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From Fastcasual.com

More than half of U.S. adults use their mobile phones to find information on local restaurants, according to Pew Research.

“Mobile is a highly personal channel offering direct, real-time, location-targeted promotional abilities, so that restaurants can drive new customers, foot traffic and revenues when needed,” said Sarah Hodkinson of Where.com, a company that specializes in location-based media.

While many restaurant operators have successfully leveraged mobile-marketing platforms, those who aren’t are missing out on a lot of potential revenue.

“If you don’t do it at all, you are leaving money on the table and inviting your competitors to begin building a stronger, two-way relationship with your most loyal customers,” said Lori Walderich, chief creative officer of IdeaStudio.

For those considering the mobile-marketing investment, questions such as ‘How do we start?’ and ‘How do we help customers find us?’ should be top of mind.  

Walderich and Hodkinson agree that mobile marketing continues to emerge as a restaurant-industry technology trend. Here, they offer eight insights into getting the most out of a mobile-marketing platform.

1. Create a mobile-optimized website. As opposed to simply shrinking a business’ website to fit a phone screen, a mobile-optimized site is a condensed, highly-functional website built especially for the phone. It doesn’t replace a restaurant’s main website, but it is an easy way for users and new customers to quickly find and connect with a local eatery. Additionally, companies such as Where.com can help operators create a free mobile page for their brand.

2. Be easy to find and locate. Add a click-to-call phone number and map to your mobile page, so potential customers can easily contact and find you.

3. Be social. Include links to your Facebook and Twitter pages to expand your social following through mobile. About 134.6 million people used social networks across any technology platform each month, and in 2011, that number will rise by a little more than 3 percent, acccording to eMarketer.

Brands need to take this shift into account as consumers get into the habit of checking Facebook on the run and they tend to ignore brands that don’t respect direct interaction, said Carla Paschke, director of Mobile Innovation at Engauge.

“Facebook is a tool for conversations. Ad campaigns are conversations, too,” she said. “This is a nice coincidence and a useful one to any brand that knows how to effectively integrate the sometimes chaotic feedback that comes streaming in from this new class of smartphone-liberated consumers, jabbing at their phones in stores, schools, trains and homes.” 

4. Get them to opt in. In order for mobile marketing to work, a restaurant concept must actively encourage customers to opt-in, Walderich said.

“No matter how aggressive the mobile marketing strategy is, it won’t be worth anything if there isn’t a big database of recipients,” she said. “Restaurants should always reward customers for opting in.” 

5. Give incentives. Mobile offers and coupons are redeemed about 25 percent more than Internet coupons and up to 10 times more than printed coupons, Walderich said.

“Free food offers always work,” she said. 

6. Add pictures to your mobile site. Let potential customers checkout your store or most popular dishes, Hodkinson said. Customers tend to eat with their eyes, so images of your menu items could further entice their patronage. 

7. Target the right consumers at the right time. “Good mobile marketing should be tailored to the medium, targeted to the audience you’d like to reach and should yield a return on investment,” Hodkinson said.

Walderich further advises taking advantage of how mobile marketing allows operators to control when promotions are distributed and to whom. 

8. Provide instant gratification. Walderich encourages her clients to offer deals that lead to immediate responses. “Unlike other mediums, a restaurant can react to unusual slow times by pushing out a free offer quickly,” Walderich said. For example:

- Daily lunch specials pushed out during late morning.
- And last-minute offers targeted at a specific slow time of the day.

From Bnet.com

• Determine what phones your customers have. “The first thing small business owners need to do is to find out what phones their customers have,” says Martin. “If a customer doesn’t have a smart phone than they need a specific approach, and if they have smart phones, then they need a different approach. In the US, roughly one out of three phones are smart phones, but by the end of this year it will be a 50-50 split.

• Find out how they use their phones. “Then they need to find out what customers do with their phones. They should put up a sign their business, or just ask people to find out if they’re using their phones to text, take photos, or scan barcodes. Then they can adapt their strategy to that.”

• Capture mobile phone numbers. “They should capture the mobile phone numbers of their customers. In any marketing materials, they should say ‘please give us your phone number so that we can send you text messages.’ Every phone can receive text but only a smart phone can run an app.” When customers give you their mobile phone numbers, says Martin, they are essentially agreeing to an intrusion.  You need to be respectful of that by making it clear that your messages will have value for them and that they are in the driver’s seat. “They should have to opt in twice, ” says Martin.  After your initial message, you might send a second one saying “we will send a maximum of two messages a week and one of them will be a special deal or an advanced notice of sales.”  Your customers should be able to opt out with a single touch.

• Analyze your results. “Watch carefully when people opt in and opt out to see if you are providing value,” says Martin. “Only the best customers will opt in, so you will end up with a subset, but it’s the best subset you can get. As a result, you have to provide high value to that group. It’s the ultimate in one-to-one marketing. Get feedback, because you can instantly measure what is working and what is not.”

• Include a call to action. “Mobile is not a passive marketing tool,” says Martin. “It’s not like an ad in the newspaper.” He suggests including video, which typically gets 15 to 25% higher click rates than text.  “It could be as simple as a 15- 20 second video of some new product that came in,” he suggests.  You might also consider creating two- dimensional QR (quick response) barcodes that consumers can scan with their phones, and that take them directly to a website. QR codes first became popular in Asia, but are becoming more and more ubiquitous in the US.  Martin, for example, has a QR code on his book.

• Create a mobile version of your website. Most businesses already have websites, but they’re rarely mobile-friendly.  ”Whoever has built or maintained their website can create a mobile version of it,” says Martin. “A mobile site has significantly less on it, and if they use WordPress, there’s a very easy way they can have it converted automatically.

• Remember that mobile is about retaining, not acquiring.   “This is not about acquiring new customers,” says Martin.  “Use mobile to treat your better customers really, really well. A lot of businesses make the mistake of doing it the other way around. You need to think of it as a way to interactively connect with your best customers. “

 

Mobile ad network Greystripe surveyed over 239 moms and 66% stated that smartphones play a role in their shopping habits. 

Around 45% said they use their phones to locate the nearest store. The next most common use of smartphones was to compare prices. Only 15% of the women surveyed said they actually made purchases using their phones. There have been some conflicitingnumbers from some other mom related shopping surveys. Nonetheless, smartphones has become a key component for moms on the go.

Originally Posted on Mashable.com Written by by Todd Wasserman

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor has said that a lot of the company’s focus this year will be on mobile. When Facebook declares an intention in any direction, people take notice, but for marketers, this may mean that 2011 is the “year of mobile,” a designation that has been tossed around every year since 2006 or so.

It’s unthinkable for a marketer to ignore Facebook, but that said, there are a lot of mysteries and frustrations around the platform. Display ads don’t perform very well there, for instance, and a lot of consumer data is kept under wraps. Facebook’s mobile operations are even harder to get a handle on. The company’s mobile app, for instance, doesn’t at the moment provide any opportunities for advertisers through traditional venues, such as display ads.

But things are changing. Eyeing Groupon, Facebook recently expanded its Facebook Deals platform to include local deals in at least six cities. Facebook Placeshasn’t been used much by marketers yet, but that could also change. Here are three big potential growth areas for Facebook’s mobile operations this year and some ways that marketers have already capitalized on them.

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1. Mobile Friendcasting

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Last November, Constellation Wines worked with mobile marketing firm Augme Technologies for a programthat offered consumers a mobile site accessible via a 2D barcode or a text message. The site, which offered a party-planning calculator and suggested food and wine pairings, among other features, was designed for consumers who were out at liquor stores looking for a wine to bring home or to a holiday party.

One viral aspect of the effort was a feature that let those users share their purchasing decisions with their Facebookfriends. David Apple, the CEO of Augme, predicts that such sharing will become easier this year as Facebook attempts to get retailers to register for Facebook Places. Doing so, Apple says, is going to “allow general grocers like Safeway and Kroger to create on-the-fly inventory deals.”

That would also mean that the deals will be broadcasted across Facebook, opening up a new form of advertising: Mobile to Facebook. Another marketer that sees potential in mobile-to-Facebook is ABC, which is using MMS video messages, distributed every Wednesday, to publicize its new show Happy Endings. Users who get the messages also automatically post them to their Facebook wall. The network is hoping the Wednesday distribution will encourage tune-ins. In this case, the salient aspect about texting is not the ability to reach a consumer in a given location, but the fact that consumers are generally more responsive in real-time to texts than emails.

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2. Deals

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The combination of location-awareness and time-sensitive deals opens up a whole new area of mobile marketing for Facebook. Facebook got into the market when it introduced Deals as part of its Places service last November, and expanded it in Marchwith Groupon-like deals specific to each city. (The pilot launch is in Atlanta, Dallas, San Diego, San Francisco and Austin, Texas.)

The expansion of Deals, in theory at least, gives retailers more incentive to register with Places. Imagine the following scenario, for instance: A consumer with 150 Facebook friends cashes in on a deal at Kroger, which automatically sends out a status update on her account describing the deal. Assuming 10 friends are shopping nearby that day and checking the Facebook app on their mobile phones, that’s potentially 10 more customers than Kroger might have had if not for the Facebook-broadcasted deal.

Jamie Tedford, CEO of Brand Networks, predicts that a lot of brands will begin exploiting the possibilities of Places in earnest this year. “We will see more marketers building games and promotions on top of the Facebook Places platform delivering ‘check in to win’ and loyalty points as reward for checking in and broadcasting their location,” he says, noting that his firm did something along those linesrecently with JetBlue.

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3. Phoneless Checkins

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Since Facebook is so pervasive, it’s easy to see a day where consumers can access the social network by means other than a computer or mobile phone. For instance, under a program at the Coca-Cola Amusement Park in Israel last summer, visitors were able to update their Facebook statuses via their RFID-enabled bracelets. (See video below.) According to All Facebook, the program netted more than 35,000 updates each day of the program even though the village only hosts 650 teens at a time. Similarly, Vail Resorts last fall launched a platform where skiers could post the amount of vertical feet they traveled on their Facebook profiles. In another program, running shoe brand Asics let friends and family members send individualized messages to runners in the New York Marathon via Facebook. When a runner’s tag was recognized by an RFID reader, the message ran on a video screen.

Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal, says phoneless checkins make sense at waterparks or skiing resorts where people might decide to leave their phones behind, but also at an event where connectivity might be a problem. Though he thinks it will take a while for the technology to go mainstream, he says that it opens up a lot of possibilities. “As marketers learn about it, they’re going to find new and interesting ways to use it,” he says of RFID Facebook checkins.

Here are some useful tips from American Forum.

1. Choose a simple keyword that is easy to text.
   Most of your customers will join your mobile program by sending a text message to a short code number (5 or 6 digits) with a keyword to identify your program. Your customer may have limited time to read your marketing material and have to remember both a short dial number and the keyword to text, so keep it short and make sure it’s easy to spell!
2. Decide what relationship you want to develop with your customer.
   You are not trying to build a list of customer mobile numbers so you can SPAM them with a message. Consider collecting a customer’s name in the join process so that you can personalize all future messages you send. Personalizing your text broadcasts can increase your response rates, but be careful not to overstep relationship boundaries too quickly, as this must feel genuine to your customer. 
3. Make an irresistible offer to join your campaign.
   In a world where we are bombarded with so many different advertising messages every day, we want to know what’s in it for us. You need to keep this in mind with your marketing. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask what they would really want from you and your business, and build that into the marketing material your user will read or hear. Focus on your call to action that will have customers rushing to text your keyword. Does is stand out? Is it exciting and a no-brainer to join? 
4. Integrate your mobile program into ALL your marketing activity. 
   Include the keyword commands to join your mobile opt-in lists in everything you do. This includes your website, e-mail footer, print advertising, retail storefront, your receipts or invoices, products, and even on your mobile phone voice message. If your budget allows, try different keywords for different advertising mediums so you know which is the most successful.
5. Make sure your customers can ALWAYS opt out. 
   Even if a customer willingly joins your mobile marketing program, there will come a time when some of these people just aren’t interested in your business or messages any more. It’s vital that the customer can leave your mobile program even more easily than they joined. If you choose the right supplier, they will provide this functionality as part of their core service. Just make sure you test it before your service goes live.

Sensing the growth in geolocation marketing through cell phones, and the succes of start ups like Foursquare, Facebook has made a marketing deal with McDonald’s. McDonalds will create a campaign to reward customers for “checking in” at locations using Facebook’s new geolocation functionality.

The two companies are working together to build an app that will let users check in at a restaurant and receive rewards such as coupons for featured products a few days later.  This is a marketing trend that small or large companies could utilize to increase share and drive consumers to their products.

From Business-opportunities.biz

Marketers have long been giddy about the prospect of sending ads to consumers’ cell phones, but consumers haven’t always been too keen on the idea, reports Inc.com.

That, however, is starting to change. Though cell-phone owners still seem resistant to the idea of advertisers randomly pinging their phones, a recent survey by HipCricket, a mobile advertising firm, found that 37 percent of consumers would be interested in participating in a mobile customer-loyalty program.

In fact, as coupon usage has experienced an upswing during the recession, more and more shoppers have signed up to receive special offers through third-party cell-phone applications and text-message programs.

New free mobile applications, such as Yowza, MobiQpons, and Cellfire, allow consumers to check for nearby businesses offering special deals. Phones that have built-in GPS capabilities, such as the iPhone and T-Mobile G1, can usually pinpoint a customer’s location down to the city block.

In many cases, a customer simply shows his or her cell phone at the register, where the cashier scans a bar code on the phone’s screen. Although most of these applications have been around only for a few months, millions of people have downloaded the software to their phones.

Because mobile coupons target customers who are near a store’s location, the redemption rates can exceed those of paper coupons.