Forward thinking companies make sure that they’re in their customers’ pockets – by this I mean that they should be easy to find, have a good reputation and be clear and concise in their information.
Think back (if you are old enough to) to the 1980’s – in this decade it wouldn’t be unusual to:
- Be woken up by digital clock radio
- Use an A to Z to plan a travel route
- Have a penpal who lived a long way away but you wanted to stay in touch with
- Play games on a computer, be it a green screen Amstrad (which took 15 minutes to download a cassette game) or even that amazing graphic technology that was Atari tennis
- Listen to music on a giant ghettoblaster – music which had been taped on a Sunday evening from radio one’s top 40 – which of course was the start of illegal, downloads
- Have a camera that you only really used on special occasions such as holidays – then when you get back from holiday you sent your film off in the little photo envelope to Kodak, only to get back 30 photos, 20 of which were blurred or had fingers over the image
- Go down the pub and rant or rave about a company – the start of reviews and testimonials – and people think this concept is new?
- Have a little pocket diary to keep a note of birthdays, appointments etc
- Have a telephone table under the stairs with a telephone on (no walking around on the phone in those days for the average person)
- Watch videos on their VHS player (or in some strange and rare cases betamax)
So fast forward 30 odd years and you may be forgiven for thinking that life has got more complicated – but the truth is it hasn’t. Instead all the things listed above most of the population now have one thing that does it all – and more. That’s right its the…
Smart-phone.. it’s your; alarm clock, music device, gaming device, camera, social media portal, phone, calendar, sat-nav, e-mail, virtual office, video player, app centre – a massively growing arena to showcase companies offers/products and services..
And the really big one for generating revenue for businesses is?
Internet browsing device – more and more people are using their smart-phone as their main source of internet – now a lot of businesses understand that they need to be on the internet to compete in the digital marketplace, but not all of these ensure that their digital marketing covers the smart-phone and mobile device arena too. There are still companies out there who have websites that have been built with flash – while this is fine for viewing on many computers, flash is not compatible with any of the Apple products and with a huge amount of people in the UK owning a iPhone, iPad or iPod this is a lot of people who won’t see your website correctly.
SEO is a big one too as smart-phones have much smaller screens than standard computers or laptops (in case you hadn’t noticed) so ranking well in search engine results is imperative.
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are downloaded as apps onto peoples phones – these apps don’t display adverts like they would on PCs or laptops so most of the adverts are omitted. Smart companies have their own facebook pages so that when this is shared it will appear in numerous friends of friends’ news feeds.
To make it simple a company that really wants to maximise their digital marketing in this day and age must:
- Make sure they have a website
- Make sure that their website is viewable on all devices
- Make sure that they appear high in SEO listings – by having a correctly built and optimised website
- Make sure they have a social media presence and they encourage followers to share their page and website link
- Make sure that they encourage online reviews
So ask yourself are you in your customers’ pockets? But more importantly are you in your customers’ pockets correctly?
