

Evolution of Email Marketing is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency

As technology continues to evolve and more consumers are switching to mobile devices, mobile marketing is fast-becoming one of the most powerful ways to engage with a customer. Regional marketing – capturing a target audience within a smaller geographic perimeter, or local area – has proven effective in print and broadcast advertising. Today, the regional marketing concept is carrying over into mobile marketing sector with geofencing advertising.

A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geofence can be dynamically generated – as in a radius around a store or point location – or it can be a predefined set of boundaries, like neighborhood boundaries. Geofence programs allow an administrator to set up “triggers,” so when a device crosses a geofence and enters (or exits) the boundaries defined by the administrator, an SMS or email alert is sent.

A relatively new marketing tool in the mobile advertising world, some of the world’s biggest brands are using geofencing advertising to market their products. Take Gap, for example. Last year, the clothing giant conducted a two-week geofencing mobile ad trial campaign in New York, San Francisco and Chicago. The campaign reinforced traditional billboard ads with mobile messages displayed to people standing right beside those ads.

Gap worked with advertising company Titan to place conventional advertisements at bus stops and other transit locations. Titan then created geofences around those ads, which activated the mobile part of the campaign for people who were nearby. Using location-based apps on smartphones to determine the location of the potential customer and location-finding technology, Gap sent virtual ads and coupons directly to the phones of those in proximity via apps such as Words with Friends. By using geofencing Gap was able to determine who was nearby and target them specifically.

Gap is not the only brand making the most of innovative mobile advertising methods. Best Buy has teamed with Placecast and SocialVibe on a geofencing mobile effort that rewards consumers when they participate. Through the initiative, Best Buy is able to reach consumers with geo-targeted advertising, offers and rewards. Mobile gamers can win in-game rewards and other prizes by visiting a Best Buy location. Consumers can also receive discounts from the retailer by playing mobile games. When users are nearby a Best Buy location, the geofence is triggered, prompting an SMS alert to the user. The SMS message may include a brand offer, reminder or confirmation of earned virtual currency.

Setting up a geofence allows marketers to use not only the ability of reaching a consumer anywhere, but the ability to know in real time when a customer is in a prime area to be engaged. According to digital marketing expert, Stephen Warley, today’s mobile technologies are taking the concept of geofencing advertising to a whole new level in three different ways: hyper-local  hyper-personal and highly perishable. On Feb. 11, 2013, Warley wrote an article for onroutedigital.com on these levels, stating:

Hyperlocal. Not long ago, hyperlocal advertising meant targeting consumers by ZIP code or a local neighborhood. Mobile geofencing advertising will now enable business owners to deliver their marketing messages to hyperlocal audiences. For example, a business owner using mobile geofencing advertising can target customers passing near their business by establishing an advertising perimeter of one mile or even just 500 yards. Each time a registered consumer enters the established perimeter, they’ll receive a mobile alert with a special offer from that business.

New Pew research shows that 72 percent of Americans use their mobile device while shopping and 28 percent of them used their mobile device to research a product or service. To receive alerts, consumers will first have to opt in via text or download an app to receive these offers as they travel around their local area. Either a business can offer its own app or a local media publisher, like a TV or radio station, might offer an app with multiple offers from various local businesses.

What makes mobile geofencing advertising unique is its ability to increase foot traffic into any business. It entices customers not within sight of the business, but within a short walk or drive, to make a purchase they might not have otherwise. It brings the front door of the business to consumers.

Hyper-personal. Mobile devices are the most personal of all media technologies. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, 91 percent of mobile users keep their phone within reach 24/7 – even while they sleep! While advertisers can exert greater control over their hyperlocal marketing messages using mobile geofencing advertising, it also creates a more hyperpersonal consumer experience.

For example, by opting in via text or by downloading an app, consumers can choose which geofencing advertising messages they want to receive. They can filter their choices by type of business, location and even the frequency of alerts. These hyperpersonal marketing messages empower consumers to establish the parameters for engagement with local businesses. According to Moto Message, 95 percent of marketing text messages are read within 15 minutes of receiving them and they have a redemption rate of 20 percent. Giving more control to the consumer results in higher redemption rates for the advertiser.

Highly Perishable. Geofencing is a great way for retailers to drive in-store traffic and offer consumers something different. One of the most powerful features of mobile geofencing advertising is its delivery of “highly perishable” offers. The hyperlocal and hyperpersonal nature of mobile geofencing advertising requires a different type of enticement to get consumers to act. Traditional special offers advertised on billboards, in newspapers, on the radio or TV or even desktop websites, won’t work because they often have a shelf life of days or weeks. The redemption period for special offers delivered via mobile are often measured in hours or even minutes.

If someone receives a mobile alert from a business within a mile of their location, the goal of that offer is to redirect that consumer into the business right then and there. The consumer will make a split-second decision on whether or not to act on that offer, so it needs to be extra special. Not only does the offer have to be a deeper discount or bigger enticement than a traditional offer, but the redemption deadline has to be much shorter – most likely under an hour. For example, a coffee shop might send out an alert stating “Buy 1 Coffee, Get 2 Free, Redeem in Next 15 Minutes.” An offer like this one is not only very enticing to consumers, but it is a powerful way for the business to drive foot traffic during slower times.

Mobile marketing is becoming more important for businesses. Geofencing is just one tool in the marketing mix. By using audience targeting programs in conjunction with geofencing, marketers can maximize the likelihood of reaching the optimal recipients of an offer.

Geofencing Advertising is a post from: Blue Interactive Agency