WSI of Windermere is the Top Gun of Digital Marketing and can help your local business experience greater traffic.
WSI of Windermere
Most Consumers Ignore Mobile Advertisements
May 16th, 2012
Hello fellow bloggers and followers. Before we get into serious blogging business, I have another treat for you today and that is another video trailer of my most recent Spring vacation to Israel.
Just click on the image below:
Back to business:
According to AYTM Market Research, 46.8% of 400 consumers stated that Mobile ads are annoying and 27.3% stated that mobile ads are intrusive. In addition, 42.9% stated that they have never purposely clicked on a mobile ad.
This sort of puts a cog in the wheel of mobile marketing.
There is a saving grace however. By using current digital techniques such as video and social media applications on mobile platforms the user experience can be enhanced and the appeal of mobile marketing increases. Both social media and video are two of the most popular categories of tablet and smartphone applications today. By utilizing these applications vs a mobile display ad, the user now engages interactively in your marketing campaign.
These seem to be the most effective way to reach mobile audiences.
Another category very popular with the mobile crowd is mobile searches. The growth of mobile search proves the effectiveness of SEO campaigns in lead generation from smartphone and tablet web browsers.
Mobile search has proven to be highly effective in capturing a convertible target market. Mobile SEO campaigns are currently resulting in a 7% click thru rate vs a .6% click thru rate for mobile ad campaigns.
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based mobile marketing company, believes strongly in the adoption of effective marketing techniques necessary to remain abreast of the ever changing digital world.
Mobile Phone Ads and How Millenial Men React to Them
May 9th, 2012
Hi ladies and gentlemen. It has been a few weeks now since my last blog due to my annual vacation.
This year, I visited my 6th Wonder of the World – Petra, Jordan.
You can view 2 of my video trailers here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbq8LHNAHIk&feature=relmfu
Back to Business:
As the number of smartphone users exponentially increase, the more likelihood of their exposure to mobile advertising increases.
According to Insight Express, between the ages of 18 and 29, men were more likely(69%) than women to remember viewing a mobile ad on their smartphone.
Women in the same age group had a recall rate of less than half at viewing a mobile ad.
According to the research, men not only were more likely to recall the ad but they actually enjoyed recalling the ad.
Only 12% of women in the same age group said that they enjoyed ads with the majority of women having no opinion on the subject.
40% of men stated that they enjoyed the ads while 20% stated that they enjoyed the ads a lot.
Taking an average of all smartphone owners, the majority liked mobile ads in one manner or another.
This year, Emarketer predicts mobile ad spending will reach 2.61 billion, up 80% from 2011.
In 2016, spending is expected to reach almost 11 billion. These formats will include messaging, search, media, banners and video.
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based Mobile Marketing Company believes strongly in the power of mobile platforms and mobile advertisement.
Females Prefer Coupons While Males Prefer Reviews
April 18th, 2012
Empathica, a customer experience research firm, recently released data stating that websites and brick and mortar retail locations are much more important to luxury spenders than social media.
The manner in which luxury spenders interact with said deliveries is significantly gender dependent.
More than half of male luxury spenders read online reviews prior to making a purchase compared to 39.2% of female spenders.
Both genders were just under 13% when it came to using social media as a buying source.
This made social media significantly less relevant to luxury spenders.
Men cited the requirement for specific service/product information as their highest requirement in improving social media sites for marketing.
On the reverse side of the coin, women cared less about specifics and were more influenced by exclusive offers and coupons.
Women’s request for the largest improvement to social media sites would be the ability to directly make a purchase on social sites with their coupons because they were ready,willing and able to buy.
WSI of Windermere strongly supports the study of human behavior and psychographics in the digital marketing spectrum. Understanding, relating to and knowing your target market is critical whether it is digital or traditional marketing.
Connected Devices
April 11th, 2012
As electronic technology continues to dominate the digital landscape, the expectations of consumers for connectivity on all digital devices will continue to increase.
Smartphones have become hubs for multimedia content.
Tablet computers and Ereaders have risen from cool toys to technology wonders.
Media players, game consoles and even television sets have been exposed to worlds of information due to connectivity to digital content.
Newly created television sets are either wifi ready or have wifi access built in.
Television sets today can be more complicated than a motor vehicle.
Because of this major advancement in technology, consumers will expect digital content to be available at all times, basically everywhere, on all screen devices from televisions to smartphones to tablets to game consoles.
Emarketer expects more than 26 million mobile phone users to switch to smartphones within the next 2 years.
By 2014, Emarketer expects smartphones to be in the hands of more than half of all mobile phone users.
Emarketer expects tablet computers to increase from 55 million users to almost 90 million users in the next 2 years.
Emarketer expects more than 1 in 3 internet users to have a tablet device by 2014.
Connected devices have almost become a necessity to consumers in this new digital age.
Very few people would even own a tablet device if it were not for the availability of games, photos, magazines, newspapers, tv shows, movies, video and /or music through connectivity .
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based digital internet marketing company, supports the advancement of technology and the impact connectivity is having on this digital world.
Brick and Mortar Stores are Slowly Dying to Technology
March 29th, 2012
Best Buy, Kodak, Blockbuster, Polaroid, Sears and similar other companies have all felt the pain and sting of ignoring the advancement of technology.
Best Buy’s new philosophy of “smaller will be better” is permeating across the retail industry. In an effort to cut costs, Best Buy will begin to rent out space in it’s stores to other retailers.
These new renters will not necessarily be technology retailers. They will be anyone who is willing to pay rent to Best Buy.
Best Buy’s profits were down 12% and the stock was down 7% as of 5 January 2012.
Best Buy has been hurt by online competitors such as Amazon and deep discount competitors like Wal Mart.
Best Buy’s direct competition, Circuit City, Tweeter, Ultimate Electronics and CompUSA have already been destroyed by this same competition.
Even the retail giant Sears is shutting down Brick and mortar stores due to the powerful online retail market.
Blockbuster Video (billion dollar company)watched it’s own demise while allowing Netflix to steal it’s market share by ignoring the mail order and streaming video audience.
Kodak, (another billion dollar company and the leader in film and camera equipment for years)basically did the same by allowing other companies such as Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic to steal the digital camera market from under their nose.
It is ironic that the entire digital camera market is now suffering due to the inclusion of digital cameras in smartphones.
As the smartphone continually becomes the dominant search device for consumers, many more brick and mortar facilities will continue to see their profits eroded by online retailers and consumers’ insistence on comparing online prices and reviews.
Many brick and mortar facilities are becoming mere showrooms for consumers to test, view and evaluate products with the sole intention of purchasing said products online at a deeper discounted price.
This has been a significant factor in the demise of the brick and mortar retailer.
Gigantic billion dollar cable companies such as Cox, Wometco and Brighthouse are seriously concerned about the impact that streaming video will have on their ability to continue to sell their cable packages.
Plasma, DSP, and Led televisions will take a considerable hit in July 2012 when LG’s first OLED television is made available to US consumers.
A 55″ OLED TV weighs 16.5 lbs, is less than 4mm thick, can be hung on a wall like a picture and has over 4000 lines of horizontal resolution.
In contrast, a 55″ plasma TV weighs over 100 lbs, requires 2 people and an expensive mounting system to hang on a wall and has 1080 lines of horizontal resolution.
Samsung has already eliminated the production/manufacturing of plasma tvs.
We are already witnessing the prices of flat screen television mounting systems decreasing rapidly due to OLED TV’s picture hanging capabilities.
The demise of the television mounting system is just around the corner as televisions become lighter and more flexible to work with.
As can be witnessed by these retail examples, keeping up with the advancement of technology is critical not only in the profit margins of business today but also in their utter survival.
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based digital internet marketing company, believes strongly in the advancement of technology and it’s critical impact on the future of businesses.
Android OS vs Apple OS vs Smartphones
March 24th, 2012
Apple’s domination of the tablet market has been reduced a little by Google’s Android system.
According to Strategy Analytics, Apple is still the King with a market share of 58% but Android has stolen a large chunk with 39% of global share.
Google tablets acquired 10% of the market between the 4th quarter of 2010 and 2011.
Apple’s shares decreased by a similar amount.
A lot of this is due to the Amazon Kindle Fire which uses the Android operating system. Ironically the Kindle Fire does not look or feel like an Android device.
Despite the Android’s gains, Apple does not seem very concerned considering that they shipped 15.4 million iPads in 2011 which is an 8.1 million unit increase over the fourth quarter of 2010.
Regardless of how you analyze these stats, one definite truth is that the tablet market is on a significant roll.
Forrester Research predicts that 1 billion people will own smartphones by 2016. This alone is reason enough for businesses to allocate resources towards a mobile marketing strategy.
Forrester predicts that 360 million workers will use smartphones by 2016 and 200 million will take their phones to work with them.
As consumers continue to crave connectivity and access on the fly, the demand for smartphones will increase.
With mobile marketing, businesses should not only have an optimized mobile website for mobile viewing but also what their customers want and need when they visit your site on a mobile device.
The user experience is the most critical element in marketing on a mobile phone.
Think about what your customer wants and deliver it.
The mobile revolution is a gigantic shift in consumer engagement. We need to understand that customers think just like us when using mobile devices. When they want something, their mobile device is within arm’s length and they surf the web for what they want immediately. They do not wait until they get home to search on their computers!
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based mobile marketing company, believes that our mission is not only to educate our customers on mobile marketing but also in the advancement of technology as being witnessed with mobile devices.
4 SEO Tips for your Word Press Blog
March 19th, 2012
I am a big fan of Word Press for a business blog. Word Press is incredibly user-friendly, which means it’s very easy to customize your settings and make small changes whenever you need to. If you are using Word Press for your business blog and are looking for ways to get SEO value from it, here are 4 Word Press SEO tips.
Word Press SEO Plug-ins
SEO plug-ins allow blog owners to write custom title tags and Meta descriptions, much like you can for a page on a website. This allows you to control what shows up in the SERPs when your blog post ranks and gives you the chance to target relevant keywords.
YOAST (http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/) is a great SEO plug-in and should be installed on your business blog. The title tag should mirror the post title and the Meta description is a 150 character description with the most important keywords. I’ve also had great results using All-in-One SEO pack plug-in.
Social Share Buttons
Social signals are having a huge impact on the world of SEO, including how well your site ranks in the search engines. The more times your content is shared the more inbound links it earns and the more important it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Social share buttons are a great way to encourage readers to share your content without actually having to leave your blog to do it (you want to keep a reader on your site as long as possible!). The four critical social share buttons to include both above and below the blog posts are Twitter, LinkedIn, +1, and Facebook.
You can also add either a ShareThis or AddThis share button plug-ins to the blog and individual posts that allow readers to submit content to other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more.
URL Structure
Your Word Press blog should be mydomainname.com/blog and not on a sub-domain (blog.mydomainname.com). Having the blog on your company website will help get posts indexed and ranking faster since your website’s trust factor is being passed along to the posts.
New posts should also have a custom URL, which is easy to do in a Word Press blog. The URLs keywords reflect the title of the post and target the most important keywords (which helps the blog posts rank for related searches.)
Blog Design
If you are really serious about having a great business blog avoid using any pre-made design templates. Instead, create a custom Word Press design that mirrors your website and brand including colors, header, fonts, call-to-actions, conversion points, etc. You can use a basic theme from Word Press and use the same HTML as the main website so the two blend seamlessly into each other.
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based internet marketing company is a strong proponent of the word press platform and business blogging. Powerful content is still the #1 priority when it comes to search engines.
Ipad and iPhone Account for 13% of all Christmas Online Purchases
March 6th, 2012
Consumers who used iPhones and iPads to buy items online stole the holiday show.
6.4 % of all online purchases were made on an iPhone during the 2011 holidays and 7% were executed via iPad.
IBM’s holiday benchmark found a surge in internet shopping via mobile devices among 500 retailers.
Androids accounted for 5% of online purchases on Christmas day. The day after Christmas the iPad accounted for 6% of all online purchases followed by the iPhone at 5.8% and Android at 4.6%.
Online sales on Christmas day surpassed last year’s numbers by 16%. 18.3% of all online traffic came from a Mobile device, an increase of 118% from the previous year. Actual online purchases with mobile devices was 14.4%, a 173% increase from the previous year.
On 26 December, 2011, online sales surpassed 2010 sales by 27.8%. 16% of all online traffic came from mobile devices, a 109% increase from 2010. Mobile device purchases reached 11.3%, a165% increase from 2010 numbers.
These statistics are retail store purchases only, not music, apps or mobile digital content. IBM’s research only looked at retail store purchases through the mobile browser.
These same stats follow the trend for black Friday and Cyber Monday. Both of these days illustrated a rise in online purchases with the iPhone and iPad being the major tool used.
These statistics are solid evidence that the mobile device is slowly becoming consumers’ primary method of making purchases. It also indicates the trust and confidence consumers are placing in mobile devices and purchasing portals.
WSI of Windermere, your Orlando based mobile marketing company, strongly advocates for the use of mobile devices in our everyday life. Mobile devices are becoming a vital part of our existence.
Warning Signs when Hiring an SEO company
February 28th, 2012
Not Responsive
You should not have to chase your agency to get things done.
When you have a question or suggestion, they should respond within a day via email or telephone. At the very latest, they should respond by the next day.
If you find yourself calling or emailing multiple times, it ís obvious that you are not their main priority.
Not Friendly
Even if they are busy and stressed, a good SEO provider should still remain professional and friendly in all correspondence.
Do you really want to work with someone that:
- Sounds angry all of the time
- Acts like you are bothering or interrupting them
- Does not have any manners and never says please or thank you
- That sort of attitude can grow old, real quick.
- Does not listen to input
Nobody knows your business better than you do.
As time goes on you will learn more about the ins and outs of SEO and probably come up with some suggestions of your own. Your SEO provider should always be willing to hear you out.
Even if the proposed strategy would not work, an SEO provider should take the time to actually explain that to you instead of simply saying: No!
No matter how good your results are, if you are not being treated properly, it can leave a bad taste in your mouth.
An SEO company should be able to provide good results and good service.
It ís not a one or the other sort of deal.
It ís important to hire an SEO provider that you will feel comfortable with for the long run.
Mobile Marketing will Surpass Online Marketing!
February 22nd, 2012
The rising sales of smartphones is a clear indication that Mobile advertising will replace online advertising as the ultimate platform for reaching the general public.
Digital marketer, the world’s leading online marketing newsletter, predicts that mobile marketing will see gigantic increases in overall marketing spend.
Approximately 43% of all Americans own a smartphone today according to the latest Nielsen reports. Ironically actual purchases made on smartphones are relatively low.
Prior to 2011, Mobile sales accounted for only 2% of U.S. ecommerce. This basically kept marketers away from the mobile platform from a sales perspective.
Teachers selling mobile courses have claimed 300% increases in overall sales via smartphones.
2011 smartphone ecommerce totaled almost 5 billion dollars.
With less than 2% of all commerce being on smartphones, advertisers have basically stayed away from all of the hype.
The exponential increase in smartphone sales has driven marketers to increase their advertising budgets towards mobile.
In 2011, only .09% of marketing dollars was applied to mobile budgets but that fact should change drastically with the sheer increase in smartphone purchases.
Consumers cite the small screen size of smartphones as being a detriment to smartphone purchases but the larger screen sizes and the popularity of tablets being produced today should drastically alter those statistics.
The marketers who enter mobile’s fast lane now will leave the remainder of the pack significantly behind.
The introduction of One Tap Mobile payments, Google Wallet and similar mobile app purchasing platforms will drastically alter the way we make purchases.
Credit card companies are shivering at what is to come in the very near future.
WSI of Windermere, your local Orlando based digital/mobile marketing company stays ahead of the curve in mobile technology and endorses the wave of the mobile future.
