As a business owner, you are busy running the business. But if you are like most, wearing many hats, marketing may not be getting the attention it needs. Especially in digital and social media areas.  Maybe it’s time to outsource some of those responsibilities. There are some definite benefits to doing so. Our managed digital marketing is cost efficient, time saving, stress-free and professional.

Cost Efficient
Most digital marketing services are sold as a package and are billed out as a flat monthly fee. With a monthly fee for services, you never have unexpected charges, and it’s much easier for you to fit into your budget. Packages vary depending on the services desired. Often, these monthly fees are far less than you would pay an employee to achieve the same results.

Professional Service
Icon Web Group provides a whole team working on digital marketing and social media. You can’t fill the roles of strategist, analyst, designer, copywriter, brand specialist, and yourself, so why not have a whole team of specialists working behind the scenes for you?

Time Saving
Since you have a whole team of professionals monitoring your digital marketing and social media, you don’t have to take the time to learn all those roles or stay abreast of changes in the arena. There’s no time required to search for those qualified individuals, because you have our team at your disposal.

Stress-Free
By outsourcing digital marketing, you can rest easy knowing that it’s being handled by a team of professionals. You don’t need to worry about deadlines or whether posts have been published to your social profiles, because we are taking care of it for you.

If you want to be involved in the process, we have programs for that too, using your input in every aspect of the digital marketing! The amount of your involvement is entirely up to you.

Many local businesses don’t have the capacity to get as much out of social media as possible, and just don’t have the time to dedicate to managing everything in the digital space.  Why not see where Icon Web Group can help.  Give us a call today at 501.444.2810.

#GetFound to #WinLocal...It’s what we do here!

Yes, you can pretty much find stats online to support any claim you want to make. If you can't find them, you can always make them up and post them in a few places to validate your statements. But here are some real stats, from reputable sources, that you should consider when evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing and planning for 2015, as it relates to social media.  We even have a fun little video (CLICK TO WATCH), for those of us with limited attention spans.

• 80% of US social network users prefer to connect to brands through Facebook. (State of Inbound Marketing)
  
• 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business. (Source: Social Media Examiner)
  
• 53% of social media marketers don't measure their success. (Source: Awareness, Inc.)
  
• 52% of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing. (Source: Adobe)
  
• Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. (State of Inbound Marketing)
  

If you are like many small businesses, you struggle to find time to effective engage your customers and grow your audience on social media. Starting with our Digial Snapshot, we will work with your team to build a roadmap and provide you the tools and training to outpace your competition.

At Icon Web Group, our goal is to help your business #GetFound by local customers looking for your products and services. With our #ToolsForSocial you can do just that and #WinLocal. Fill out a request today for your Digial Snapshot!

Every day, customers are talking about businesses online, whether it’s on Yelp, Urbanspoon, Tripadvisor, Google+, Facebook, personal blogs, or elsewhere.  Our latest video helps put everything in perspective (WATCH NOW).

According to Nielsen, 85% of consumers find local business info online, and 90% of customers say buying decisions are influenced by online reviews.  Local businesses need an affordable way to see what their customers are saying and manage their reputation.

Consistent online listings are crucial to search engine rank. It’s essential that your business listings are right, or you could be driving them to your competitors. We partnered with all of the four major listing data providers — Factual, Acxiom, Infogroup and Neustar (Localeze) — in order to offer a complete listing syndication solution. These four providers power the web, doling out information to over 300 other sites, like Urbanspoon, Yelp and many others. To correct a company listing with each of these providers individually can get quite expensive.

How important is listing accuracy for local search? In a word, critical!  Want to know all the places your business is listed on the web and what information is displayed? Our Digital Snapshot can help, and show how much of an impact it has on your local visibility.  

Let us demo an affordable, easy-to-use platform that will solve both of these problems.  Just call us, 501-444-2810, or fill out a request for a digital audit.

Tools to help you #GetFound and #WinLocal.

Unquestionably, Steve Jobs has impacted society, but very significantly in advertising and commerce. 

He had a vision of something different, and a very aggressive plan to bring his concept to reality.  Would we have Android without iPhone? Would old guys like me, with arthritic thumbs, be sending text messages or searching for dining and hotels on business trips? Buying stuff we do not really need on eBay from our phones? 

Maybe at some point, but who knows when that would have happened.  Mr. Jobs showed what could be possible and made it happen.  I might even say, that aside from Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin, there might not have been a more significant contributor to changing so many aspects of our world.

Brands are increasing testing the waters with SMS, but many miss the mark for communicating with customers. Here are some tips to avoid common pitfalls.

1. Think of mobile as an ongoing conversation with consumers and prospects. 
   
2. Look long term and use mobile to support and enhance other marketing programs. 
   
3. Use mobile to deliver the most relevant content and offers to each customer, where practical. Do not just blast the same boring offer to everyone on your list week after week.
   
4. Commit to building a mobile program, with the same overall goal of other marketing. 
   

Then lay out a strategy to build the database - think email incentives, circa 1998 - and begin to segment the audience, use a CRM perspective to develop dialogue.  Use content and offers that excite, something they may not be able to get from another source, something special.  Not necessarily deeper discounts or freebies, but early buying privileges, chance to vote for a new style or feature.  And monitor activity as closely as possible to constantly refine strategies and messages, timing and variety.

While it is true that many vendors have built their platforms to simple blast to the masses, a few visionary companies do preach targeting and some even have CRM capabilities built into their platform.

The problem is that many brands and organizations are settling for and choosing to use mobile partners that offer a substandard targeting and delivery method.

Data capture and CRM integration should be expected from any mobile partner that a brand chooses to work with, along with robust analytics and messaging capabilities. And in many cases, price isn't the issue, lack of understanding seems to be. We wouldn't let an email vendor slide by on those kinds of deals, certainly not direct mail. Demand the same from your mobile vendor. If they can't give it to you call someone who can.

Just say NO to bad mobile!

THE NEW MANTRA OF MOBILE – BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER!

As I leave the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) in Las Vegas, it is apparent that we who evangelize the opportunities of mobile marketing will not be proclaiming 2010 as ‘The Year of Mobile.’  No, that designation must certainly be given to the current calendar…2009 is, indeed, THE Year of Mobile.

This was outstandingly evident in the conversations within the gaming industry, as major commercial casino enterprises, regional properties and Native American gaming have all begun embracing mobile opportunities.  Promotional and equipment vendors were using SMS to interact with attendees.  Updates on events surrounding the convention were sent to us, as we moved about the venue.  Mobile was conspicuous in many forms.  And questions were not “Will mobile work as an effective tool to bring in players,” but more “How can we make it work for our casino?”

Other recent events offer proof that the world of mobile marketing has taken huge leaps forward, even in the midst of the economic meltdown.  Just last week, AdMob, the mobile banner network, was purchased by Google for $750 million.  As a result, Millennial Media was able to raise $16 million in new capital, which may have seemed a stretch just days earlier.

The adoption of mobile as a marketing tool has accelerated faster than any technology we have experienced…EVER!  The chant that ‘Mobile is the future, and always will be’ can now be laid to rest.  Today, there exists no wall, no barrier to brands and organizations delivering their message to their most valuable customer. 

Yet, the words of Patrick Moorhead, director of emerging media at Razorfish, commenting on the recent acquisition of AdMob by Google ring out, “Brands are the only people who aren’t playing effectively in the mobile space, and this is a wake-up call to clients who says mobile is not a real opportunity, because it is.  Google doesn’t get involved in anything it doesn’t think has scale.”

Thus, our roles as evangelizers must now be that of navigators in this newest of media.  It is now our charge to guide clients to properly utilize the tools we have developed.  We have the technology, we can rebuild marketing.  We can make it better, we can make it stronger, we can make it faster!  Plagiarized, yes (from the opening of The Six Million Dollar Man TV show, for those readers too young to know)…but that is our charge…that MUST be our new mantra! 

BETTER

The tools are now in the hands of brands to literally reach into the pockets of customers, wherever they are, whenever they see an opportunity!  It is not the shotgun approach of mass media, but the pinpoint accuracy of delivering relevant content to each unique customer, giving value in exchange for permission to that most private channel of communication.

The drive to keep mobile BETTER must be constantly on our minds, lest we succumb to the demons that reared their ugly heads in the form of pop-ups, spam, misleading redirects that burden the interactive space.  This most personal of all media will only grant access to those that supply relevant content.  The precious real estate of the mobile device will not be given to just any snake oil vendor.

The stakes are high, and the user controls the space.  One false move and the relationship with the brand will be over with a simple tapping of STOP or END.

STRONGER

It strikes me as well, that last week marked 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, just about the time I got my first ‘cellular’ phone…really, a brick with a handset and antenna attached.  No caller ID, no voice mail, certainly no SMS or web browsing capabilities.  And what of the other technologies of that time?  Well, an IBM Internet mail system powered interoffice communications, but no links to the world outside of the company.  Most people thought Prodigy Mall was the entire Internet.  And believe it or not, we didn’t even have debit cards yet!  Change has come.

Today, marketers have the opportunity to offer me merchandise and services, based on real knowledge of my purchase and lifestyle habits.  Not the perceived idea that as a 46 year old male, I must be interested in improving my performance in the bedroom.  Rather, real information, knowing that I purchased a jacket last month and may be interested in a great deal on matching slacks.  And they can give me the ease of one-click purchase, right from my mobile device, because my size is connected to my customer account.   Yes, stronger…MUCH STRONGER than any other channel of marketing.

FASTER

In talking with a client a few weeks back, the comment was made that the appeal of mobile was the immediacy and accuracy that it offered.  For them, email just wasn’t fast enough anymore.  And in a family setting, with shared email accounts, it wasn’t targeted enough.  They had hit a wall in their strategy. 

Yes, a marketer can put an offer in the hands of customers in just mere minutes.  It doesn’t require the intervention on an IT department or ad agency.  A few keystrokes and the casino’s most valuable players can be alerted to VIP seats at an event this weekend.  A shoe store can let a select group of customers know about a fabulous sale for members only…who will, of course, tell all of their friends about the great deals to be found.  Faster…so MUCH FASTER than ever before!

Faster, too, must be the speed with which brands enter the market.  While we, as consumers, tolerate and continue to sign up for, offers delivered to our inbox, the same will not be true of mobile.  This personal connection will only be offered to a few deserving brands.  If that relationship is not created now, it will certainly be more difficult in the very near future.  Marketers will have to go even further with more lucrative offers to gain attention and move a competing brand off the real estate of a device.  FASTER…as in no time like the present!

BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER!  That is what brands need from the navigators, those of us in the role of mobile technology vendors and consultants – better strategy, stronger partnerships, faster delivery.  That is how they need to communicate with their customers – better content targeting, stronger relationships, and faster response.  And we have the technology!

BETTER – STRONGER – FASTER!  Whether we are vendors in the mobile technology space, brands and organizations offering products and services, or marketing consultants and advertising agencies that support their efforts, this must be our mantra.

And while this is ‘THE Year of Mobile,’ it is not the end.  A few brave navigators must continue to sally forward into uncharted waters, developing new tools, exciting uses and opportunities.  What will the future hold for those taking up the charge?  What will we find at Lands’ End, as we push the envelope?  Ah, that is a topic for another day.