Beanbag Media digital marketing

Smartphones are playing a critical role in purchasing decisions, according to a new study released.

The study, by ForeSee Results, surveyed 10,000 visitors to top e-retailer sites, found that 11% made a purchase using their phones in the Christmas shopping period, up from just 2% the same time last year.

Thirty percent of people used their phones this Christmas to compare product details, prices, or to find store locations.In 2009 just 11% of consumers used their phones to research in this way. Those who were highly satisfied with a retailer’s mobile experience were 30% more likely to buy from that retailer both online and offline.

The use of mobiles in retail is growing even faster than the early days of Internet shopping

eBay reported that mobile shopping on its app increased 134% in December, and Amazon’s turnover from mobile sales has just passed $1 billion. According to ABI Research mobile online shopping in the United States rose from $396 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2009. The same survey predicted that mobile would bring in $119 billion by 2015.

Of course not everyone has a smartphone, but the rate that sales are growing suggest that the mobile internet is groing at an even faster pace than the internet did when it started to explde in the mid 1990s.

Many doubted that internet retailing would ever be a big concern in the early days of online shopping, it would be a similarly foolhardy person who would make such predictions about Mobile shopping.

Amazon.com is expanding its home delivery service into fresh groceries in the United States according to The Financial Times.

Amazon has operated its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service in it’s hometown of Seattle since 2007, with the bright green trucks apparently becoming a common site on the city’s streets.

The retailer announced plans to expand in the U.K. last summer,so we can assume that if it’s a success Stateside we will soon have the internet retailing giant on the roads competing with the likes of Tescos, Sainsburys and Asda.

The competition between the iPhone and Android phones is hotting up as Carphone Warehouse reported that Android smartphones outsold Apples iPhone last year in the UK.
Those business who invest in producing an iPhone app are potentially turning away the majority of smartphone users who don’t have one.
A mobile web app can be used on all smartphones. It can even be optimised to look best on whatever handset is being used.
To find out more about creating a mobile presence for your company contact john@beanbagmedia.com

Youtube can be a an affiordable way of getting your message across cheaply and quickly.

Beanbag media was commissioned to make this short promo for Alun Jones Family Law.

You might be surprised as to how affordable and cost effective it is to use youtube as a platform for our business.

Youtube videos now routinely show up in the middle of the normal google search results. This is a great way to get your business noticed as you can sometimes leapfrog your competitors at a stroke.

1. Optimise your exisitng website
   If you already have a website and you are not getting any traffic, it may need to be re-organised so that search engines will rank it higher. Your web pages must be focused on your target keywords, and these keywords need to be placed strategically throughout the site There are many tools that can help you with your keyword research, a good starting point is google keywords tool
2. Add more content to your website.
   If you have a website with 100 pages then google will be indexing an awful lot more than a site with just one page. The more pages you have which are optimised with keywords the more people will come to your site
   
3. Work on getting more websites to link to you
   Other sites linking to you will help to increase traffic directly and indirectly. People will click to your site from links they see on other sites and also google will give you a higher ranking the more people who link to you.
   
4. Offline Advertising: Despite what you may have heard most people do not spend 24 hours a day sat in front of their laptop. Put your web address in your print advertising, TV advertising, on your stationary and in your brochures, on your vehicles, in your shop window
   An easy to remember URL  wil stick in people’s minds where a phone number wouldn’t
   
5. Pay Per Click Advertising: All the above solutions  take time to deliver traffic to your site. If the main sections of your site are ready for public viewing and you want to see how well you can do, then buy some traffic. The most popular and probably most effective pay per click advertising program is Google’s Adwords. It only takes a few minutes to set up an Adwords account and you will get traffic immediately. But remember, your site has to be good enough to convert this traffic into orders if you want to recover the cost of the advertising.

If you are one of the 500 million users and also have a business it would be well worth investing some time and effort into marketing using Facebook.

Using social networking for marketing purposes gives you a different relationship to the traditional one between a business and its customers.

The increased feedback and direct communication can be rewarding personally and financially.

We can show you how to  build a steady fan base and get you well on your way to using Facebook as a promotional tool.

Twitter is nothing to fear or look at with awe it’s just a communication tool. Like the Web, the mobile phone and the handwritten letter, it’s just a tool that connects one person with another.

Twitter for those who have been living on Mars some time gives you 140 characters to answer the question, “What are you doing?”
Those who join Twitter  can “follow” other people, which causes their updates to appear on your home page. In turn, they can and often will follow you. Twitter for a business,  can be looked at as a form of permission-based marketing. You can also directly message your followers, but again always in 140 characters or less.

Some of the main business uses for Twitter are:

• Follow others in your line of business who post links to useful resources
• Post questions for quick answers and answer others’ questions to establish your credibility and expertise
• Create links to your Web site or blog (but don’t over do it! as this can put people off)
• Keep up on the news and gossip in your line of work

Suggested uses for marketing through Twitter

• A restaurant tweets their daily specials
• A ticket agency tweets slow selling tickets with a discount
• An estate agent tweets new homes on the market
• A concert venue tweets about forthcoming gigs.

A study by online ratings firm Nielsen revealed that Britons aged between 15 and 24 access the internet on their mobile phones than their European counterparts.

“Among European youth, those in the UK are more likely to use mobile Internet, with over 20 per cent more usage than other European countries,” read the report that compared  19 countries across the world.

Nearly 46% of UK mobile users aged 15-24 had used the mobile Internet within the past 30 days when the survey was conducted.