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One of our recent blog articles talked about the use of QR Codes and MS tags and although we added some examples on how they can be used in marketing campaigns a friend of mine recently share with me a link to this fab video.

The video shows how Tesco - Homeplus as it is known in South Korea- designed and implemented a marketing campaign by using QR Codes making shopping a more convenient and time saving experience.

Sales increased tremendously, with online sales increasing by 130% and the number of registered users rising to 76%. Homeplus has now become No1 in the online market.

 

Tactic #1. Be prepared for mobile

It should come as no surprise that this topic is number one on the list. Now is the time to make sure you have a mobile-optimised site. This includes being optimised for:

• Different mobile platforms
• Different-sized devices
• Making certain the mobile shopping cart operates properly
• Getting Facebook-compatible elements on the mobile site
• Resisting putting too many bandwidth-eating graphics on the site

When optimising the mobile site for differently sized devices, remember the tablet experience is different than the smartphone experience and the same goes with the iphone and ipad, which should be reflected in your mobile presence. Devices need to be addressed individually.

Tactic #2. Build a Facebook store for exposure as much as for sales

Facebook is an interesting case. Facebook drives a lot of traffic to e-commerce websites

Facebook is believed to be a traffic generator outside of search engines, so you want your products to be part of that conversation.

The benefit right now,is people are interacting with brands on Facebook, and having a Facebook store will make your products that much more of the discussion.

Use Facebook analytics

The social media platform offers an analytics package where you can register your domain and track what is happening around your brand on Facebook:

• Who is "liking" it
• What kind of traffic is being sent to your store

Take advantage of Facebook advertising

You should also include Facebook "like" buttons on your websites to help become part of the social discussion. This interaction with your customers and potential customers can even become part of your Facebook 
advertising strategy.

You might know Facebook offers highly targeted advertising, but did you know you can now include comments made by people about your brand in advertisements on their and their friend's pages?

A new advertising feature allows you to find and use comments about your brand in Facebook ads, essentially taking what people are naturally saying about you and making it more visible through advertising.

Some brands are going to be more successful on Facebook than others, as it becomes a medium for transactions. But any consumer marketer can benefit from using and testing the platform's advertising and store options.

Tactic #3. Optimise the e-commerce website

You want to optimise for search, conversion and performance.

If you are optimised for the type of product that people buy through the holidays, your chance of showing up organically is tremendously higher than if you decide you are going to start optimising your site in November.

You should start getting links and updating pages for SEO purposes in the summer.

optimisation elements to focus on:

• Page load speeds should be under 2.5 seconds. Two seconds is the benchmark
• Optimise your graphics because holiday images tend to be "very heavy" graphics and can affect site performance
• Prepare for multiple shipping options to react to competition
• Make sure the site offers third-party or alternate payment functionality, such as PayPal

Tactic #6. And finally … be prepared

This tactic is short, sweet and should go without saying.

Preparation is key. You might not know exactly what products are going to populate your email sends, but you should know what type of email should be part of the campaign and have a schedule for when they are sent.

Delivery plans should be in place long before they become an issue during crunch time, and your e-commerce site should be optimised in the summer.

Prepare for Christmas, there is no reason you do not have your graphics done in time.

This year is going to be a huge year for Digital Marketing advertising. With players such as Facebook and location based advertising, businesses can experiment with some new and not so new marketing strategies. According to Hubspot these are five digital marketing trends to watch as the year unfolds;

1. Group Messaging  -  this year the front runners of this service is by Beluga and GroupMe, were small user groups communicate with each other. The data that this groups provide is invaluable, as they can be organised by interest, age and location. Facebook has already acquired Beluga and with the new Facebook changes recently introduced this is one to watch.

2. Reputation Engines - there is of course Foursquare, HurricanParty and Twitter. There are also some other contenders such as BranchOut, Honestly.com and Hashable. The algorythms may not be perfect but each network serves as a prime audience for marketing. 

3. QR Codes - QR Codes have been around for a while, the technology is simple enough, consumers have seen them before and there are people that are still confused as to what these are. Having heard and read all the hype about QR Codes we think that we will see an increasing use of them throughout 2011. 

4. Startup for Startups - small businesses can now create a no-fuss landing page for their business in a matter of minutes with LaunchRock. This concept is not too disimilar  to what Google created a year or so ago with their GBBO initiative. 

5. Q&A sites - Quora is one of the Q&A platforms that has become a useful marketing tool as users can engage in simple dialogue in relation to a particular question. Businesses have the opportunity to seed questions, interject into negative discussions, establish credibility and respond to questions. 

So we know that QR Codes have been around for a while, the technology is simple enough and some consumers are familiar with them. But what is the difference and how can some businesses leverage them?

QR Codes are two dimensional matrix (2D) barcodes that can hold  thousands of alphanumeric characters of information. They have been used in Japan over a decade, where they were invented. 

MS Tags are proprietary of Microsoft and as such they can only be read by a Microsoft Tag Reader. 

Explaining the difference visually; 

 
QR Code                   MS Tag

How QR Codes work 

QR Code Generators there are a number of sites generating QR codes. You can use QR codes to link to a webpage, text, phone numbers, SMS, etc.

QR Code Readers the QR Code reader app that works well on my iPhone is i-nigma. Is easy and simple to use.

Practical Uses of QR Codes they can be used:

- Back/Front of your business card
- Brochures and other marketing material
- Sides of Trucks and Trailers
- Product tags and packaging
- Convention and event nametags
- Restaurant menus
- POS receipts 

QR Codes can then link to:

- Installation instructions
- Directions to your business
- The process of hiring a professional service
- Coupons and special offers
- Recomendations for complimentary products or services
- Customer feedback forms

A few examples:

     

Facebook is introducing new changes to their pages; some of the changes include:

- the placement of randomly selected tagged images across the top of the page. They can be from your wall or tagged and will not include the photos post by your fans
- the tabs across the top have now gone, the links are now showing on the left hand side
- most of the navigation is now on the left hand side of the page
- posts to show, you can choose which posts to show
- if you have a personal account you can use it as a page 
- administrators can now comment on other pages using their brand or own names
- there is now the ability to add iFrames to facebook tabs

In the UK more than 40 percent of people have made purchases over smartphones according to the IAB Consumer M-Commerce Study.

As more potential customers/prospects use mobile phones, you should ensure that your website is accessible and usable on a mobile phone. Here are some things you need to consider:

1.  Asses your current online presence and decide the key elements that you need to make sure that are prominent on a smartphone

2. Be conscious of the amount of information displayed on a smartphone screen

3. Look at the size of the website, a heavy graphic website will take ages to load on a mobile phone and you may loose customers/prospects. Customers won't be paying for the extra data to be downloaded.

4. Usability and Testing on different devices is a must to make sure that the user experience is seamless.


 

The Apple iPhone 4 was named Best Mobile Device at the Global Mobile Awards 2011 at the Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona. 

According to AppleInsider  the judges said that they picked the iPhone 4 because it has a great screen, sharp design, fantastic materials and phenomenal ecosystem for app developers. In a tight race, the iPhone 4 built on the success of its predecessors to set the pace for smartphones. 

App Awards 

Awards for the 'Best Mobile App' and 'App of the Year' went to Rovio/Clickgamer/Chillingo for AngryBirds, with judges saying: "This is the 50 Million plus-selling app that catapulted the benchmark for mobile gaming higher than ever, it is innovative too in terms of in-application monetisation".

As technology adoption increases amongst small businesses, social media is an area social media is an area that more business owners are becoming more aware and interested in.

Alexis Lamster, VP of customers at Postling and creator of the below infographic mentioned that the company analysed 20,000 Postling users to obtain information on how small businesses are using social media.

Check out the data below.

When it comes to setting objectives for a particular email campaign the focus should be in effectiveness. Email Marketing is a very effective marketing tool and strategy and capable of demonstrating quantifiable objectives; such as increase number of website traffic, opening, rates, click-through rates, increasing sales revenue and more. 

B2B company objectives will be somewhat different from a B2C objectives. B2B sales cycles are longer and complex and therefore some of their objectives might be to increase brand awareness and increasing lead generation. Whether B2C objectives could be to increase website traffic, increasing sales revenue or improving customer retention. 

Below is a graph from Marketing Sherpa and the survey conducted;

According to a Juniper Research, marketers spent $87 million worldwide advertising on mobile games last year. By 2015, the amount will be 10 times greater at nearly $900 million. 

The rise of plaforms such as the iAd, are contributing to boost spending on mobile game advertisements around the world as mobile becomes a key channel for casual gaming.