Photo from depositphotos

Originally Posted On: How an Everyday Small Device Can Be a Powerful Marketing Tool | Online Impact 360

 

There’s a small device that could become your most powerful marketing tool.

Can you guess what it is?

It’s the smartphone. And no, it’s not just to make cold calls to customers. The idea is to use your phone to reach them and start building a relationship.

Yes, you can do that through phone calls. But you don’t have time to have conversations with every person who might become a customer. So you have to rely on other marketing strategies.

Marketing strategies that will help grow your business.

One effective strategy is to increase your brand visibility by building up your online presence to have greater awareness on social media platforms. In other words, by building a brand online.

Another is to use search marketing through paid traffic or SEO and optimize your websites to appear on the first page of Google search results organically.

You can do all this using the small device we call a smartphone.

Photo from depositphotos

And you can use it to find more qualified customers than you could before. Meaning, people who are likely to purchase your product or service.

Which is the problem, right? Finding qualified customers.

Even with the traditional ways of marketing, such as traditional mass media, there was a large pool of people who saw the ads but were unqualified as buyers for the product being advertised.

It was the traditional shotgun approach to marketing.

Take billboards, for example. The way the billboard companies like Clear Channel or Amor sell you on a billboard is by giving you some numbers. They’ll estimate the number of people in a vehicle. Suppose the average is 2.5 people per vehicle. If you know how many vehicles travel on that road on a given day, you can estimate how many people will pass by in a two-week period.

By doing the math, you’ll have an estimate of how many people potentially will see your billboard. The problem is you have no idea how many of these people are qualified.

Let alone most of these people aren’t even looking out the windows of their car, because half the people driving are unfortunately looking at their phones. You know what I mean. You wonder why people are driving so poorly and it’s because they are looking at their phones.

Which is the reason you have to be marketing on the smartphone. That’s where people are looking, even when they shouldn’t be.

Not convinced? Consider some statistics provided by Google data.

To start with, 97% of consumers looking for a local service or business search online first.

Then 76% of searchers who find their local business information online will visit a physical store within 24 hours of performing that search. Even more amazing, an iAcquire study showed that 70% of these searches result in action taken within the next hour.

Further, 28% of searches that include “near me” in the search phrase end up in a purchase.

These statistics (and many others) prove that people searching for something on their phones are motivated to buy. They’re already in motion, unlike someone sitting at home looking at a desktop computer.

And 82% of smartphone users using a search engine on their phones will look for a business using the “near me” search term.

In other words, they’ll be searching for a “dentist near me” or “plumber near me” or “restaurant near me.”

They use the “near me” phrase because they want someone based locally, someone close to where they are.

And they don’t stop searching even when they’re in the store. One study reported that 82% of smartphone users pull out their phones to help them decide which product to buy while they looking at the items on the shelves. Just because they made it to your store doesn’t mean they’ve made their buying decision.

If you aren’t harnessing the power of the smartphone to market for you to reach your customers, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. All these people searching for businesses like yours “near me” won’t find you.

They’ll be finding your competitors instead.

The beauty of using smartphones in marketing is that we can pinpoint with extreme accuracy. We can find qualifies customers who are exactly the kind of people who will buy your product or service. In other words, the ideal or qualified customers for your business.

Using data that’s available, we can pinpoint which customers to put our ads in front of. This will bring those qualified customers to your business.

And unlike a desktop, people keep their phones close. They check them often, some more than once every hour.

But how does marketing on the smartphone work?

It works just like SEO optimization campaigns: optimize for the exact phrases and keywords that customers are using to search for your product or service.

Using smartphones to search for products and services is buying behavior consumers already perform.

Photo from depositphotos

And you are doing it as well. Every time you take off your business owner hat and put on your consumer hat, what happens? You want to buy something, you whip out your phone and search for it.

You do this every single day. Whether you want to buy a product, find a service, or locate a restaurant, you are most likely searching online.

If you’re buying things this way, so are your customers.

Which is why you have to be using smartphones in your marketing.

Of course, the process doesn’t end with serving an ad and hoping someone comes to your business. You need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly and loads fast. If your site loads slowly or is difficult to read on a mobile device, you could be losing sales. Lots of them.

And don’t forget the data and analytics that Google will provide to you. That data will tell you what kind of searches people are doing on mobile vs desktop. That information will be extremely useful as you tweak and enhance your website to give users a better experience.

If your competitor’s site loads faster than yours or presents product information in a more relevant way than yours, then they will be the one to get the sale. Not you.

Your website is your one chance to make a favorable first impression on potential customers. It’s also your best way to provide instant, relevant information, and answers to buyers, no matter what time of day or night they are looking for that information.

And if you haven’t made your site mobile-friendly, then you’re losing out. Leaving money on the table. And overlooking the powerful potential of that powerful small device in everyone’s pocket.