Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is marketing through mobile devices, phones and internet. Some of these methods include text messages (SMS), picture messages, audio messages (MMS) and mobile internet. In an era like this where the majority of potential customers own or have access to mobile phones including mobile marketing, like social media marketing, would seem to be a very smart idea for any businesses marketing campaign. Depending on your customer group and your marketing objective there are many different marketing techniques you could use to market your business, product or service such as:

• Sales promotions - 'Text this number back to receive vouchers and discounts'
• Special offers - Sending special codes to existing loyal customers
• Information - Time, critical issues, reminders about events, products, services or appointments

Before begin mobile marketing there are several things you must take into account. 

• Check whether or not the person is eligible to receive the information in the text being sent out. 
• Deciding how to collect the numbers.
• Deciding if the customer will be charged to receive the text, and if so how much they will be charged.
• Know how to stop the message if requested.
• Exploring how to make your messages concise and interesting.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is an online advertising service, developed by Google. The more you pay-per-click (PPC) the more likely your ad will appear in the search results. However, Google uses something called a "quality score" and it is not just the highest bid that is taken into account. Quality sore is when Google looks at how relevant and useful your ad is to the searcher and the search terms they’ve used. It also looks at how many clicks your ad has received previously (its click-through rate) and how relevant your landing page is. The higher your quality score, the better, even if your maximum bid is less than a rival bidder, you still may appear above their ad if your quality score is better. Although AdWords is not a free service it is relatively cheap and effective way to advertise your company/product.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Integrated with AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). This can be anything from sales to downl

oading a file, such as:

• Show you where your visitors are coming from
• What they did on your site
• How long they were on your site
• Tell you which of your pages receives the most traffic
• What keywords from the search engines brought your visitors to your site
• See your most important analytic data first
• Determine where your most frequent visitors are from
• Learn what people are searching for on your site
• Identify the wort performing pages
• Determine weather you need a mobile site

Using all of this information can help you make more informed decisions about potential changes to your website. 

How to beat banner blindness

1. Placing your banner ad above the field on a web page will gain more attention because of how viewers read a webpage. As i stated in the last blog viewers read a webpage in an "F" shape, which would mean that placing your ad on the top of the page would mean that it would be the first thing a viewer reads. 

2. Design your advert in the same form and function of the web page you are placing your ad on. This is known as native advertising, this entails your ad having the same looks and feel as the web page. This provides higher viability for your advert. 

3. Offering ads to users based on their interests and performances is a great way to reach your target audience. Under this term there is behavioral targeting which is essentially the same concept. Users will be served ads based on their browser history on the internet.

4. Tweak your ads design so that it will stand out on the web page. Take into account colour schemes, text and images while keeping in mind to stay as close to your brands image. Contrasting with the web page will call more attention to the ad and its content. For example if the host site is light - coloured use dark and so on. Maybe thing of including a CTA (Call - to - action) button. 

 

Banner blindness

Banner blindness is the phenomenon where the visitors on the website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner ads. Benway and Lane conducted a study on website usability. What they found was that any information provided through any ad banner was being over looked by users and people were altogether overlooking banners no matter where they were placed on the screen. What was even more surprising was they found that the traditional practice of making banners large, colourful and flashy had little effect on the blindness. Although the first ever banner had a click-through rate of 44% current banner ads have a miserable click-through rate of 0.1%.

Why does this exist? Well it was found that when users scan a webpage they normally read only the information that is relevant for them and ignore everything they do not need. An eye tracking study by Nielsen revealed that users would mostly navigate a webpage in an 'f' shapeed pattern starting on the content on the top of the page. Today as users are bombarded with ads on every site they have learned to focus on just the info permitted to them.

Banner advertising

A banner ad, also known as a web ad, is an advertisement that is displayed in a webpage. The advertisement consists of an image ( jpg., png., gif.) or a multimedia object (this could be created using flash or HTML5). By embedding the advertisement into the website it is intended to attract traffic to the website, of the business/service/product advertised, by linking to the website of the advertiser. Banners can also function as regular, print advertisements to inform or notify about a new product, to increase brand awareness and so on. Banner ads can come in a variety of sizes, 468x60, which is considered to be a full sized ad, 728x90, which is a leaderboard, and so on.You can start a banner advertising campaign with Google Adwords or any other display network.

Today the world of banner ads has developed from banners ads you see on websites to social media ads like Facebook Banners, Instagram Sponsored Ads, Snapchat Geofilters and other social media ads. Online advertising formats as banner ads, video, rich media and sponsorship will account for the largest share of digital ad spending. 

It is easy to grow awareness using banner ads, businesses such as apple and Nike use banner ads to grow their businesses. With people seeing your adds on a load of websites they will easily recognize your brand in future. It is a great way to build a users base and if somebody came on your website but didn’t sign up on your newsletter or didn’t try out your product you can re-target them with banner ads. 

When choosing a site to place your banner advert make sure to take into account: 

• How much traffic the website gets.
• The price they will expect.
• Weather or not your target audience visits this website.
• Is this website in your industry or does it relate to your products, services, or interests.

When creating the banner ad follow these steps:

1. Take into account your target audience and what you want from them. Do you want them to click the ad and go to your site, would you like them to sign up for your newsletter etc.
2. Choose the size you wish your advert to be and remember the simpler the banner ad is the easier you can communicate the right message to your audience make sure no to overcrowd your ad and make it look sloppy.
3. Choose the text for your ad carefully and maybe use a CTA (call to action) button.
4. Take into account what font you are going to use, make sure it is readable? 
5. Low quality photos and images used in a banner ad can create the idea that your business is not great.
6. If you want to create professional banner ads and you want people to recognize your brand on the internet I recommend you to stay close to your brand color while also trying to contrast with the page it is on, this might mean tweaking the advert for every site you with the ad to be on.
7. Don't forget you company name logo and website.

Like any form of advertising you just need to know how to optimize it and get the best out of it. Try checking out other companies banner ads before starting your own and see how it is normally done, what is best to avoid, what makes it more attractive and so forth.

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on being found by customers rather than seeking them out, like in traditional marketing

. 

What are strategies that seek out customers?

These are techniques that are poorly targeted and interrupt customers in their day to day lives. This sometimes causes them to not interact or becoming annoyed with the brand. Worst case scenario, the associate that annoyed feeling with the brand and have a negative feeling toward the brand making them more likely to purchase from competitors. Examples of this is cold-calling, junk mail, spam, etc.

The fact is these techniques are becoming less effective anyway with the developments in technology e.g. Caller ID, block calls, filter block mass email. 

Inbound marketing is essentially the opposite of outbound marketing techniques. Businesses set up blogs and social media sites that people will look for and subscribe to. Having the customer come to you makes it more likely that they will read the information you offer on these sites. Creating useful content on the site keeps customers interested and having contact info means they can contact you when they want rather than you spending money on cold-calls.