Take Advantage of the Growth in Mobile this Year with MobileCoupons.com

We are really excited at Boot Camp Digital to be working with a client that has a product that we really think can make a market impact this year.  Adage recently posted an article on 5 Mobile Trends for next year – and mobile coupons and commerce was on the list.

MobileCoupons.com is a free service that allows businesses to create coupons that consumers can find and redeem through web, print, mobile web, text message or iphone and android apps.

Why Mobile Coupons?

Mobile coupons are projected to grow 10x next year and to continue triple digit growth in 2011 and 2012.  The Yankee Group forecasts nearly $2.37 billion in North American mobile coupon transactions is 2013.

For small businesses, getting in the mobile game can be expensive and time consuming.  SMS campaigns can be costly and require users to opt-in.  Iphone apps are expensive to develop and with over 100,000 apps in the app store, many apps don’t pick up significant traction.  MobileCoupons.com gives businesses a free way to get into the mobile game and give consumers what they want – coupons with them when they need them.

How it Works

MobileCoupons.com makes it easy for businesses to start offering mobile deals to their consumers.  It is completely free to use (they don’t even ask for your billing info) and takes < 5 minutes to create a coupon.   Simply create an account at MobileCoupons.com merchant page.  The easy to use coupon creator allows you to input all of your coupon details, and even create a unique barcode or coupon code.

Coupons can be changed or modified at any time and businesses can also track the views and clips of their coupons.  For example, if a coupon was created for $1.00 off and had only a few clips, you could increase the coupon amount to $1.50 on the spot.  Conversely, if the coupon had too many clips the amount could be reduced to $0.50.

Customers can find coupons online, through the mobile web or through iphone and android apps and redeem coupons simply by showing their phone.  Because mobile coupons are always with you they have up to 10 times the redemption rates of paper coupons.  Mobile coupons also reach younger and more affluent consumers than traditional coupons.

Power Up Your Marketing Budget

With the tight economy many businesses are looking for ways to get more out of their marketing budgets.  MobileCoupons.com offers higher ROI than traditional coupons since there is no cost to create or distribute the coupons.  Mobile Coupons also provides a green solution for coupons since they aren’t printed.

Businesses are already using MobileCoupons.com including brands like Arby’s, RotoRooter and Little Caesar.  Businesses like using MobileCoupons.com because they can run tests in the high growth mobile space without blowing their marketing budgets.

We’ve worked with a few small businesses to get them set up on MobileCoupons.com and the feedback has been great.  Between the SEO benefits, the social spread and the opportunity to reach new customers, businesses using MobileCoupons.com have been thrilled.

Get Mobile

With all of the growth projected in mobile, 2010 is the year to get your business in the mobile marketing game.  Dedicate a portion of your marketing time and budget to experiment with mobile marketing.  Many small businesses are already seeing results from mobile marketing – what are you waiting for?

Internet Marketing – Get the Most with a Solid Strategy

Over the last 10 years almost every business has either built some form of a web presence – a website, social media profile, online display ad campaign – or their customers have built one for them – online review sites, comments on twitter, review sites, online directory submissions, social media comments, blog reviews, etc.

The problem is that many companies don’t approach their internet presence with a solid strategy.  They may start with building a website and then invest in a variety of other areas – pay-per-click ads, social media, search engine optimization, adding e-commerce, creating a facebook page, display based adds, etc.  This results in a variety of internet marketing activities but no solid strategy.

Often times this results in a suboptimal investment strategy and suboptimal results.

To correct this there are a number of steps that can be taken:

1) Invest in Analytics

This is typically an investment of time vs. dollars (unless you want to outsource it).  Learn how well your site is currently working, where your traffic comes from and where you might have problems.  Understand if people are taking your “call to action” or where people are abandoning your cart.  Spend some time understanding how well different traffic sources are working for you.

2) Evaluate your Call to Action

Your site (and every single page on your site) should include a clear call to action.  This means that you have a specific action that you are driving a web visitor to take.  Do all of the pages on your site clearly encourage visit

ors to take some sort of action?  Evaluate your site and the action that you are encouraging visitors to take.  Prior to optimizing for search or using social media to get traffic you want to be sure that your website it effectively converting visitors.

3) Landing Page Optimization

What are the most important pages on your site (if you have an analytics program you should be able to measure this).  How effective are these pages in driving action?  Are they effective?  Spend some time optimizing the most important pages on your site and leverage them to drive your users to take action.  You can get complex and do A/B split testing or simply look to implement best practices.

Either way, be sure that your landing pages are optimized so that when you do get traffic you are getting the most from it.

4) Evaluate Quality of Traffic Sources

Look at your current traffic sources and evaluate which ones are providing you with the best “quality”.  Depending on your site there are a number of ways that you may evaluate this – time on site, bounce rates, page views, sales, clicks, email signup, etc.  The key here is to know how effective your different traffic sources are.  This will help you prioritize your marketing spending.  For example, if you notice that people who get to your site from search are more likely to buy than people who get to your site from twitter, you may choose to adjust your investment.

5) Strategically Invest

After assessing all of the above you will be in a good position to make strategic investments.  Rather than investing randomly in various areas you’ll know that your site is working for you and how valuable different traffic sources are.  This will allow you to invest strategically on the areas that really matter.