Lakeside Marketing Solutions, LLC

If you are a local business the daily deals, such as Groupon, are really not a great marketing strategy. Unless the customers you bring in turn into repeat business, it is really a very costly loan. And for companies like  Groupon it is not a great long term business model at all.

From a guest post by Rocky Agrawal on Tech Crunch:

“Imagine you’re a small business owner. You have to choose between two propositions:

1. You can pay $62,500 for marketing. You’ll get a whole lot of customers coming through your door. No guarantees if they will ever come back, but they’ll come once.
2. I’ll pay you $21,000. You get $7,000 in about 5 days, another $7,000 in 30 days and the remainder in 60 days. In exchange, you’ll give my customers cheap products for the next year.

There’s no way a business will sign up for #1. Most merchants would laugh you out of the store if you asked for $60,000.

Except they are. In droves.

Although they sound completely different, #1 and #2 are really the same—it’s the Groupon business model.”

A much better choice would be to set up your own coupon program. Using Facebook and Mobile (SMS texting), you can offer your own coupons and collect the information on the people using them. This gives you a way to follow up and build long term customers.

Read the full article – Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse

This is an example of a fairly basic 30 second commercial or infomercial. Your marketing videos can be even simpler like a slideshow of still images or powerpoint slides, with or without voice over.  Alternatively you can go with very high quality videos putting yourself and your business on camera. We can create the videos for you (or with you), or we can take your marketing to the next level using videos you already have or do yourself. Call us to discuss the possibilities and what might work best for you.

In the first quarter of 2011, QR code (2D bar code, mobile bar code) scanning increased by over 4000%, according to a Mobio Identity Systems study.

New iPhones and android based smartphones are being sold with built in QR code readers (and older smartphones can download the readers for free), helping build the awareness. Add that to the fact that more and more known brands (such as Calvin Klein) are using them in TV, print and web advertising and use has built up dramatically.

For more information read this interesting article from Mobile Marketer

Is your business taking advantage of the mobile market? In 2010, 297 smartphones were sold worldwide.  There were 1.6 billion total mobile phones. Most people do not leave home without their phones, so there is no questions that businesses today should be using mobile as part of their overall marketing strategy. But ‘mobile’ in not just one thing.

Text messaging can be used to stay in touch with your customers, send special deals and notices, appointment reminders, paging (“your table is ready”) and be also used as a loyalty program (no more punch cards!).   A mobile website is a trimmed down version of your main website – made smaller to be easy to read on smart phones and also to give the most important information right up front.

And now, of course, there are apps. But does your business need a mobile app, or does a mobile website make more sense? While I am still recommending mobile websites, it can depend on several factors. Read this interesting article from Mashable for some insight into this question:  How to Decide Whether Your Business Needs an App

I’ve just added a new page to this site.  These are the tools I recommend for doing business. Mostly online tools plus a few extras.

This makes it easy for you to buy your website domain names, get website hosting, get an email marketing service and more.

Go to the Online Marketing Business Tools page to learn more.

Mobile Fitness Personal Training is sponsoring a benefit raffle.   Buy a $10 Raffle ticket at the Mobile Fitness Studio located on 49 Dartmouth St, Portland, ME for a chance to win $600 in personal training.  All proceeds go to WinterKids, St. Mary’s Food Pantry, Wayside Soup Kitchen, and the Biodiversity Research Institute. Please write checks to the charity you choose to support.

Facebook introduced a new feature last Wednesday. Moving into location based mobile search and marketing, Facebook had previously started Facebook Places. This new feature will allow merchants to offer coupons and special deals through the Facebook  mobile application, intensifying competition in the market for mobile searches and advertising.

Read more….

Noah Elkin, senior analyst at eMarketer, New York, revealed seven key trends that mobile marketers need to know during a keynote address at the digiday: Mobile conference.

No. 1 Mobile usage has become pervasive.

No. 2 Mobile devices and platforms have experienced dramatic evolution.

No. 3 The device market is shifting in favor of smartphones, and the U.S., is driving a lot of the demand.

No. 4 Increased ownership of smart devices is driving mobile Internet growth.

No. 5 Communication modes are undergoing a significant shift.

No. 6 The base of mobile content users will continue to see strong growth.

No. 7 Tablets are changing the face of mobility and computing.

Read the full article in the Mobile Marketer newsletter….

A new Nielson report gives  insight as to  how people use apps on their phones. Games, weather and navigation/maps topped the list. The report starts with a message that is crucial for businesses to understand – “most Americans can’t imagine leaving home without their mobile phones” and points out that 25% own smartphones.

The report is a study on which mobile apps people use the most, how they find them, and how this relates to mobile advertising.

Read the NY Times article here….

A recent study by Validas research shows that mobile owners are accessing the web at an increasing rate. Validas expects data penetration on mobile devices will reach 80% by the end of 2010. Wireless data consumption figures from over 74,000 consumers were gathered from their wireless bills. There was an increase in the number of mobile devise owners using data in some form from 35% to 50%, between the end of 2009 and mid 2010.

According to Ed Finegold, executive VP of analytics for Validas, this is a lifestyle shift, where using a mobile device to go online is becoming typical – maybe even preferred. This makes it very clear that if you are trying to reach your customers online, you really need to cater to mobile devices. And to make sure what you offer is easily read and accessed across a range of devices from iPhones, Droids and Evos on the high end, through BlackBerry devices in the middle, and down to the feature phones.

Contrary to what you might think, most data consumption still occurs on a pay-per-use basis. Most people are still access the web using feature phones. Smartphones like iPhones or Droids are only about 23% of the market right now.

Even within the smartphone market, not all browsers give the same experience. Mr. Finegold is himself a Blackberry user and he pointed out that if a web site is not optimized for the slower Blackberry, it is difficult to use with this type of phone. Blackberry is still the market share leader in smartphones. This is just one example of why it is so important to optimize your internet content to work well across multiple mobile platforms.