Mobile marketing and Foursquare are two words that are just right for each other. Foursquare has an impressive base of users and is extremely popular in big cities like London – which means it’s ideal for any business or brand to get started with mobile marketing and hyper-local search.

Focus your marketing on mobile – integrate offline with online

Now that mobile marketing is becoming the focus of all your online marketing activities (if not, why not?) all your offline marketing needs to be integrated with this mobile, online world.

Foursquare has the tools for loyalty, promotions and analytics

Foursquare is facing tough competition from Facebook, Google and any of those voucher / deal-of-the day services. Yet the range of loyalty tools, promotion options and improvements in analytics means Foursquare has plenty to offer. Before starting out with paid mobile search campaigns or investing in vouchers – have you done everything you can with Foursquare?

What do you think? Have you had success using Foursquare for mobile marketing or local search?

Damien Saunders

Mobilising your web content and cross channel integrated marketing may sound like just a bunch of buzzwords to boost my SEO. But it’s not. So I’m helping you to understand the latest in mobile marketing, tools & techniques.

You can now visit http://damien.mobi from your smartphone and have the best experience a mobile can get. If you’re a fan of the iPad then you can also save this as a web app on your phone.

So don’t waste time. Head to http://damien.mobi now.

PS .. This shows the best experience you can get using WordPress and a plugin called WPTouch Pro

What do you think? Leave a comment or contact me?

Damien Saunders

To understand more about Social Media and Mobile Marketing its important to get a few facts together on current trends and insights. 50 completely useful stats for social media does just that.

Why do this? well it helps to create some drive … and helps to understand why anyone or any business needs to do more in social media and mobile marketing.

Damien Saunders

Foursquare is now open to business and is moving beyond geo-tagging and location based social networking. But is Foursquare really open to business? After trying to claim my business location and setup an offer for visitors its now been 3 weeks without a reply.

In the UK right now, I believe there is an opportunity for Gowalla, Foursquare, etc to setup a small but viable business team to work with digital agencies or mobile marketing specialists here. Much of the current success for mobile marketing has been specifically using SMS coupons or vouchercodes or hyped up branded apps.

Foursquare claim to have more than 1,000,000 registered users – it would be great to know how that is split between the US, UK & rest of Europe and Rest of World – but any digital agency, creative marketer, or social media manager should start to claim their business just so they have it … even if Foursquare don’t bother to get back to you.

Damien Saunders

A short guide to mobile marketing is as short as it can get – and provides just enough insights, trends and key facts to help make the most of mobile marketing. What’s included in this is 8 quick suggestions how to include mobile marketing in your marketing strategy.

Damien Saunders

A short guide with b2b marketing tips for improving your content sales and improve your content using mmCHANNEL’s new API.

1. Got an upcoming marketing campaign? Need Content?
Now any marketing campaign can include digital content like tones, songs, games from a selection of mmCHANNEL manages.

2. Drive traffic to your website or fanpage
You can setup a content shop in your existing website using the mmCHANNEL b2bAPI with no need to build any other platforms

3. Increase your depth of content catalogue
You can extend your content shop and use the mmCHANNEL b2bAPI to include all the digital content that we manage.

4. Refresh your mobile strategy
Mobile Content – for sale or free to download – is a great way to get people coming to your mobile site and the mmCHANNEL b2bAPI allows content downloads by SMS or from a mobile internet site

5. Its cloud computing but not as we know it
Because the mmCHANNEL b2b API is available everywhere in the world you can think of this as cloud computing with the difference that people are there to help you all along the way.

Call or email me to find out how to do this.

Damien Saunders

Have you had a funny feeling in your pocket lately? Have you noticed a distinct lack of marketing SMS or that you only get SMS from your bank or your mobile operator – no more unwanted SMS. Smart digital agencies and mobile marketing specialists are already moving their clients from this type of communications.

There are 3 very good reasons that this year is the year SMS marketing will die.

1. High Cost of SMS Marketing Campaigns

Sending an SMS campaign still has real costs – typically these costs would double if you want customers to able to reply to your ad message (for example – to get a free code, answer a quiz question or just to reply with STOP). So a campaign with a set of 1000 numbers may cost you up to £100 – and if only 5% respond then your campaign costs are £2 per response.

The same £100 budget could be used smartly on a Google Adwords Campaign and a trial budget of £1 a day would last about 3 months! You would serve out 1000′s of impressions a week and get more CTR or leads.

Targeting Mobile Search or Mobile SEO would also be an attractive option for would be marketers.

2.Limited Marketing Budgets for 2010

Many companies are cutting their budgets again for this year. Predictably, high cost campaigns with low response rates will be the first to go. SMS campaigns that focus on buying something, going somewhere or ones from unsolicited sources are all suffering. Even banks will stop sending balance alert SMS’s unless it can be adfunded.

3. Strong Smartphone sales means you need to use a mobile website or app

All smartphones will come with unlimited monthly internet plans and have access to some kind of app stores. The better smartphones will be more like pocket computers with big screens, HD video playback and more. Customers will be able to connect almost anywhere with your brand.

Strong Smartphone sales including Androids (from manufacturers like Google, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola) will increase in popularity along with iPhone and maybe Windows 7 mobiles. Nokia will continue to have some dominance in mass market 3G devices.

Finally .. now is the time to build a mobile marketing plan that is integrated – think mobile search and SEO – check what your website looks like on your mobile phone. Then contact me.

Now have your say … will SMS Marketing die in 2010?

Damien Saunders

For non-profit organisations, charities and cause related marketing the mobile can provide the best integrated marketing solution for campaigns. There are a number of tools and techniques which can be used to promote your cause or help to raise donations.

1. SMS Premium Text Donations

Making donations using your mobile is as simple as sending a text to a special number. For the not so concerned and the lazy its a quick way to send a few dollars, euros or pounds to a worthy cause. The SMS premium text solutions that you choose must work across all major operators and the solution should mean that the service provider and operator minimise their cost for the charity.

2. Mobile Apps & Games – Branded Content

For cause related marketing and integrated marketing mobile apps and branded games are a viral marketing tool. Today’s mobile phones allow for fun based games which also can teach the user about your cause (ie teaching people how to take care of their land or water supply). Development of an app does take budget – but the rewards are something fun that can be easily promoted via the iTunes Store, Android Market or your own web or mobile site.

Of course any app should link to your mobile site and allow the user to sign-up for email alerts or status updates.

3. Mobile Internet and Websites

Mobile websites are no longer the little brother. As more people get smartphones with richer functions a fully ‘grown up’ website can be created for customers to experience. The same points apply – allow people to sign up for alerts to stay in contact or to download any mobile app straight to their phone.

4. Campaign Tools & SMS Status Alerts

Once you have people opted-in to receive status alerts, you will be able to quickly let people know about important events and invite them back to your mobile website to make a donation or find out how they can help. It makes sense to have a solution that integrates with a mobile and email CRM allowing for campaign promotions.

5. Branded Content – Videos, Music, Tones, Images & Wallpapers

Branded content is one of the best ways to get recognition of your brand. Wallpapers can be downloaded to desktops or saved on phones (even shared with friends!). Content like videos can also feature your brand as part of the digital overlay or a pre-roll or post-roll sequence

It is also easy to build your own digital download content shop into any existing web or mobile site using solutions that mmCHANNEL provides (who I currently work for).

Now have you say … are you working with Charities?

Damien Saunders

Until recently mobile devices were often overlooked by marketing managers in favour of online campaigns or traditional paper-based direct marketing. However, brands, ad agencies and telecoms operators are increasingly using mobile as part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.

The rapid growth in smartphones spurred by the iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android has given mobile marketing a major boost. The latest devices offer fast and easy web access, often with flat-rate charges. This has sparked a flurry of development in a range of formats, including thousands of mobile apps, as well as in music content, search and social media.

The latest handsets can add location and web browsing behaviour to the streams of customer data, such as call statistics and purchasing behaviour, that mobiles already generate. This data can be harvested or saved to improve customer service and increase sales from existing customers. In theory, the more a company knows about its customers, the better it can match communication to behaviour.

[via new media age]

Damien Saunders

Damien Saunders

It’s easy to create effective mobile marketing campaigns using apps and games … this short video aims to demonstrate whats possible

Mobile Advertising and Mobile Games

Damien Saunders

Running competitions using social media is a good way for brands and businesses to create welcome visitors and friends to their sites. You can now take that competition mobile using mobile apps, games or mobile websites and you don’t have to use SMS.

Using Social Media to get your customers discovering you on their mobile

Your marketing messages on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can direct existing customers to discover your mobile website or to download a mobile app. Read up on whats currently hot in social media.

Mobile internet usage is really popular for smartphones like Android and iPhone with good screen size and great browsing experience. It means your customers can always access your shop or website when they are not in front of their PC. It’s now even possible to go direct to facebook fan page via the mobile.

Create Competitions on the Mobile that don’t use SMS

In the past marketing campaigns focused SMS messaging for competitions.  This allowed a business to build a flat file or excel spreadsheet of ‘customers’, but the data was useless outside of the competition unless there was an opt-in for marketing message. 2010 will be the year when it becomes more popular to use Social Media and Mobile not SMS, brands can now ‘engage’ customers and ‘create conversations’. Customers will tell you more and love to use mobile apps and mobile games.

How will you make mobile part of your marketing strategy?

Damien Saunders

Take a vote … what do you do for mobile marketing and have you tried any mobile apps?

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/69091/tbhgt

Damien Saunders

The problem with doing research on social media and mobile marketing is the overwhelming amount of noise you get from doing searches on Google, Delicious and Twitter.

Here are a few links of really useful and easy to consume ‘research’

best ‘inspirational’ video on social media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

map of social media world
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wasabibratwurst/3128711125/sizes/l/

top 100 companies by media spend
http://adage.com/globalmarketers09/

Damien Saunders