Location-based mobile marketing is the next wave of marketing that allows retailers to connect with potential consumers. In utilizing GPS information to pair with mobile platforms such as FourSquare and Facebook, retailers are offering specific deals to consumers in the immediate vicinity of their storefronts. This allows the consumers to take advantage of specials and retailers they would otherwise be oblivious to if they had not checked in to that specific neighbourhood. This is a truly innovative idea… or is it?

When you really think about this, this is actually exactly how business was done prior to the invention of mass media. Instead of checking into a neighbourhood, a consumer would travel to Main St., or another area with a high concentration of retailers, in search of the goods that he or she needed. In order to attract customers in this setting, retailers would utilize sandwich boards or employ someone to call out to passersby to attract them into the store. This is essentially what is being accomplished by location based marketing, just in a high-tech and less intrusive way.

With the evolution of digital culture, instead of using a person to reach out to other people we have progressed to using computers and machines to talk to computers or smart phones in hopes of catching the attention of consumers. The goal of a successful social media marketing campaign is that you can develop a one on one relationship with your consumers. Call me crazy, but isn’t that one on one relationship exactly how things used to be done?

This makes me wonder how marketers might utilize the sales tactics of yesteryear, in new and innovative ways, to capitalize in the current market.

Having just ventured into the world of organizing a content management system (CMS) and optimizing a website’s search engine optimization (SEO), I am supremely grateful for the functionality that Hubspot provides.

This software as a service platform not only gives you a simple user interface in which you can create and edit content, it also provides subscribers with tips and tools to help to optimize the reach and impact of their website. For someone with limited experience with HTML and CSS, the page builder lets you design and build a page in a matter of minutes and apply a standard template to work from. This gives you a great foundation for a website, then through utilizing the various analysis algorithms built into the system you can gradually begin to improve your site’s SEO and thus the impact of your site.

The integration with your existing social media platforms is also seamless. Providing analytics on not only your website but also your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blog sites allows you to get a full picture of your online presence. Through the Hubspot dashboard you can send promotions and updates to your contacts via all social media platforms and email simultaneously. This simplifies the process and requires fewer resources than posting on all of these platforms independently, something that is particularly important in small start-ups.

Without the subscription to Hubspot the is provided by my employer, managing the company’s online presence and even all marketing communications would be significantly more difficult. With the trend of the marketing industry transitioning away from traditional outbound marketing to inbound marketing, familiarity with Hubspot or one of the few other competing solutions for any marketing professional.

Monitoring

My last post ended with the discussion of being able to interact with your consumers and engage new potential customers online. This post will focus on the benefit of using Twitter to monitor not only your brand image but also what is happening in your industry as well as related industries.

Considering the breakdown of information put out on Twitter (as shown in an excerpt from a 2009 Pear Analytics report below) it is important to be able to sift through the noise to find the useful info.

Twitter Information Statistics 

• Pointless babble – 40.1%
• Conversational – 37.6%
• Pass-along value – 8.7%
• Self-promotion – 5.9%
• Spam – 3.8%
• News – 3.6%

With tools such as HootSuite and Tweetdeck available free to users, it is a very simple process to track any number of users, search terms or lists on Twitter to help to sift though this noise. Once you have identified the important influencers in the market, including your competitors, creating a list to keep you updated on their posts is important to react quickly to changes in the industry. By utilizing this tactic on multiple occasions I was able to find information with direct connections to our brand or one of our current campaigns. Armed with this information I was able to address this within minutes of the information being released.

This graphic is a great representation of Twitter. And although slightly over 10% of information put out via Twitter can be considered useful, if you can identify where to source this information the ability to access information near instantaneously is invaluable for a business. This is particular true in highly competitive markets.

Basically what it comes down to is despite my initial apprehension around joining Twitter and the value add that it would represent, Twitter has been a great resource with little or no additional time commitment as the time I current spend on Twitter was underutilized before.

A Retrospective View of the World’s Third Largest Social Media Tool

It was slightly over 6 months ago, May 14, 2011 to be exact, that I took the plunge into the world of Twitter at the suggestion of a classmate during a slightly unproductive group meeting. As with anything new I was apprehensive about the added value that twitter would provide on a day to day basis.

Initially I had opted to stay away from Twitter as I felt as though I really had no reason to post information about what I was doing at any given point at 140 characters at a time. As it turns out I was right, in the last 6 months I have tweeted only 34 times or a little more than once a week. But the true value of Twitter, for me anyways, is not in the outgoing traffic but on the incoming traffic and the access to the immediate information that Twitter provides.

Linking my Twitter account to my Blackberry allows me to browse updates and information while riding transit, time that was essentially wasted before Twitter. In the 45 minutes a day I typically spend on Twitter my time is divided almost equally between sourcing news, business and sports related tweets. Twitter has provided me with an abundance of information that I use for both personal and professional use, often times much faster than I would have found using traditional methods. As this is a blog about eMarketing I will focus on how I have been able to utilize Twitter as part of my role in the marketing department at BASE Hockey.

There are two basic types of engagement on Twitter, monitoring and communicating. Twitter gives you the ability to reach out and possibly make connections with both current consumers and potential consumers who are not currently in your network. More than ever before everyday people have access to celebrities, athletes, politicians and other notable influences in their market. This makes the ‘twitterverse’ seem much smaller as there is a slim possibility that you can connect with people who you hold in high regard. This would be extremely difficult if not impossible to do without Twitter. Other social media platforms allow you to interact with these influencers however due to the small investment required for each tweet or retweet there is an increased likelihood of engagement of that person.

This informal nature of the platform makes it particularly appealing for consumers to reach out to companies to ask questions or give unsolicited feedback. When properly utilized this can lead to further consumer engagement as a conversation via Twitter can be used to nurture leads and improve overall consumer satisfaction. The benefits of this strategy can be summed up in the following:

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” - Michael LeBoeuf

For the assignment I chose to look further into the somewhat new concept of inbound marketing. This book was written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah the two founders of Hubspot, the premiere software for inbound marketing in the market today. The major area that I am looking to delve into is the insights into how to use inbound marketing, what sites to utilize, how to generate content and finally how to drive traffic to you site(s).

The book does a great job at first introducing inbound marketing as the new form of marketing that is replacing our traditional forms of outbound marketing. Traditionally we are used to sending out one-way communications to reach potential customers and having those customers contact us. The authors indicate the in the last 50 years the focus has been on outbound marketing, and the next 50 will be focused on inbound marketing. This is a bold statement but I believe that there are some merits in making it. The problem is that it is becoming harder to reach the consumers by traditional methods as consumers have developed methods to avoid these types of advertising. The way in which we shop and research our purchases has changed drastically has changed in the past decade, it is time that the way we market catches up to these trends. This is illustrated (literally) quite well in the book:

Marketers seem to have some sort of disconnect between their role at work and their role as a consumer.

Another good aspect of the book is that at the end of each chapter the authors generate a to do list of actions that will be beneficial in helping your business become more successful in that specific area of inbound marketing. In addition to the tips, which range between 2 and 26 per chapter, there are spaces left at the end for you to make your own additions to the list to generate a more complete list as it pertains to your company in particular.

Additionally to emphasize each point outlined in the chapter the authors provide an example of a company or website that has been particularly successful in implementing that part of the inbound marketing strategy. With the concrete example as well as some online links this helps to drive through the understanding of the theories and move beyond the traditional textbook concepts into the realm of real-life. The one limitation to this is that linking the offline content of the book to online sources has a limited time period for which the concepts that they are outlining are applicable as online content is changes very rapidly and thus the illustrated points have less of an impact.

Another area that could be utilized to strengthen the impact of the book is how the authors treat the forms of social media. The book is written as though all forms of social media and Web 2.0 applications should be used for all businesses. To increase the effectiveness of the messaging, I think the book should delve further into the strengths of each of the platforms mentioned and the characteristics of the industry or relationships that this particular platform is most successful. Failing that, at least recognize that each of these areas of social media has limitations in their applications and draw the attention of the marketer to these limitations ahead of time. This will help those reading the book to maximize their time spent on social media platforms for the biggest impact in the industry that they operate in.

The book does a good job at looking into a number of social media platforms, however I can’t help but question whether or not the release date would have significantly affected the list chosen. Had this book been released 2 or 3 years earlier would this be singing the praises of MySpace, which we know now is all but dead with the exception of use in the music industry. My point here is that the book focuses on specifics yet fails to speak generally as well for the purpose of being relevant into the future once the next big social media trend emerges (i.e. Google+). Identifying the common characteristics of successful social media sites is an important aspect to not only staying current, but also being able to look forward to the next big trends in the market.

Finally the major trend in the book is talking about generating remarkable content. I like the use of the term coined by Seth Godin as it emphasizes that the content that you post should be worthy of people to comment or remark about. The concept of remarkable content is one that is great in theory, but there might be a greater impact if there was more in-depth discussion into how to create this type of content. The book discusses a lot of good concepts, however they examine them from a broad perspective without providing sufficient insights into how to be successful in implementing them.

Finally the most useful part of the book for those new to the area of inbound marketing is the depth into which the book examines the various social media platforms. By explaining not only why the platforms are successful and how to better utilize these for your business, in theory, the book helps to make the somewhat intimidating task of implementing a social media marketing plan significantly simpler.

All in all I think this book is a good introduction to a new form a marketing that seems to becoming the norm in the industry. It by no means covers everything to the extent that would be necessary to become completely successful, but it does give a broad stroke view of the topic. This seems like the type of book that could be marketed as “Inbound Marketing for the non-marketing manager.”

Over the past week or so I have be seriously contemplating the consideration of tone and grammar usage in social media from a business perspective and the implications on professionalism. Twitter is one thing, where you have only 140 characters to get your point across, but what about Blogs, Facebook and the other categories of social media interaction.

The major selling point of social media, in a business environment, is that it is a transparent form of two-way communication between the company and its consumers. There is traditionally an informal tone taken in these channels as you are communicating one-on-one with individual consumers. For a company just venturing into the social media realm it can be a difficult balancing act between appearing open and receptive to customer comments and questions, maintaining a level of professionalism and not coming off as a cold corporate enterpise.

There was a recently published article by lakestar media (http://bit.ly/uj37mu) says that you should speak to your customers in their language, however it would severely limit you when attempting to influence consumer perception of your brand. For highly technical or new companies, speaking in the language of the consumer may in fact work opposite to the intended goal of engaging consumers through social media channels.

Ultimately corporate social media communications should take into consideration both the informal nature of social media and the nature and tone of their traditional communications in order to ensure success in this realm.