Strategic Marketing Innovators marketing principle is to empower businesses to take on a growth minded strategic approach to exceed customer's needs and create a measureable revenue-generating process for your business.

This blog site is dedicated to helping you achieve these goals.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Mobile Marketing – How is your Business Website viewed on a Smart Phone?

Imagine a business person, Tom Jones, who is at a local venue waiting for his next meeting with fifteen to twenty minutes to spare. Tom Jones pulls out your business card and decides to review your website and service offerings discussed in an earlier meeting on his smart phone. Tom types in your URL, and his first experience is the website is slow to load due to all the images. Finally, Tom can view your website, but he becomes frustrated as there is so much information that he has to constantly move the page and the links are so jumbled together that he keeps selecting the wrong one. Frustrated, he closes the browser window and makes a mental note to review your business website later when he is back at his office PC, but will he?

According to a white paper by Gomez.com, by 2013, the US mobile internet audience is expected to reach 134.3 million users. In addition, the white paper states that out of 1000 US mobile internet users, 58% of them expect website load speeds on their mobile devices to be comparable to, or better then, what they experience on their desktops. When creating a marketing strategy, it is important to define a mobile marketing strategy that is in sync with all other marketing efforts and tied to the user preferences to ensure marketing success and revenue generation to exceed profit margin.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Social Media - Do you need a Strategy?


Yes!

According to emarketer.com 52% of marketers are acting without a game plan. What are the impacts to this that I have observed?

I have heard Marketers and Clients say....

1. "Let's sign up for all the Social Media Applications so we can increase optimization."
  • The issue with this is while you may have solved one issue (partially) you have created another if you are not updating your social media sites in a way that supports your brand.
  • In addition, optimization is also maximized by how often you update your social media applications.
2. "Don't worry about the business plan, our focus is the marketing plan."
  • The issue with this is your marketing plan needs to be 100% tied back to your business plan. If I were asked to create a marketing plan to sell 1000 widgets in one state, I would create a marketing plan to support this as I would if asked to create a marketing plan to sell 4000 widgets in four states...the bottom line is the plans would look very different.
  • Know your business goals and build your marketing plan to support them
3. "Let's just focus on the Social Media Strategy."
  • A quality marketing plan is integrated and all marketing components are evaluated and tactics are designed to work together and complement one another to reach revenue goals.
  • The old saying..."No Man is an Island" also stands true in that Social Media is not an island....integrate with your overall business and marketing strategy...see image at beginning of post.
Be smart in your approach and create the social media strategy (road map) and integrate within your overall business and marketing plans.

Monday, June 7, 2010

A Smart Business Model


It starts with a smart business model. You cannot market a product or service that is not valued by the customer.

Last week I presented for a business group and reiterated the importance of the business plan. Make sure you have one or dedicate time to finish it and make a commitment to dust it off and review at least once a year.

The business plan is that guiding light that provides a road map to achieving your goals. It answers such questions as: How much PROFIT do I want to make this year? What will my business look like 2-3 years from now? When is a good time to add an additional service offering to my portfolio?

Once these questions (and then some) are answered, you can build a quality marketing strategy to help you exceed business goals. Otherwise, from a marketing perspective, you are trying to throw your marketing net so broad and wide that you capture nothing in the way of leads and or brand recognition.

Remember.....Aim at Nothing and you Hit it every time.

Be Smart, and Wise....and be Successful!