Category Archives: SEO

Mobile Analytics, Does it Work?

SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

The Effectiveness and Future of Mobile Analytics

How does one measure the effectiveness of an advertising strategy that has no fixed location, but that relies primarily on the response of individual targets? Mobile marketing, a strategy which allows advertisers to send out text messages or alternatively develop applications for use on mobile devices, is measured by what is known as mobile analytics. According to studies conducted over the last ten years, mobile marketing can dramatically increase the impact of any given ad campaign in terms of what is known as ‘user engagement.’ Specifically, applications, or ‘apps’ as they are known, attract users who are interested in a particular product or service, and keep them engaged by periodically offering them relevant updates or information. But what is the future of mobile marketing? Has it already hit its prime, or is there room for development that will come to redefine the relationship between ‘customers’ and ‘businesses’?

Effectiveness

                A recent news event confirms the effectiveness of mobile marketing. The event involves Nokia, a once-powerful telecommunications company that has been struggling to regain market share against its competitors the iPhone and the Android. Nokia announced that is purchasing the Mobile Analytics company Motally, which has spent years developing highly refined techniques of tracking customer interaction and response to mobile apps. Motally’s data takes into consideration the device that the user has to access the data, the content the user accesses, the location from which they access it, and the total amount of time they spend accessing it. This type of information, coupled with demographic data that is publicly available on such applications as Facebook, provides companies with a wealth of detailed information about their visitors, including age, work history, and social connections. Nokia’s decision to purchase the company when Nokia itself is struggling indicates that the company believes that Motally’s technology will allow Nokia to aggressively re-enter the mobile device market.

Motally’s mobile analytics has an added degree of sophistication, primarily in the rapid way it is able to sort all of this data and render it to Nokia. One of the unexpected difficulties of the 21st century has not been accessibility or availability of information, but rather the ability to sort through all of the available data to produce meaningful and useful results. Mobile analytics in of itself is incredibly valuable and useful primarily because it offers companies a pre-developed metric to sort through literally thousands of gigabytes of data in a timeframe that allows them to make commercial gains.

By comparing real-time user data with demographic information, a company can predict the interests of a particular user, and send them information about upcoming products or services that they will very likely be interested in either purchasing or using. Each time the user interacts with the information that has been sent to them, they add to a larger data stream of information about them, which allows companies to target them with ever increasing accuracy. In this sense, mobile analytics is the equivalent of a personalized commercial profile, a tool which gives companies and developers incredible power.

Case Studies

                The burgeoning club scene in Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas has discovered something about its users: they move fast. In an era when the rapid-fire communication technology of social networking sites has bestowed upon email a certain stolid formality, marketing to people under the age of 30 requires a high-impact approach. Both PACHA in New York City and the nightclub TAO in Las Vegas discovered an enormous boost in attendance and follow-up participation once they switched from flyer and email marketing to an text messaging/app-based approach. This direct engagement, which could be instantly modified depending on user response, helped both clubs create instantaneous communities of dedicated club goers.

Of course, the success of mobile marketing is not limited to night clubs. Other businesses have benefited from being able to interact with their customers, including those companies who offer services online, such as the iTunes store, or developers who create apps. In each case, the success of the marketing strategy seems to hinge on the fact that the company begins to develop a slightly more ‘personal’ relationship with its customers. In the case of the Ran Pass Liquor store in Texas, customers were clued in to discounts ahead of the official announcements, creating customer loyalty and spawning other events, which in turn drew in more customers, who signed up for the individual messaging service.

Apps, meanwhile, compete with each other for market dominance primarily by being able to offer customers the most useful and efficient methods of parsing data. With its detailed roster of data, mobile analytics is vital to the success of a given app. If an app user knows that his or her core customers are spending most of their time on one particular feature, but neglecting others entirely, he or she is able to spend the appropriate amount of labor and time in re-engineering those portions that work, and those that do not.

Geolocation

                So what is the future of mobile marketing and mobile analytics? With an increasing amount of personal information now available on the internet, is there a point where the most successful mobile analytics firms will develop a formula that emphasizes speed?

Not necessarily. While information parsing is of vital importance to the technology, the “type” of information may also impact mobile analytics, and subsequently alter business practices. Geolocation, which is the technology that allows a network to pinpoint the geographical location of an individual based on his or her access signal or IP address, may dramatically reconfigure business models, and play a substantial role in how mobile analytics is used.

Perhaps the easiest way to visualize how this could occur is to imagine the stages of evolution of the internet. In the 20th century, the internet was primarily an amorphous realm, without tangible connections to a physical locale. Gradually, as more and more users began to interact with the internet, the idea of a three dimensional physical location began to gain more importance. If someone wanted to order a pizza, for example, they would need to know who sold pizza within their geographical radius, not all the pizza makers on the planet.

With the increasing emphasis on commerce, physical locality again becomes of utmost importance. In order to compete in this new era, retailers will want to advertise directly to individuals who are within their vicinity, which makes the availability of geographical data a kind of insider edge. Additionally, as users continue to build up a commercial profile of themselves by virtue of not only of the purchases they make online, but how and when they make them, retailers will want to start competing for very specific individuals who have excellent shopping ‘profiles.’ Put another way, everyone will want to track down the big spenders. Undoubtedly, mobile analytics will make advertising rates to certain individuals far more expensive than to others whose commercial profiles are not as impressive.

This gradual narrowing of focus in advertising, with an emphasis on targeting a select group of coveted individuals, will have other effects. Individual users may in fact have their device subsidized if they spend more money. If Google and Verizon manage to enact a two-tier system, the public internet will require users to pay to get in, while those individuals who use their mobile devices to make purchases and thus create detailed histories about themselves will be able to use their devices for free.

Conclusion

                Mobile marketing and mobile analytics are both useful tools that promise to alter how society interacts with the internet, and with each other. By increasing the amount of accurate information about individual consumer habits, mobile analytics changes how businesses interact with their customers. Those mobile analytics companies that can parse data in the fastest and most detailed fashion will become very wealthy indeed.

By Peter Marino, Senior Partner and CMO of reelWebDesign.com, a search and social media marketing company in New York City.

HTML 5 in a Nutshell

SEO, Web Design, , ,

HTML 5 – What it Is and How it Affects You

HTML 5 is about to completely redefine how websites are created and experienced. HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is the code with which websites are written. With the release of HTML 5, many things that were difficult or impossible to do in HTML 4 are now easy. Read on to learn more about the release of HTML 5 and what it might mean for you.

Graphs, Charts, Complex Graphics – On the Fly
In the past, you had to use outside plugins or code to generate graphs, charts or other graphics. Now HTML 5 will support an element called the Canvas Element that allows you to generate graphics right on the fly.

Embedded Video and Audio

HTML currently supports a rudimentary method of embedding video and audio that nobody really uses. It’s slow, the player is unattractive and is often buggy. HTML 5 is aiming to change that.

Currently, most people use 3rd party plugins like flash to display video or audio. YouTube, for example, is a flash player. Most other players are also written in flash.

With HTML 5, you’ll be able to embed video and audio directly into the browser without using a third-party coding language like flash. It’s designed to be fast and efficient.

Run Applications – Without the Internet

Most web applications don’t work when you disconnect from the internet. Google Docs for example – If you disconnected from the internet, you could keep browsing the doc you’re on, but you couldn’t pull up another document or make edits.

With HTML 5, you’ll be able to run web applications as if they were desktop applications – Without needing to download anything. It’s called “Offline Web Applications” and it works just like it sounds: Web applications that work even when you’re offline.

Accurate Geolocation

Currently, locating someone online is possible by decoding their IP address. However, IP addresses aren’t a sure thing when it comes to location.

HTML 5 will come with its own Geolocation technology to help website owners decode where visitors are located. This will help them tailor web content to the location of the browser. For example, news sites will be able to show you only news stories that relate to you based on where you’re at.

More Styles, Better Forms and More

HTML 5 will feature stylable elements, which can be visually altered with CSS. This means more dynamic and more visually appealing websites

Forms too will be getting an upgrade. You’ll be able to add sliders to forms, pick data and more.

HTML 5 Summary

HTML5 is an upgrade of the very framework that the internet runs on. Once all the browsers adopt HTML 5, you can expect a significant jump in the quality of websites everywhere.

If you’re a website designer, HTML 5 will give you wider range of tools to play with. It’ll speed up and simplify how things are done currently in addition to giving you completely new elements to play with. If you’re a website browser, you can expect certain things to speed up, improved designs and graphics as well as better video, audio and web software.

Enjoy the new and ever evolving internet!

Can Small Businesses Compete with Big Ones?

SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , , ,

Marketing online has brought about more changes than probably any other medium. The biggest difference between the online age and the dawn of TV and radio is this: small businesses have more of a level playing field than ever. When TV and radio came upon the seen it was only the large corporations or successful small businesses that were able to afford to advertise. With the advent of the internet start-ups can present themselves with the look and feel of a large business on a shoestring budget. If you have time and a little bit of creativity you can write a blog or make videos that can appeal to your customers and make you an expert in your field. This in turn leads to business for you by making you the go to guy for your given field. Inadvertently this also leads to better search engine optimization for your website which leads to you ranking higher on the search engines. Yes, big businesses can do this as well but that’s where being niche oriented comes into play. If you take on a small enough niche that big businesses are ignoring but that would still be lucrative to your business you can outdo the big corporations and be more appealing to your market in the process.

There has never been a better time to be a small business but you need to utilize the technologies and methodolgies that can elevate you above your competition and seperate you from other businesses in a unique way.
If you need help with blog writing, video production or search engine optimization please feel free to utilize our services today!
Be small and proud!

Analytics for Social Media; The New Gold Standard

SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , ,

Most good marketers know that tracking is critical to success – Social Media is no different. Many marketers just starting out with social media do it in a haphazard manner and fail. Yet those who are able to produce consistent results through social media have one thing in common: They track their efforts. Here, you’ll learn the ins and outs of why you should track, what exactly you should track and how you can track your social media results.

Why Track?

There are many reasons to track your social media. The first and primary reason is that tracking is the first step to improving numbers in business. If you have no idea how many fans are joining your Facebook page per day or how many people are watching your video per day, then how are you going to improve those numbers?
Another reason to track is so that you know what’s working and what’s not. Perhaps your twitter and Facebook campaigns are really not doing so hot, yet your video campaigns are pulling in visitors by the boatload. You now know where to focus your attention.

social-media-analyticsFinally, tracking saves you a lot of time. Social media can be a bit of a “spray shot” at first. You’re on twitter, Facebook, MySpace, a hundred video distribution sites, digg, reddit, delicious, stumbleupon … The list goes on and on. Over time however, if you track properly you’ll be able to distinguish which areas are paying off and which areas are just a drain on your time.

What Should You Track?

Now that we know the why of tracking, let’s talk about the what. What are the actual metrics you should be tracking?
The most important in any marketing campaign is always: How much money did we make? How many new customers did we acquire? In other words, what was the impact on the bottom line?
As simple as that sounds, it’s often overlooked for impressive visitor figures or branding data. In the end, the whole point of branding or exposure is dollars in the bank.
That’s the most important metric. Here are some other metrics you may want to track:
– How many views did your page get?
– How many views did your video get?
– Which site pulled the most views / visitors?
– What’s your average join per day?
– What % of visitors converts?
– What selling point or promotion generated the most buzz?
To put it in short, you should track everything. Even though only a few numbers really matter, metrics allow you to get a good handle on your business.

How to Track

There is a handful of software out there to help you track your social media progress. ViralHeat(least expensive), WebTrends and Omniture (most expensive) are some of the most popular. Each has their strengths and disadvantages. Although social media analytics software isn’t quite as advanced as web analytics software, there’s still a lot of data you can glean and use from them.
There may be data you want tracked that the software doesn’t’ support. In that case, it’s best to track it by hand at first to get a feel for it. Then, if it’s worth it, you can have custom software built to track it for you. It would only cost a few hundred dollars to have a simple script written up on freelancing sites online.

There you have it. You’ve learned why you should track, what metrics you should track, how to use analytics software to do your tracking and what to do if there are metrics you want to track that your analytics software doesn’t cover. Track carefully and meticulously and you’ll be well on your way to a successful social media campaign that brings results.

If you need social media analytics tracked or website analytics reelWebDesign.com can help. Give us a shout out today info@reelwebdesign.com.