Which marketing method works best? It depends! Selecting between online marketing or mobile marketing, if you really had to only pick one, is not as easy as you might think. It is true that a well run mobile marketing campaign can deliver up to 90-95 percent click through rates and phenomenal pull-through to action. Frankly nothing beats it “IF” your business or campaign is well suited for a mobile campaign. But that is a BIG “IF”.
In almost every case, we actually end up recommending an integrated approach that includes bits and pieces of many different types of marketing and advertising. For example, if we incorporate a mobile campaign, we almost always use both an online campaign and an onsite campaign to feed leads to the mobile campaign. The best payback comes from the strategic combination of multiple advertising and promotion methods all feeding into the primary campaign. But back to the question… which works best if you could only use one method.
The rest of this article offers a few guidelines to consider for deciding whether an online marketing campaign might outperform a mobile marketing campaign, or vice versa. Admittedly, this article just touches on a few of the more obvious decision criteria. When we perform a comprehensive marketing assessment we actually evaluate over two dozen different business criteria to nail down the optimal marketing plan.
Basic Mobile Marketing Guidelines
Mobile marketing works best for special promotions, sales events and in businesses that tend to be more of an impulse buy or build a business based on repeat customer purchases. The obvious businesses that can capitalize on mobile campaigns are restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theaters, and other entertainment venues. These tend to be businesses that attract repeat visits week after week from a pool of customers, making it worthwhile to build a customer or prospect list that can be tapped many times a year. But that is not the only type of business that can achieve a big payday using a mobile campaign. Consider these, just to name a few:
- Auto repair shops
- Home improvement contractors
- Carpet cleaners
- Landscapers
- Grocers
- Package stores
- Clothing stores
- Chiropractors
- Spas and Gyms
- Hair stylists
- Civic clubs
- Churches
All of these business share one common need. Repeat customer encounters and a steady stream of new prospects and customers. How about you…. would your business benefit from an economical way to contact and attract repeat customers? If so, mobile may just be the single most impactful advertising and marketing method for you.
Basic Online Marketing Guidelines
We will actually group several different marketing techniques under the general description of “online marketing”. As you will soon discover, these techniques work very well hand-in-hand with mobile marketing and they really should be implemented together if you are going to use mobile marketing.
Basically, under the “online marketing” banner we are going to combine search engine marketing (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), email marketing and several other methods including video marketing and social marketing. Online marketing techniques work well today for most businesses because so many of your customers and prospects now access computers multiple times each day. In fact, over 74% of US families now have routine access to the internet each day, and many are using the internet extensively to search for products and services and to locate businesses that sell these products and services.
It is almost as simple as this. If these prospects and potential customers find your business first when they are searching for what you are selling, then you have a gigantic advantage over your competitors. One way to make sure they find your business is to do what it takes to get your business at the top of the search engines. In otherwords, when some searches for your product or service on Google, or Bing, or Yahoo…. your business needs to show up on page one… as high up and as many times possible on page one of the search results. This is money in the bank to most businesses.
Getting your business in the top results on the search engines is neither easy nor instantaneous, but when you get there you will be happy and you will have a longer lasting source of fresh new customers without having to shell out advertising dollars every week to promote your business.
So, is internet marketing better than mobile marketing… or vice versa?
The answer is… they go hand in hand. Each method compounds the value of the other if done well. In our Comprehensive Marketing Review we take an indepth look at all of your marketing opportunities to help you identify which combination of marketing techniques will give your business the greatest advantage in your own market area.
Be sure to request a copy of our complimentary “Online & Mobile Marketing Guidelines for Local Businesses” and leave your contact information so that we can determine if your business qualifies for a FREE Comprehensive Marketing Review, which will save you $199.