Moving Out With Mobile Billboard Advertising

Mobile billboard advertising are messages formatted to appear on company Web sites that provide mobile services, such as cellphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), or ads that can show up directly on someone’s iPhone or smartphone as either text or image ads.

As a local business, you’re interested primarily in the direct-to-device option.

Mobile search — and consequently, Mobile billboard advertising — came to be because search engine providers and mobile network service providers (Verizon, T-Mobile, and so on) realized that people running around with their cellphones and PDAs wanted to do local searches. (Say your car went phlooey on the road; you want to use your cellphone to find a local tow truck.) Mobile searches were a no-brainer.

In the industry, mobile search is more formally referred to as searching with local intent — and it’s become obvious that mobile device users are just bristling with that intent Say a cellphone or PDA user launches a local search on Google (or one of the other search engines). Among the things that will pop up are ads, such as the ones we discuss earlier in this chapter in the “Running pay-per-click ads” section.

But here, the super-important key fact is that the searchers are out and about, right now. Odds are, at this very moment, they’re searching for something with immediate local relevance to them (like the aforementioned tow truck). Otherwise, they wouldn’t be searching at all.

This means that the sales trigger is just waiting to be pulled — and smart local business find a way to capitalize on that immediacy. Some offer ads that, when clicked, notify the mobile user of a special, limited-time sale, a free giveaway, or the option of being connected directly to your business phone — which can all happen immediately.
Movie reviews, maps, menus, store locations, and hours of operation are perfect items to put just one simple click away on millions of mobile phones. A great case in point:

Someone searching for Thai restaurants sees your mobile ad, clicks to find out your location and read your menu, and then gets connected directly to your take-out number. How cool (not to mention, profitable) is that?

Earlier in this chapter, we discuss how traditional pay-per-click advertising can be a relatively cost-effective sort of expense, and mobile PPC is largely the same in those regards. And if you decide to go the click-to-call-your business-right-now route, you use something known as pay-per-call. You don’t bid against anyone; you just pay a few dollars for each call that someone makes to your location through your Mobile billboard advertising.

Here’s a biggie, though: Most major search engines let you do the same sort of geo-targeted mobile ads that you can do with your primary online search engine ads. Plus Google Mobile, Yahoo! Mobile, and Bing Mobile can help you seamlessly extend your desktop-targeted campaign to local mobile users.

As you might expect, lots of new and simple resources have sprung up in the mobile marketplace to help put your business front and center with consumers on the go. These include

✓ Bango: http://bango.com
✓ mobileStorm: www.mobilestorm.com
✓ Mobile Visions: www.mobilemarketing.net

Local businesses that can benefit most from Mobile billboard advertising include restaurants, laundromats, movie theaters, florists, taxicab companies, salons, locksmiths, and similar businesses

  • Share/Bookmark
Posted in Mobile billboard advertising | Tagged | Leave a comment

Getting Seen By Your Target Customers With Banner Ads

Banner ads or a web banner is simply a form of displaying averts you place on someone else’s website or page. This particular type of ad is meant to drive traffic to the advertiser’s website and a link is offered to take you there.

Banner ads are usually short or either wide, narrow or tall. This is why they are referred to as banners. You will normally see them on pages that have interesting content, whether editorial or informational.

Banner ads are traditionally more about brand awareness than direct response and can be a very powerful tool for attracting new customers to local businesses that offer high value services or products.

Prime examples are car dealerships, law firms, and medical practices that are looking to build awareness and/or relationships instead of merely building a sales funnel.

Mega sales will follow sooner or later if you take the time to build or create a very positive brand.

Consider placing banner ads on a local level, that is, on newspaper websites (business or entertainment section) and on affinity sites.

For example, a bicycle shop can place banner ads on the local cycling club’s website and the sports pages of the local community site.

  • Share/Bookmark
Posted in banner ads | Tagged | Leave a comment

Going from Offline to Online: A Lesson in Cross-Pollination

Offline to Online, your overall marketing effort may lean heavily on online advertising to create growth and momentum for your company or business, but make sure you don’t do it at the expense of a turbo charged effort.

It is a fact that offline to online tactics can be integrated smoothly to extend your advertising dollars. This kind of cross pollination works thus:

✓ Direct mail can be improved with online offer fulfillment. In other words this means that the mail that shows up at your address provides a web address as to where to receive the special discount to whatever you are offering. This is a very powerful marketing combination to be used with your existing customers.

✓ The information you gain from your PPC advertising can generate the most interest in your products and services. This can be applied to your offline marketing and make it less a case of hit or miss than hit and hit.

✓ Networking from offline to online can help you move people into a network that you have a ongoing presence on. The number of ways you can get offline efforts to stimulate online activity is pretty much limited. This is a strategy no savvy local business should ignore.

  • Share/Bookmark
Posted in offline to online | Tagged | Leave a comment

Using Free Media Vehicles To Market Your Small Business

Free media vehicles like Youtube and Flicr make viral marketing campaigns extremely easy to implement for any small business, including local ones. You could for example:

✓ Participate on message boards and in chat rooms. Both of which are good ways to spread the word that your business and you are worth knowing. Targeted spots for this sort of thing are:

• Google Groups: http://groups.Google.com
• About.Com: www.About.Com
• Yahoo! Groups: http://groups.Yahoo.com
• Open Directory Project (dmoz): www.Dmoz.org

✓ Feature your video commercial on You Tube (www.Youtube.com) – and not on TV at all. You should prominently feature your web address somewhere on it.

✓ Host a photo gallery showcasing your latest work. For example a stone masonry company, could post pictures of its most recent patio or decorative stonewall installation on Flickr (www.Flickr.com), accompanied by a How To Discussion Board perhaps.

✓ Add a Forward to a friend feature in your email promotions. Opportunities are created to position yourself (and your business) as the local expert. As regards free media vehicles, and at the very least, you can begin to increase online awareness..

Using Facebook in the real world:

Check out the “Social Media Marketing Case Study: Using Facebook to promote a Professional Photography Business” article at The caffeinated Blog for a good example of how one business harnessed the energy of Facebook to boost his local business. You can find the article here: http://thecaffeinatedblog.Typepad.com. The business owner in this example became socially entwined with his potential customers by using Facebook, and repeated exchanges with them gave him the upper hand on his local competitors.

This is what i call smart marketing. So when it comes to using other free media vehicles to market your small business just follow the examples and steps above in this post and you can’t go wrong.

  • Share/Bookmark
Posted in free media vehicles | Tagged | Leave a comment

Introducing Search In North Asia

  • Share/Bookmark
Posted in search | Tagged | Leave a comment