Mobile Marketing for Small Business

We've been getting asked quite a bit lately about how small business can market themselves in this new "mobile" online world. The prevalence of the iPhone and Blackberry have really driven this to the forefront in the mind of marketers. We've put together a brief cheat sheet to give you and overview of where we feel the opportunites are for small business.

One main point to note is that if a business has a location-based offering - whether it be a single deli, store, shop, or a regional chain of locations – the real “bang for the buck" in mobile marketing comes in driving foot traffic to a physical location. Why? Because that's when people are using their “mobile" devices – when they are out and about and ...well…"mobile!"

Key mobile web marketing arenas for small business:

Mobile website creation

• Create a mobile version of your existing site
• Create a totally separate mobile site altogether
• Use local terms (towns, counties, states) in your site copy and title tags

This is probably the highest cost arena in which the small business can direct it's efforts. It will involve finding a good web developer that you can trust to help you understand what can and should be done to your website to make it more mobile friendly. This usually involves creating alternate style sheets (“CSS") for the mobile device so that your site content lays out differently for the small screen.

Or perhaps, a completely different site altogether is a better option. We've seen a lot of companies starting to use the .mobi version of their corporate domain to host these mobile-only versions of their sites. This method probably only makes sense when you have really tricky or complicated content that needs to be displayed in a radically different way on the mobile device than it does on the computer monitor.

Local Search Optimization

• Google Maps
• IYPs (internet yellow pages)
• GetListed.org

Getting any and all of your locations listed in the “local" search engines and internet yellow pages is a very easy and cost effective way of getting your business appearing on mobile devices. The reality is people start their mobile web experience the same way they do on their PC – at a search engine – and most likely Google. If your business listings in Google Maps are well optimized, you don't even need to have a website to drive traffic to your door via these types of services. Check out GetListed.org to see where you stand in the local search engines and optimize your listings.

SMS Marketing

• Text customers local offers
• Text customers daily specials
• MobileStorm.com
• Promo2cell.com

Texting or SMS has become a huge form a communication among individuals and now between businesses and their customers as well. There are a few very cost effective services like MobileStorm.com and Promo2Cell.com that allow a small business to build up a database of customer cell numbers (much like ConstantContact allows you to create a database of customer email addresses) and push marketing offers and information to customers that is timely and valuable to them. Examples would be the daily specials at a local Deli. A special discount at a cleaners. The text messages could include “codes" that the customers mentions when they come into the location in order to help the business owner track that these campaigns are working.

Create Your Own Apps

• Create your own app if it makes sense
• swebapps.com
• appbreeder.com

Another option for mobile marketing is for a company to actually create their own “App" or mobile application that customers download and actually resides on their cell phone. The most common example here is the Apple iPhone and it's "App Store."

This only makes sense if your business has some sort of reason for having a customized user experience that only an app can provide at this point in time.  There are several services online that allow you to very quickly and easily build an iPhone app online such as AppBreeder or SWebApps.

No Shortage of Options

As you can see, there are several ways a small business can get their business showing up on potential customer's mobile devices and varying levels of cost. At a very minimum we recommend that any small business with a local presence optimize their listings in online mapping tools like Google Maps.

Happy marketing!