What Big Business Doesn't Want Small Business to Know...

5 Marketing Strategies Big Business Doesn't Want Small Business to Know About

Mobile marking is a goldmine!

But you wouldn’t realize it looking at the marketing activities of many local businesses…

The age of the smart phone is here but many small local business owners are still in the dark ages. They're playing catch up with their clients and their behavior. An interesting Web.com survey showed of 500 small business owners showed on 26 percent of respondents invested time and money in optimizing their website for mobile devices! What does this mean for small businesses? It means this is a excellent time to stand out from the crowd. The mobile customers are ripe for the taking and you're in prime position to reap the rewards!

Since we are now seeing over half of all searches happening on a mobile device of some sort, now is the time to take advantage of this. Listed below are five proven ways mobile marketing can help small businesses on a budget.

1. Mobile Optimized Site – Making sure that the site is optimized properly for mobile is step one, and without it almost everything else doesn’t matter. Make sure it is designed with mobile in mind, and is available on all platforms. According to a survey from Google, 61 percent of consumers will leave a website if it’s not optimized for mobile.
2. Look into Mobile Ads – Mobile ads are cheap and effective. This may sound surprising but at the moment lots of the inventory goes unsold every month and this keeps the prices down. This makes it an excellent time for you to jump in and explore mobile advertising.
3. SMS and Push Notifications – SMS messages have several great advantages. First and foremost; they get opened. A lot. According to Frost and Sullivan, SMS messages offer an astounding 95 percent open rate! Push notifications are a great way to connect with your customer base.
4. Using Mobile with Your Social Media – Having the capability to connect real-time with your social networks and send links to coupons, specials, events or a link to your latest YouTube video is a surefire way to not only increase traffic and buzz, but also to help your site’s search engine ranking. Google hangouts are also now becoming a new and exciting way to reach potential customers in real-time.
5. Location Based Marketing and Passbook – Your small business needs to be found on the web. In the past, it meant Foursquare and Yelp. While this still applies, you also have to start investigating new technology like Passbook also. Passbook is a great new app that allows its user to save all kinds of things like boarding passes, gift cards, coupons, store cards, coupons and all sorts of mobile payments.

The most critical thing for local businesses is to gather knowledge and always keep learning. Remember, it doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to be extravagant. You just need to start where you are and never stop learning.