How to succeed with social media marketing
Mark Zuckerburg, then a student at Harvard, created an online social network where college students could congregate and share their life experiences from the past and as its happening. Opening enrollment beyond the campus and into the neighborhoods, Facebook is rapidly nearing 500 million members worldwide. Does social media, with its origins in the collegiate environment, make it a viable medium for higher education institutions to engage with prospective students for enrollment purposes?
The importance of seizing your local market
When recruitment advertising programs are planned and implemented, many marketers consider the job done. After all, the messaging has been fine tuned to resonate with the intended audience; media has been selected to reach the right target audience at the moment of consideration. It’s time to wait for the inquiries to roll in, right?
Magazine Readers Shift to Mobile Devices
Just last week we had a spirited conversation at lunch with a (national well-known business publication) rep about the potential for magazines giving up the glossy pages and moving to the online world. After all, precedent had been set years ago by The Rocky Mountain News, the first newspaper to shut down its printing presses in favor of the digital realm as a matter of financial survival. But now, with the quick adoption of iPad and the 200,000 apps (Apple’s TV claim), the stage has been set for a very appealing portable, electronic reading surface that may resemble printed pages or may reflect the mobile website format. And the distribution system is so cost-effective, I can’t imagine CFOs aren’t giving this a hard look for near-future decision-making.
Predictions made at lunch:
My rep said print was here to stay– mobile websites and apps created by magazines were strictly supplemental.
I predicted that within 3-5 years the majority of readership would be on iPad or tablet devices and print versions will have ceased or morphed into some other purpose.
My prediction is now being fueled by Wired Magazine who yesterday launched an iPad app and already jumped to the top of two of the App Store’s prominent “Top Charts” in the U.S.: Paid Apps and Top Grossing. Wired states they sold 24,000 copies of the application in its first 24 hours of availability.
Who’s next?
A Strategy for Mobile Marketing
While I’m an early adopter for new ideas and technology, when it comes to spending clients’ money I tend to get pragmatic. Earlier in my career I encouraged clients to jump in without hesitation and the response from those efforts was generally, “So what did that get us?”
Now that all of us marketers have iPhones, Androids or Blackberrys, let’s jump in to the vast opportunities mobile marketing offers. It’s terribly exciting! I’m actually consumed by it. QR codes in magazine ads? Cool! Location-based apps that push a menu special every time I walk past a restaurant. Yummy! But hold on. “What did that get us?”
My pragmatism now takes over. Mobile is Marketing and as such needs to follow the same rules other media usage follows. At a recent mobile marketing meeting we facilitated, it became crystal clear from those presenting case studies that if you follow solid marketing principles, the fun and rewards will continue beyond the last campaign.
1. Strategy based on marketing goals and objectives
2. Establish outcomes and measurement, up front
3. Understand your target audience
4. Understand the opportunities unique to mobile devices
5. Develop tactics based on the target audience’s behaviors
6. Test, track and optimize
7. Expand based on successes (document, measure, expand)
And (though not a principle), have fun!
2010: Mobile Marketing Trends
We’ve declared 2010: The Year for Mobile Marketing, primarily due to the influence of consumer acceptance and adoption of smartphones, such as iPhone, Blackberry and Android OS phones. By Q3 of 2011, it is projected that 50% of all mobile phones in use will be smartphones. This fact alone should make any marketer sit up and take notice that the dynamics of mobile devices is or will be a major influence on consumer and B2B research, decision-making and purchases.
Colman Brohan Davis recently hosted an event featuring Mickey Alam Khan, editor-in-chief for Mobile Marketer, and in my opinion a futurist for the industry. His online publication not only reports news and insights, but also nurtures the mobile marketing industry through guidebooks and case studies of cutting edge and novel uses.
Mickey gave us five trends driving mobile marketing and commerce this year, in his words…
2010: The Year for Mobile Marketing
Why have I declared “2010 is the year for mobile marketing?” After all, text messaging has been in use for many years. 
Two simple answers: iPhone and Apps. The iPhone hijacked, some say created, and amped up the smartphone market. 50% of the attendees at our mobile marketing session (CADM results2010) held up their iPhone as evidence of the market penetration this remarkable and technological wonder has created. Approximately 50% of the other attendees held up their Blackberry. One individual in the room had a feature phone (aka flip phone). Though these stats are skewed as this was a room of leading edge marketers, it does point out the significant impact the iPhone has made as a marketing tool. As the universe of consumers with portable accessibility swells, the various tools and applications on this mobile device is increasing our dependency on it. Our communications capabilities continue to evolve on a daily basis as the universe of smartphones grows. And certainly marketers’ consciousness has been significantly raised from their own personal usage.
