Mobile marketing has many different definitions associated with it. For different businesses, the definitions of mobile marketing vary widely. The simplest and most common definition is a method of promoting a business through mobile devices, such as cell phones. These tips can let you see how you can make mobile marketing work for you.

Use multiple marketing platforms when you are providing information about your events. For instance, send direct mail containing information on an event, like a 50% off sale. Follow up with an email and an MMS reminder before the beginning of the sale.

Recruit friends and family to help you test every ad you send out to ensure it is working properly. You could even pay someone to test it for you if you want an unbiased opinion.

Money investment should be considered necessary if you want to have a decent website that works on mobile devices. It can be hard to make a mobile site that is appealing and attractive. It can be helpful to hire a professional website designer with experience in mobile websites.

Especially when it comes to your mobile website, you must remember that less is more. Sites that are packed with keywords and say nothing of value are unfavorable. In the mobile marketing universe, brevity is highly prized.

Any type of mobile platform, especially a standalone one, should have a home base available in order to guarantee success. You need to focus on your home base and the people who visit it, whether they are repeat visitors or arriving for the first time. It is a terrible idea to base your business around your mobile platform solely.

Your ads will get the maximum attention if you do what you can to make them go viral. When you have a clever ad, your customers are more likely to forward it to their family and friends.

Create a mobile app for your business. This can encourage your prospects to monitor your app frequently so that they can find promos and specials. It will also help increase your brand recognition and overall business traffic. Ask a professional for help throughout the development process as app prices are variable.

If you incorporate links in your mobile messaging campaign, make the link back to the mobile site for older model cell phones and link to the desktop-based website for smart phone and tablets that are capable of handling it. If you have flash on your normal website, then you must only link to your mobile version.

Make sure all your content is as brief and concise as it can be, this will help your mobile marketing as a whole as people can understand what you have available. Make your message known in a manner that will be taken in by your customer quickly.

As you have read above, mobile marketing does not mean the same thing to everyone. Although it clearly includes marketing via cell phones and other mobile devices, it also encompasses an array of complementary practices to suit its particular users' needs. If you use the guidelines from this article to formulate your own mobile marketing strategy, you will be better prepared for business success.

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Professor Jon Beaupré of California State University Los Angeles Mobilizes Student Participation in Interactive Open Forums with Trumpia's Text-to-Screen Feature
Los Angeles, CA -- February 20, 2013

Cal State LA Professor, Jon Beaupré, utilizes Trumpia's text-to-screen feature to engage students, spark more interest with course topics, and encourage participation during live panel discussions.

Beaupré, a seasoned professional in broadcast journalism and long-time professor of CSULA, believed there was a shortage in educational tools that allowed for a more dynamic learning environment. He saw Trumpia as a solution that would not only appeal to students, but as one that would help open up classroom dialogue.

For his TV Film course, Intro to Broadcasting, Beaupré invites local TV, film, media, and broadcast professionals from the Los Angeles area to participate as a panel of speakers. His students are able to text open-ended interview questions with their mobile phones to a large projector screen and the panel, in turn, answers aloud. This encourages even the most timid students to partake in an interactive, social activity and voice their thoughts publicly.

Beaupré is able to track responses by using Trumpia's platform to export messages, and rewards credits to all participants. Beaupré's unconventional teaching methods are well-received by his students, and they embrace the technological style of the class. Beaupré says that he has never been a fan of traditional lecturing, and tools like text-to-screen have revived his love for teaching again.

"I understand that students are going to be texting in class regardless of classroom regulations, so I want to be able to turn that distraction into something productive," said Beaupré. "More importantly, I'm seeing that Trumpia's mobile features, like text-to-screen, are effective, affordable tools that urge students to join the classroom conversation."

"This is a terrific example of how versatile our multi-channel messaging solution really is," said Ken Rhie, CEO of Trumpia. "I commend Professor Beaupré for exploring the educational applications within classroom contexts."



About Professor Jon Beaupré

Jon Beaupré is a voice and performance consultant for radio and television performers, and teaches in the TV Film and Media Studies Department at Cal State L.A. Beaupré, a radio producer and reporter and frequent contributor to local and internationally-syndicated programming from his home in Los Angeles, also conducts workshops and seminars with the Associated Press Radio and Television Association. He has been a fixture on the convention circuit, teaching workshops at a wide range of specialty journalism and broadcast conventions and stations on both coasts of the United States.

About Trumpia

Trumpia is the leading web-based multi-channel marketing platform, committed to helping businesses grow and stay well-connected with their customer base. Trumpia integrates mobile text, email, social media, voice broadcast, and instant message to give businesses and organizations greater reach, greater responses, and greater results.

Trumpia also provides a White Label Reseller Program, Affiliate Program, and Developer API. Sales and support teams are available to serve customers seven days a week -- Monday through Friday, 6:00 am to 6:30 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm PST. For more information about Trumpia's All-In-One platform or API, visit http://www.trumpia.com, or call +1-888-707-3030.

"Mobile marketing" has a number of different definitions, depending on who you ask. Each business sees this type of marketing in different ways, and the implementation of their marketing plans is just as different. One of the easiest ways to explain mobile marketing is utilizing popular mobile devices to market your business to a wider number of users. The advice in the following article can show you how to successfully implement a mobile marketing strategy.

If you really are serious and want to have a great mobile marketing campaign, try to only send offers to the best. By doing this, you can ensure that your marketing communications are actually welcomed by the recipients.

Your mobile marketing call to action should be extremely simple and user-friendly. Always consider that a mobile user might be short on time, and their devices are not conducive to completing long, drawn-out forms. Simplify your opt-in process to make it easier for your customers.

Allowing feedback from your mobile app customers can help you see your progress, along with strengthening your bond with your customers. It might be that some recipients are hostile and some are curious, but the fact is that any reaction at all is useful, and therefore you should gather all the data you can.

Invite customers to participate in a picture-to-screen promotion. This allows customers' mobile phones to take pictures. Afterwards, they can send in their photos with a short code and have them displayed on the big screen. These pictures show up on any screen that accepts a digital signal, from TV sets to digital billboards.

Mobile marketing strategies are an effective way to broaden your customer base; however, in order for these strategies to be successful, they have to work on multiple mobile platforms. It has to be able to work on any popular mobile device, otherwise you will be losing customers because of technical issues.

Mobile websites should use search engine optimization techniques just as larger websites do. Streamline your mobile website, and use mobile specific SEO techniques. Get advice from Google and other mobile marketers.

A very beneficial thing to use when setting up a mobile marketing campaign is social media. By rewarding customers with a coupon, you can encourage them to talk about your site on Facebook or Twitter. They will in turn connect you with their contacts, which will get you more exposure.

Use various marketing items simultaneously to provide event information for a larger impact. As an example, snail mail an invitation to an event, like a sale or promotional launch. Email your customers a little while before the event, then send then an SMS on the day of the event.

Mobile marketing is one of the newest and most exciting ways to promote a business, even if the definition is sometimes unclear and never set in stone. It entails many different principles and can be adjusted to accommodate practically any objective that centers on a mobile device - this is the essence of mobile marketing. By using the information in this article, you can better understand how mobile marketing can work for your business.

If you are not that sure about what mobile marketing is, or what all would be categorized under it, then you are not alone. There are many people who either did not know that it was its own branch of marketing or they just ignored it. Read this article to obtain a good background about the subject.

Work on your message composition. You can only use 160 characters, so be concise, but clear. Short cuts or "text speak" is acceptable when text messaging. Your opt-out message can include that kind of message, too. You can save characters this way. You can get some good ideas from some translators.

Along with mobile marketing and using social media to promote your business, you need to have some official company guidelines, as far as conduct goes on those social media sites. The social media and mobile are the face of your business, as much as any website or advertisement, so have a policy to define how team members should act and engage your customers.

Remember when mobile marketing that not every mobile device is the same and thus the content you develop needs to cater to the general field and not anything overtly specific. For instance: Some people have slower connections than others, while others have smaller screen sizes. Be encompassing and not specific.

Do not use text abbreviations in your mobile marketing message. While it is acceptable for person to person communication, it looks unprofessional coming from a business. Also avoid using all caps in your message. Your consumers will feel like they are being yelled at. However, it is acceptable to use all caps in your call to action.

Creating a customized ringtone and offering it to your customers is a great way to make mobile marketing fun and unique. If you have a personalized voice message you've just released for a promotion, they'll know exactly who's calling when that personalized tone rings aloud. There are all types of programs you can find to assist with this.

Never neglect to cater to the people who aren't responding to you in a mobile marketing campaign if you want even more customers. You should also do more to bring back repeat customers, but also fix what's not working with your campaign so that you can entice more people to stop in.

When sending out content that uses mobile marketing, be sure to always use the customer's provided name. This is important because you want to make the customer feel as they are special and want to make it seem as thought the message is being sent directly to them only.

To wrap it up, you were not sure that mobile marketing had been classified as its own type of marketing but now you know not only what it is, but some of the ways that it can be implemented. Ideally, this article will be more than enough to enable you to pass this information on and help other people with the same questions.

Facebook can be an never-ending vacuum of time. How many hours do you spend mindlessly scrolling and stalking through your friends list?

If you’ve ever wondered how much you browse on the social network, a new service measures your daily, weekly and monthly use. TimeRabbit, created by Breakpoint Software Development, works as a stand-alone Windows application to monitor your Facebook usage.

The average user spends nearly seven hours on Facebook each month. While there are other browser plug-ins that track your online habits, TimeRabbit works on your desktop and is compatible with all major web browsers.

When you log in to Facebook, the application automatically starts its timer. The timekeeper stops five seconds after you navigate away from the site and can detect when you’re idle. Users can also view lifetime statistics to see just how many hours of productivity have been whittled away.

Kuba Udymowski-Grecki, owner at Breakpoint, says TimeRabbit may be able to help users fight their Facebook addictions.

How much time do you spend on social networks? Would you use TimeRabbit? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Some people use text message marketing like they use their cars. They give the system a little input, and it gets them where they want to go. They’re not interested in what goes on under the hood. 

Others like to know more about the tools they use. A basic understanding of how text messaging works may simply be interesting, or it could provide insight that helps you improve your SMS campaign to better turn potential into profit.

SMS BasicsSMS, or short message service, derives from text communication – essentially an instant message conversation between two mobile devices. The “Short” refers to the character limit imposed on text messaging – 160 characters in the Latin alphabet, 80 characters for more complex alphabets like Chinese Kanji.

On the AirwavesEven when you’re not using it, your cell phone is constantly in communication with nearby towers. They send each other small packets of data over a “command channel” to establish the phone’s location and confirm that everything is working correctly. When you place or receive a call, the command channel establishes the connection for a broader band that handles the conversation. 

Text messages are small enough that they ride in with those smaller data packets, passing through the core network then out to the tower the recipient phone last checked in with. In addition to the message itself, that data packet includes a variety of other information:

• Message length
• Recipient phone number
• Sender phone number
• Formatting data
• Data coding scheme
• Protocol identifier
• Time stamp

Repondez S’il Vous PlaitResponding to an SMS message works essentially the same way as sending one. The phone automatically codes a packet of data to go along with the phone’s next check-in via the command channel. That packet hits the data tower, then the core network, and then is pushed out through a tower to your phone. 

On your end, various tools and tracking programs analyze the responses to help you track the performance and response rates to each of your SMS broadcasts. Exactly how these work is also fascinating and useful, but a subject for another post! 

One of the newest and most powerful ways to create growth for your business is through social media marketing. There are a lot of ways you can use social media marketing to grow your business and get more visitors. Below, you will read a few great tips and tactics dealing directly with social media marketing and how you can use it.

Ask customers to fill out social networking habit surveys. If your customers are on social networks for more than one hour per day, you need to create a brand page. If your audience isn't really interested in social media sites, you may want to turn your attention to another form of marketing.

When utilizing advertisements to market on social media websites, you should take steps to make certain that the ads appear in locations on the website where they will get attention. Even the finest ad will have little effect if it winds up in a position that visitors tend to ignore. Make sure your ads are placed for maximum impact.

Set up Twitter and Facebook accounts under your business name. That will secure the name for you alone, so that no one else can use it for purposes that might harm your business. Even if you're not ready to begin marketing, your name will be secured.

Blog subscription should be easy for anyone who wants to follow you. Do not put the subscribe button in a spot where people may not notice it. This will make it easier for followers to leave their information, follow your posts and share your content with friends. To benefit those with slow connections, make it the first thing that loads on your website.

Monitor your statistics. You need to have stats that showcase the generated activity and the number of new weekly followers you have. Try matching up your different marketing strategies with the amount of new customers it brings in to help you come up with even better solutions in the future. There's no way you can know if your social media campaign is being effective if it is not tracked.

To avoid turning off your social media followers, never share content that's overly personal or political in nature. It is okay to show some personality, but you want to remain professional and positive. Stick with your niche but make sure it's in an accessible tone.

Take advantage of the power of social media websites to research new products or services or analyze reactions to old ones. A lot of your customers will be flattered that you asked for their opinion. Your followers will tell you what they want out of your products and how you can improve them, all at no cost to you.

As you now know, there are multiple ways of using social media to your advantage in business. You will be happy to see your business increase as you use social media to promote your business. Keep the info shared here in mind, and get started with your social media marketing plan today.

Synergy is when two efforts or effects combine to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In marketing, this happens most often when you use multiple channels to deliver the same message. Done right, it can create a feedback loop of publicity far greater than what two media modes would have accomplished individually.

Facebook (Social Media Marketing) and SMS Marketing are two modes born to create this kind of synergy, since they serve similar audiences and thrive with the same kind of short-form message. Keep a few things in mind to maximize the benefits for both your campaigns. 

Don’t rebroadcast the same message on both channels. This mistake will lead subscribers to believe they only need to subscribe to one channel. Instead, put unique content on both.

Do tease content between channels. For example, you can put a promotional video on your Facebook feed, and then send an SMS broadcast with a link. Be sure to go both directions, so you harvest subscribers from both bases. 

Don’t only broadcast advertising. This might be tempting since you’re putting out more effort on both fronts, but customers are more likely to unsubscribe from advertising-only channels. Make sure you include funny, informative and topical posts along with your shameless self-promotion. Otherwise, those who follow you on both channels with get bored twice as fast. 

Do hold cross-platform contests. Send an SMS coupon to people who participate in a Facebook contest, or hold a text message poll to decide on a detail of your Facebook page design. The more involvement you get between both forms, the better. 

Don’t stop at just the two modes. Include a link to your Facebook page and your SMS call to action on your website, in your print advertising, and on all of your takeaway collateral. The problem with focusing on Facebook and SMS is that the communities are aware of each other. Reaching out to more traditional media will bring in even more fresh faces. 

Do check your Facebook and web presence on mobile devices before you go live with anything. Linking from an SMS broadcast means people will look at your Facebook posts on a phone. They need to like what they see. 

Readers, do you have any experience here as a marketer or as a consumer? Tell us about it in the comments below. What’s the worst, or the best, thing you’ve seen along these lines?

Searching the web for advice having to do with mobile marketing has not proved to be fruitful up to this point. There might be plenty of content out there, but nothing you can make use of. Give this article a try and you will be happy that you did.

Let customers give you feedback. Some mobile marketers have outgoing only messaging, meaning that a customer cannot text them back without going through a lot of hassle. Let your customers talk back to you to improve the focus of your plan, and know if you may need to do something differently.

Maintain your program. There is nothing more disappointing for a customer than to sign up for a mobile marketing campaign and never hear anything from the company. Take the time to send customers a message at least once a week, even if it just something simple, like telling them you are glad to have them aboard.

Link to interesting websites. One of the fun things you can do to improve relations with your customers is to link them to sites you believe that they will enjoy. These can include blog posts, social networking sites, sweepstakes, or anything else you choose. Just make sure not to overdo it by spamming them.

Choose the right font size is important in mobile marketing. Font size around 16 pixels or higher is an excellent choice, but you can size it to fit your own desires. Using a size relative to the size of the window is great. Remember if your targets can't read it then it is useless.

You should use text messages rather than sending files that will take a long time to load. Pictures might load quickly on certain devices, but you should think about people who do not have access to a good network. If your message takes too long to load, people will not open it.

Enhance your text messages with other forms of communication. Make use of multi-channel marketing. One form communication isn't enough for today's audience. Each style of communication has its own set of pros and cons. This is why it is best to use more than one. Try sending direct mail, e-mail and a text right before something important happens.

If you are making use of mobile marketing - send an occasional reminder message! If you have some sort of event coming up, you should remind your customers a few days ahead of time, as well as the day of the event itself. Customers are busy people, and may forget what they had wanted to do without a reminder from you.

Do not aim for an elaborate marketing strategy if you use mobile marketing. People will want to know why you are sending them a message and which advantages they could have access to. Do not simply send a picture and ask people to go to a link to learn more.

In conclusion, you may have felt as though you have checked every resource for information on mobile marketing. But, the expert advice given here can only steer you in the right direction if used as directed. Start using this today and you will be glad you took the time to learn.

Despite predictions of the decline of SMS, business-to-consumer text messaging continues to enjoy double-digit growth.

SMS just had its 20th anniversary and along with that milestone came a number of articles predicting its imminent demise at the hands of newer forms of mobile messaging.

Given that up-and-coming consumers, those between 14 and 18, send an average of 60 text messages a day, it is unlikely that this granddaddy of personal communication is dying anytime soon.

In fact, as that generation starts to develop purchasing power, SMS messaging will be a critical way for brands to reach them.

What’s up
The growth of IP-based messaging applications such as WhatsApp and KakaoTalk has definitely put a dent into carrier SMS revenues.

These apps enable messages to be sent between individuals or groups or people over an IP channel, with the carriers losing out on revenue from the SMS messages that would otherwise have been sent.

The success of these messaging apps has led to their proliferation, with different regional favorites popping up around the world, alongside platform-specific services such as BlackBerry Messenger and iMessage.

Although different apps are not compatible with each other, as long as enough of your friends are using the same one, it works out.

But what if you are a brand, who wants to connect with your consumers using mobile messaging? Which app should you use to reach people?

The myriad of non-interoperable, IP-based messaging apps represents one big fragmentation headache. This is where one of SMS’ core strengths comes in: it works out-of-the-box on more than 6 billion mobile devices.

In the world of business-to-consumer messaging, SMS is alive and thriving.

Get the message?
In 2011 we saw our year-over-year SMS volumes increase 29 percent in Europe Middle East and Africa, a supposedly mature market. In Asia-Pacific, the volume grew by more than 120 percent.

Juniper Research has even predicted that the business-to-consumer SMS market will overtake person-to-person texting by 2016.

Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, and brands and enterprises who want to connect reliably with their customers over mobile are increasingly turning to SMS.

Ninety percent of text messages are read within three minutes of receipt.

The rate of SMS spam is relatively low due to stronger regulation than email.  We are seeing an increase in the use of two-way SMS messaging by companies who want to be able to engage in a direct and immediate dialogue with their customers, whether to provide support or craft special offers.

Juniper Research states that “SMS will continue to dominate the mobile messaging market for the next five years in terms of traffic: this type of messaging is well-established in the mobile market, with near ubiquity of availability on mobile handsets and high levels of adoption.”

OVERALL, MOBILE engagement between companies and their customers will continue to grow.

Our research has shown that while 66 percent of consumers would like to receive offers from brands they trust on their mobile devices, only 23 percent of consumers have actually received an offer from brands on their phones.

Companies are learning how to refine their marketing strategies to tap this opportunity, with mobile messaging forming an important part of the mix.

And while it is complemented by other technologies such as push notifications for smartphone apps, SMS will continue to be the messaging cornerstone as the only messaging channel with reach to virtually every mobile on the planet.

Like many 20-year-olds, business-to-consumer SMS has a bright future.