‘Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.’

- Sir Tim Berners-Lee

There really is no such thing as mobile marketing… at least not in the way the majority of marketers seem to think about it today.

That may seem like an odd statement given that analysts at Gartner predict global mobile ad spend will reach US$3.3 billion by the end of 2011, and will jump to a massive $20.6 billion by 2015, but bear with me, and I’ll do my best to explain.

A quick glance at the headlines across a selection of mobile-centric web sites reveals that a lot of pundits are treating mobile as the shiny new marketing channel of choice  for hip brands that want to engage with their tech-savvy customers. But in reality mobile is nothing of the sort. When we talk about mobile we’re not talking about mobile marketing — we’re talking about mobile internet access.

Mobile is not a marketing channel… it’s just a portable and convenient way for people (your customers and prospects) to access information and interact with their peers over the internet wherever they happen to be. It’s the mobility that’s new… the engagement channels are still mostly the same.

I was looking at a presentation on Slideshare recently called “Why Mobile Social Media Matters”. It was in many ways a well put together presentation, full of lots of interesting facts and potentially useful statistics. But its fundamental premise was inherently flawed. Mobile social media doesn’t exist! Posting to Facebook is posting to Facebook whether you do it from your mobile phone, your laptop, your state of the art gaming desktop or your playstation portable. Likewise twitter, consumer reviews, blog comments and any other social media platform you care to mention.

Treating mobile as a discrete marketing channel, as a lot of marketers and a worrying number of online “experts” seem to be doing, I think spectacularly misses the point. It undervalues the huge underlying potential that makes mobile so valuable to your business.

Mobile is probably the single biggest development in digital marketing since the inception of the internet, but the marketing channels you harness to engage with people through their mobile devices are still the same. The net IS STILL the net, regardless of the device you use to access it. Social media IS STILL social media no matter the device you use to interact with your peers; the world wide web IS STILL the world wide web, whether you’re accessing a mobile-optimised version of a site or the belt-and-braces full-browser version… I could go on, but you get the idea.

That’s great news for marketers… because we don’t have to re-learn all this stuff from scratch. The intricacies of digital strategy are still much the same; the lessons you’ve already learnt about marketing your business online still apply when your customers choose to access your marketing content through a mobile device.

From a marketers’ perspective what’s really changed with the widespread

adoption of mobile devices is this:

• the immediacy of having access to information and services wherever you happen to be

• the additional functionality afforded by modern mobile hardware (like GPS sensors, motion sensors and touch screens), which extend the scope of marketing possibility.

• the way these combine to alter your customers’ perception, expectation and ultimately the potential utility of your marketing content.

  Focus on the human side of the mobile equation

As with everything else in the digital marketing arena, it’s the human element of the mobile equation — how it’s influencing consumer behaviour and interaction — that makes it so powerful. Ultimately mobile internet access is convenient: it helps make people’s lives easier. Mobile devices are portable, they’re accessible, they’re always on. They give us access to what we need, when we need it. That naturally has profound implications for marketers.

One of the fundamental problems I see with the current in-vogue perception of mobile marketing as a “shiny new marketing channel” is the inherent assumption that we can somehow control the way people choose to access our content. We patently can’t; the customer controls that side of of things, all we can do is ensure our marketing content adapts seamlessly, however our customers choose to access it.

The quote from Sir Tim Berners Lee that I opened the article with sums things up pretty well: information should, wherever possible, be platform independent — and I think that applies to marketing content as much as it does to any other type of information. That presents challenges, certainly, but it maximises choice and flexibility for consumers, and ultimately increases the value and reach of every bit of marketing content you produce.

So do you need a mobile marketing strategy? The short answer is no! Do you need to integrating mobile elements into your existing digital marketing strategy? The answer is almost certainly yes.

How you do that has more about understanding your customers than it does about understanding the underlying technology. Mobile success isn’t about launching a new mobile-targeted ad campaign, commissioning a new smartphone app or hiring a mobile agency to craft exclusively mobile content for your brand. It’s much broader and deeper than that, and should permeate your entire digital strategy across all channels.

If you can really understand the human side of the mobile equation: how your customers integrate mobile devices into their lives, how that’s influencing their perceptions, expectations and behaviour, then you’re well on your way to reaping maximum reward from the burgeoning potential of mobile. How you make it happen… that’s just logistics.

This article was first published in the April 2012 edition of The Chief Marketing Officer’s Council’s monthly eZine Marketing Magnified.

At the heart of all good internet marketing strategies you’ll find effective keyword selection. Success hinges on choosing the right keywords for your online marketing campaign. If your focus is too general you’ll get a lot of traffic… but very low conversion rates, if your focus is too narrow you’ll get great conversion, but not enough volume to make it really pay. The trick is to find the optimum balance between the two. That’s where effective keyword research comes in.

Whether it’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), PPC (Pay Per Click / Google Adwords), social media, ad networks, affiliate marketing or whatever else you care to invest your time, energy and resources in, good keyword research is the foundation successful online marketing campaigns are built on.

So how do you find the right keywords for your niche? Here’s SEO specialist Aaron Wall of the widely acclaimed and respected SEO Book website explains keyword research basics:

Check out SEOBook.com for more great keyword research resources.

What are your top keyword research tips? Let us know in the comments.

Targeted Traffic Generation is the key to Affiliate success

Auto Mass Traffic -- top ranking affiliate traffic generator

The real trick to making money as an affiliate marketer is to direct large volumes of targeted web traffic to high converting affiliate offers in your niche. It’s no coincidence that some of the highest profile, best converting products on Clickbank are designed to help new and experienced affiliates to do just that.

Top of the heap, according to it’s gravity score (a Clickbank measure of product effectiveness) is Auto Mass Traffic.

Traffic System + Software = A Smarter Way to Work

If you’re struggling to see your affiliate commissions rise above a few dollars, the techniques outlined in the Auto Mass Traffic members area are designed to help. And here’s the best bit:

• You don’t need Google
• You don’t need a blog
• You don’t need an e-mail list
• You don’t even need a website

All you need is a tiny bit of capital and the willingness to invest a little time implementing the techniques revealed in the programme.

Auto Mass Traffic top of the clickbank charts

Whether you’re sending traffic to affiliate offers or to your own landing pages, the system is based on identifying “buyer keywords” and showing you how to leverage the power of online ad networks outside the realm of the search-engine gatekeepers at Google, Bing and Yahoo, and without needing to invest lots of time in content creation, blogging, social media and SEO.

Imagine being able to put your traffic generation on autopilot. What would you do with all that extra time?

• Create new products to promote and grow your online business
• Spend more time with your family and friends
• Climb out of the trenches and start planning your business strategically for better results

Like many of these products the sales pages for Auto Mass Traffic are garnished with the usual assortment of hype and over-the-top marketing rhetoric, but the underlying system is based on sound principles and certainly has potential. The vendor also offers an iron-clad 60 day no-questions-asked money-back warranty, so you really can’t loose. Check it out for yourself, and watch your affiliate income soar.

While people have always talked about the companies they do business with, today instead of telling five friends in a bar about that bad customer service experience, or crappy product, they’re online telling 50, 500, 5000….

You can’t afford to ignore that. Social media is here to stay. Some of your customers are undoubtedly out there looking to engage with you through social media today.

The next generation of consumers won’t just expect to engage with you through online social channels, they’ll demand it. Will you be ready?

Image via Wikipedia

As an independent professional service provider looking to succeed online you’re going to encounter one fundamental problem. You – your time, your skills, your personality, your charisma – are not scaleable.

No matter how well you market yourself, and how much business you bring in, you can only do so much of that work yourself. Once you’re fully booked, you’re fully booked – you can’t take on more work until you stop doing something else.

How to scale your online business

There is one absolutely vital thing that you do own, however, which is valuable and truly scaleable: that’s your knowledge. By packaging your expertise effectively, and turning it into a product rather than a professional service, you do two things:

1. You make access to your expertise more affordable to a much wider audience
2. After the initial investment of creating your knowledge product you’re free to sell it to as many people as you can without much additional demand on your time and resources.

But how do you go about developing a product based on your knowledge and expertise?

Dave Navarro, AKA “The Launch Coach”, has built a successful online business showing people just like you how to do exactly that!

I’ve been working through Dave’s excellent free online marketing workbooks in the LaunchCoach Library. The workbooks take you step-by-step through:

• 7 steps you can take to playing a much bigger online game
• 7 steps to networking yourself to A-Listers
• 7 simple income streams that you can actually create
• How to start making real money with your product in just 3 days

The thing I like most about Dave’s style is that he avoids the usual marketing hype of your typical online “gurus”, and gets straight to the meaty stuff that’s really valuable to people like you and me who are looking to turn our expertise into a scaleable online business.

I’m not a “guru.”  I’m just a guy who’s pretty darned
good at teaching people how to do things in a simple
step-by-step, you-can-do-this manner.

Dave Navarro – The Launch Coach

The free stuff that Dave offers is amazing – but if you’re looking to fast-track your online product creation and promotion skills, you should check out his latest offering

Two downloadable Workshops — 10 great training modules — that show you how he built his own online business, and that could be just the catalyst you need to kick start your online business.

I’m certainly going to check it out. You’ll find all the details on Creating Products that Sell & Building a Responsive List on Dave’s site.

Toyota teamed with comedy director Jody Hill to create this creative series of online videos featuring a couple of self-absorbed parents and their young family with the only vehicle that can match their awesomeness, the Toyota Sienna.

The ads seems to be resonating with parents and are generating a lot of buzz through this clever hip hop parody. Check out the full series of Swagger Wagon videos here… and watch for this one cropping up in 2010 online marketing awards later this year.

Check out this video of Damian in action, and be sure to roll by the Simply Zesty blog for lots of social media insight from Ireland’s leading social media agency.

But as Chris Pirillo points out at LeWeb 2009, the tools are NOT the community – the community is the people using the tools, the connections between them.

My favourite quote from Chris’s presentation:

If you believe a community is a tool, then you yourself are a tool.

Communities aren’t about tools and they’re not about technology – communities are about people, and understanding people is far more valuable than understanding the underlying platforms and technology when it comes to being a part of and harnessing the potential of online communities.

We’re sourcing case studies from various places, and will feature a mixture of different online campaigns in the book, from award-winners to more obscure but successful campaigns from all sorts of businesses spanning a variety of industries.

We’re a bit short of time to truly crowdsource all the case studies for this edition – but we are looking for your nominations to help us identify truly exceptional examples of online marketing that we may miss through other channels.

You can use this form to submit your favourite campaign for consideration. We’ll let you know if it goes on to be featured in the book.

Thanks a million for your input.

Understanding Digital: CREATIVE will take place at the National College of Ireland in the city centre from 4-7 pm, followed by a drinks reception and  an opportunity for informal networking.  We’re hosting the event in conjunction with the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) as part of Design Week 2009.

For just €50 (€10 for current ICAD members) you get to share the expertise and insight of four leading digital creative minds.

Places are limited, and at that price they’re going fast so register now to secure yours.

The speakers

As well as Damian and myself… who’ll be hosting he event… our panel of speakers will explore how digital media can expand the scope of creative marketing online, facilitate interaction and ultimately improve the bottom line.

We’ll hear from Dave Birss, Creative Digital Director at Ogilvy London; Matt Butterworth, Managing Director of Folk Creative; Nick Suckley, Managing Partner of Agenda 21 Digital and Robin Grant, founder of We are Social.

It’s a line-up that Damian and I are very excited about. It promises to be a great event, and the drinks reception afterwards, in association with Design Week sponsor Bombay Sapphire will be a great opportunity to meet and chat with us, with the speakers and a great mix of people from inside and outside the digital media sector.

We hope you can make it, and look forward to welcoming you on the 05 November.