Mobile marketing gives consumers the ability to access content anywhere at any time. It is essential for marketers to continuously create content that delivers the type of value consumers are looking for. Marketers have to be able to give up some control of their brand in order to fully engage consumers.

Mobile marketing focuses on real-time data collection and analysis while simultaneously retaining constant contact with a customer base. The use of mobile marketing and social media allows businesses to embrace customer service, market responsiveness, and maintain their brand’s voice in a technology-driven market.

Take for example Pandora who launched its first mobile app in 2008. Pandora’s competitive advantage is their unique ability to personalize music and give consumers the ultimate music experience. Not only are consumers able to listen to music whenever and wherever they are, but Pandora introduces us to similar artists further developing our experiences as music listeners.

Pandora cultivates the consumer experience through artist suggestions and encourages consumers to explore related “products”.  Their connection with Facebook lets users see what type of music our friends “like” expanding its reach to its target market. Pandora embraces the power of the people and maintains its status at the top of music recommendation services because of their mobile accessibility.

Through mobile and online marketing, advertisers can target consumers by using certain demographics and traits (such as gender, ZIP code location, and type of music) increasing their local-market penetration. This is where analytics come into play – giving hard numbers for traffic, click through rates, time visitors spend on pages and how they like to share information.

Mobile marketing optimizes consumer engagement and produces real-time results for advertisers making it one of the most prevalent and powerful marketing tools in the “social” world. By delivering content in multiple ways, mobile marketing supports consumer power and embraces customer engagement.

Being responsive is at the core of interactive marketing.

Consumer empowerment has taken over marketer power for what seems like the past decade. With the tremendous growth of social media, consumers expect marketers to know everything about their buying habits and patterns. Social media has enabled consumer loyalty, but not necessarily the consumer experience. A company may have a massive brand presence on Facebook, but having one million fans does not mean they are giving the consumer the desired brand experience.

Interactive Marketing Plus

Social media provides the opportunity for market researchers to listen to and mine consumer insights, but this is not the only opportunity presented. Social media allows consumers to directly respond to the changing marketing conditions. Social networking has created a virtual space for people to be advocates for their fellow brand ambassadors. However, interactive marketing involves more than just internet marketing.

Crowdsourcing & Measurable Results

Consumers are more likely to talk about a brand via social media rather than through surveys. Although social networks use analytical software to produce measureable results, they are slow to make the data, analysis, and insights available to marketers. Marketers need to reconnect with consumers to optimize the consumer promise and the brand promise.

The mission and challenge for marketers is to be responsive to consumers’ concerns and behaviors with a more measureable, data driven approach by customizing the marketing experience.

It is time for marketers to engage with consumers and effectively meet their expectations. The question remains: when it comes to interactive marketing, who is really in control?

Facebook may have a serious following of 600 million worldwide but LinkedIn is the number one social media network in terms of growth; 1 million new users a week.  From jump street, LinkedIn established Q&A online communities through groups (both private and public). Self-identifying groups with large amounts of members are attractive potential markets.

B-to-B marketers are finding that LinkedIn and these communities, or groups, are the best platforms from which they can communicate with one another and create exposure for themselves. In the constant effort to appear more transparent, LinkedIn has a more buttoned-up, purely professional feel than Facebook or Twitter making it a good spring board for lead-generation and continued and open dialog.

Facebook’s answer to the Q&A feature of LinkedIn, that attracts so many, is the “Questions” tab. This recent and slyly added  feature hasn’t blasted users with the usual Facebook overhaul alerts, “we revamped the entire lay-out of Facebook, get ready for the switch-over”.

You’ll only notice “Questions” when you’re updating your status on your profile page. The move to the additional feature without any official announcement is interesting because of Facebook’s other intentions.

The minds at Facebook have delved further into discussions about implementing real-time advertisement solutions based on your status updates and “questions”. Will this be Facebook’s attempt to gain more users and compete in LinkedIn’s category? Food for thought.

Two dimensional QR codes have been alive and abroad for several years and yet, the U.S. hasn’t quite taken to them.  Customers and users still aren’t sure what to do with them or why they’re on packages and posters. The early adopters didn’t spread as quickly as other technologies that were more tangible.

Marketers must educate the public about using the QR codes, why they are useful and why they are integral to our mobile world. Perhaps they’ve been marketed wrong or not at all – there certainly was no debut like the unveiling of the iPad2 so the codes have largely fallen under the radar. B2B Magazine found that “1% of U.S. mobile phone owners and 5% of smartphone owners had used a 2D barcode scanner in the previous three months” (B2B 3.14.11, p.11).

The importance of the QR code is its ability to act as a bridge between our physical and printed world to the virtual world. The 2D codes offer a direct line to further information for consumers. Post™ Cereals, Macy’s and art museums now sport the codes as another way to attract their audience to the continued conversation (discounts, events, consumer appreciation, surveys, give-aways, contests) and further strengthen the feedback loop. The inherent risks of the technology are broken links, codes that aren’t compatible with users’ mobile devices and thus loss of interest. Given time to develop and greater accessibility this could be the new technology with which the U.S. finally gets on board.

Another windy morning in Chicago last Thursday ushered in an intrepid LoSasso quartet to The Drake Hotel. Awaiting LoSasso President, Scott LoSasso and Vice President, Mark Hollingsworth were professors from colleges and universities around the Midwest, plumbing the depths of LoSasso’s interactive marketing expertise at the 2011 Spring Marketing Management Association Conference. The talk was organized by Don Jones and resulted in great dialogue between area professors and our LoSasso team.

The presentation addressed changes in the marketing industry and what businesses are looking for in new hires, especially those undergraduates hot off the presses. Particular attention was paid to content driven interaction: the driving force behind creating a space for consumers to interact with one another and with businesses. Industry forums and social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare) have become the new quilting circle or local watering hole where information is readily exchanged, available and digested at a rapid pace.

The message was clear: the toolbox has changed but the fundamental principles of marketing have stayed the same. Developing a relationship with a client is still at the core of those principles; it is the way in which we enhance that relationship that has grown to include social media, SEO (search engine optimization) and the need to build a presence both physically and virtually for every client.

Frequent and consistent messaging continues to be of utmost importance but a close second is the need for silos within businesses to break down. More than ever, direct marketing and public relations are completely meshed together: communications and marketing departments have to interface constantly to maintain that consistent messaging for optimal success in their campaigns.

The discussion was also centered around best practices for hiring and what makes a new hire successful. Scott LoSasso initiated the conversation by outlining optimal job candidates that contribute to a team work environment. Incoming new hires are strong writers, positive team players, involved in an array of social media platforms, creative thinkers and detail-oriented. For more information about skill sets businesses look for in new hires, visit iMedia Connection.

Thank you to the Marketing Management Association, Don Jones, The Drake Hotel and all in attendance for a great open discussion about our evolving industry!

What does net neutrality and its ensuing court battles have to do with B2B and B2C marketing strategies?  A bushel and a peck.

Since fall of last year, the F.C.C. and large corporations (Google, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast) have been duking it out over government regulation of the internet – which as of right now is still considered an information service and therefore a public resource.  The internet is the last standing outlet for democratized free information — telecommunications services are far more privatized, without F.C.C. regulation, and so can determine what information a user views.

“The suits could potentially free Internet service providers from regulation — allowing them to treat their own content better than that of rivals, and block content that they didn’t like or competed with. Verizon and AT&T have about 60 percent of wireless subscribers. And 80 percent of Americans live in areas with only two wireline broadband providers. In a market with such slender competition, consumers are likely to lose out.” (3.6.11, Net Neutrality, back in court, NYT)

So how does this affect a marketer? Well, it’s really quite simple.  Social media has exploded in the industry as the best way to establish working relationships with established and would-be consumers.

Interactive marketing works off diverse and publicly accessible platforms to interact freely with the masses.  Marketers on the small side of business and upstarts would lose the advantage of the last free information channel and new clientele.  Now, that open channel is vulnerable to restriction and tiered-pricing for faster access to predetermined content.

At the very least if net neutrality becomes a thing of the past, the SEO (search engine optimization) and mobile marketing games will have to adapt and at a cost.

” ‘Cause you can look right through me, walk right by me, and never know I’m there…” Or so goes Amos Hart’s sad little song in the musical Chicago.  Poor invisible Amos’ verse embodies the challenges facing websites struggling to create relevant content.

There’s been much debate over the amount of social media we process as humans on a daily basis: are we so inundated with messaging that we are developing blind spots?  This becomes the main hurdle facing the advertising business and it means blending traditional with more conversation-oriented practices.

Consumers now look to companies’ Facebook pages before being directed to their home pages.  If you want to be in AllState’s “good hands” or reap the benefits of State Farm’s magical jingle, commercials are telling you to visit their Facebook page.

At the end of the day, something is marketed so it can be sold and if we go back to the founding principles of customer service, the conversation between consumer and company reigns supreme.  Oddly enough, social media in its cold digital form has resurrected the more human approach to sales while benefiting the bottom line.

Questions, concerns, praise and complaints can all be aired on a company’s Facebook page allowing brands to respond directly to consumers and establish an open line of communication.  What better way to get instant feedback while developing a relationship with the very people to whom you sell?  The concept of the “invisible man” gets broken down when companies encourage their consumers to actively participate in the discussion, whatever the topic.

As we have moved our clients into fully integrated programs we continue to find interesting ways to leverage content distribution and lead generation across the online marketing landscape. This recent article quantifies a few of the strategies and tactics that we are using in both our b2b and consumer client work. The concept of owned media is on that we have been intrigued with for several years as we have seen strong success with focused email marketing programs. There is incredible opportunities to repurpose content to make the content distribution strategies and owned media work hand in glove. Both paid and unpaid placements drive growth of email and prospect databases when conversion strategies are handled properly.

The strong growth indicated here through the use of video is also right on  track with what we see. For many marketers, the return on track investment in video is much greater than it has ever been in the past.

Click here to read the whole article.

The business of social media has been rapidly evolving to create bigger and better opportunities for businesses to advertise on social media sites across the web.  These advertising opportunities mainly revolve around things like promoted Tweets and Facebook ads, but recently another way to integrate advertising into the social media landscape has begun to emerge – placing advertisements directly into popular social games such as FarmVille or Sorority Life on Facebook.  With the growing popularity of social games (Neilson recently released stats showing that online gaming has overtaken e-mail as the number two way Americans spend their time online) it is a logical step for advertisers to gain increased face time with their target audiences.

What It Is

The concept of in-game advertising gives advertisers the opportunity to connect with customers in a unique way, by helping them to get ahead in the game.  Social games such as FarmVille are based on players acquiring virtual goods – tipically these goods are not free to the player, costing them virtual currency (in-game currency is bought with real-world money).  Advertisers can partner with these social games, offering players virtual currency or virtual goods as incentives when they make a real-world purchase with the advertiser, or they can even reward a player for simply  choosing to  “Like” or become a fan of the brand.  For example, if a player buys $20 worth of merchandise at an advertiser’s store, they might receive $10 in virtual currency to use in-game, etc.

Ways to Advertise

There are multiple ways to advertise with-in social games – ranging from simply posting on community bulletin boards, to branding in-game merchandise.  In-game ad placements such as virtual billboards or banners are another way to reach customers and are growing in popularity for advertisers because of their high ROI potential.  A more interactive way to advertise in-game is to actually create a branded game of your own.  “This strategy not only gives consumers a fun and memorable way to engage with your brand, but it also enables you to create and sell your own branded virtual goods,” according to an article on mashable.com.

While still a fairly new tactic, in-game advertising is a unique way to engage with customers and has the potential to be a useful and successful strategy if it is targeted and executed correctly.

Twitter made the long-awaited announcement Tuesday that the company will finally be getting into the money-making business.  Twitter launched an advertising campaign that will put contextually relevant “promoted tweets” [read: paid] at the top of its search results pages.  Twitter says these tweets are a lot like a regular tweet and users are able to interact with them in the same ways: replying to them, favoring them, or retweeting them.

So what’s the big difference between promoted tweets and regular tweets?  According to Twitter’s blog, promoted tweets “must resonate with users.”  Unlike normal tweets, users must interact with the promoted tweets in order for them to stick around on the site.

So is Twitter selling out?  No, just trying to make a living.  Twitter points out that all of the promoted tweets are already an organic part of Twitter before becoming a paid advertisement, meaning that the ads start off as normal tweets in the company’s Twitter stream before users ever see them as a promoted tweet at the top of their search results page.

“The idea behind promoted tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer.

Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America are some of the first companies to get on the promoted tweeting action.