Kady Bentley: Hey everyone, my name is Kady, SEO Specialist and Project Manager here at Masterlink Interactive. Today my goal is to convey the importance of mobile websites and why they should be a part of your business marketing plan. We’re living in a world where we fly by the seat of our pants. We try to keep up with our day to day tasks and anything that makes it more convenient less time consuming is always a bonus and tools that do that are definitely worth your investment. Mobile websites are one of those tools that your customers will find useful in order ti find out your business information. Basically at Masterlink, we try to focus on different key features for mobile websites, but a few of them in particular I’d like to highlight are that it’s essential on a mobile website to feature your contact information and your driving directions so customers can find your information easily, they don’t have to search through your website so they can get to you sooner.

Displaying this information in large fonts that are easy to read is also a benefit instead of having to scroll, like on an iPhone where you can maximize font size, but if you already have it portrayed larger, it’s easier for the customer to see what they’re looking for and get to you.

Also, having simple navigation is very key. Since 3G is fast, but not super fast, if you have a navigation that is condensed and only focusing on the main things you’d like to highlight, it will make speed times faster and people will be able to find your information quicker.

If you’d like to learn more about mobile websites and how they can help your business, we are definitely here to help you contact Masterlink and we’d be happy to get you to the next level of marketing.

Millions more people bought smartphones last year. Millions more dollars worth of 3G infrastructure was built.

In fact, as we mentioned a month ago here on the Masterlink blog, nearly half a billion smart phones are expected to be sold worldwide in 2011. And in 2012, smartphones are expected to steamroll past computers as the primary way the world surfs the web.

According to comScore Senior Vice President Mark Donovan:

“2010 was a game-changing year for the mobile industry. Smartphone adoption, 3G penetration and unlimited data plans drove a surge of mobile media consumption across geographies and deepened the integration of mobile devices into everyday life.

And, the coming year has the potential to be even more exciting. As the mobile ecosystem continues to develop, including progress in mobile advertising and commerce, it’s clear that mobile is destined to become an increasingly important platform for digital marketers across all industries.”

Millions more people, therefore, began gorging on the glorious trough we call the world wide web from mobile phones — people who want your products and services, but who just want for you to make it as easy for them as possible to get them on the fly.

Is your company ready for this new reality?

At Masterlink, we’re telling every small business that will listen that a mobile-version of their website is an absolute necessity in order to thrive in this new age. Mobile web design is specifically tailored for the strengths and weaknesses of smartphones with a few important elements:

• Easy access to essential information like contact info and driving directions.
• Large fonts for easy reading on a small phone.
• Simple navigation to make up for slower 3G speeds.

So let’s imagine a couple ways your company could suffer without a mobile site:

– Let’s say you own a small Thai restaurant in Dallas. You do all the basic Internet marketing things you should—e.g. you get listed on Google Maps and Yelp, etc., employ a solid SEO strategy that moves you to a page-one ranking, and earn rave reviews as a true green curry garden—but you don’t have a mobile-friendly website. Your heavy, thick-with-content regular website overwhelms a smartphone user—let’s call him Hungry Hal—who ends up looking for a website that’s a little bit more digestible.

Meanwhile, a competing pad Thai palace features a simplified mobile website, with clear driving directions and contact information, a mobile-friendly menu, and a single, eye-popping plate of pad krapow that hooks Hungry Hal and lures him in.

– Or let’s say you own a store, just down the street from a competitor. A shopper there can actually scan a barcode with their smartphone (or, thanks to recent innovations from Google, just simply snap a picture of the thing), and immediately pull up a list of prices for the same product not only from sites like Amazon.com, but nearby competing stores like yours.

If you don’t have a strong web presence, you won’t show up on that list. And if you don’t have a mobile website that makes it easy for the shopper to find your store’s contact information, driving directions, and essential info about your products and services, they probably won’t bother making the extra effort to stop by and buy.

The point is simple—mobile web usage is exploding. Don’t get left behind. Contact one of our Dallas mobile web design specialists for more information.

If your company’s face, contact info, primary sales pitch, and product and service information can’t be easily accessed from a palm-sized black box just about anywhere in America, then, well, you might be about to fall way, way behind.

According to CNN:

Smartphones have been growing at an unbelievable clip over the past year but they still account for only around a third of all phones in the US and an even smaller percentage internationally.  In developing countries, the price of smartphones, aside from some ‘quasi-smart’ Nokias are out of reach for all but the elite. India and China each have billion plus populations and growing middle classes, but neither country is even at a 10% market penetration of smartphones.

Globally, market intelligence firm IDC counted 269.6 million smartphones sold this year, compared to the 173.5 million units shipped in 2009.

In 2011, we might see half a billion phones sold worldwide.  Smartphones will likely blow by traditional computers next year as the way most of the world gains access to the Internet.

Incredible, right?

In addition to growth from emerging mega-economies like China and India, the surge will most likely be led by Android phones, thanks to their increased variety of carriers and flexibility (in 2010, Android phones grew from 30,000 activations a day to 300,000 activations/day—a number that might triple in 2011). Don’t limit your expectations for Steve Jobs’s gang, though. Verizon’s addition of the iPhone to their lineup of phones will probably attract many customers who had been waiting for such a move to happen before jumping into the smartphone game (in other words, folks who have been eager to specifically get an iPhone, but who have been hesitant or unable to leave contracts with Verizon).

The bottom line? Mobile sites matter. Why?

More Mobile Shopping

Another study recently released demonstrated that shopping done on smartphones, quite naturally, is exploding right alongside the general smartphone growth. More and more, customers are figuring out how to use smartphones to compare prices, check reviews, and look up product specifications—in addition to looking up basic info like phone numbers and driving directions.

According to Web Pro News:

People are using mobile phones to access websites and apps more than ever before, with 33 percent using their phones to access a retailer website, and an additional 26% indicated they plan to access retailer websites or mobile apps by phone in the future, according to a new report from ForeSee Results.

“It looks like more than half of all shoppers will soon be using their mobile phones for retail purposes,” said Kevin Ertell, vice president of Retail Strategy at ForeSee Results and author of today’s report.

“Any retailer not actively working to develop, measure, and refine its mobile experience is leaving money on the table for competitors.”

The report also noted that shoppers who enjoy their mobile experience with a store are 30 percent more likely to buy from them offline as well. 11 percent of web shoppers reported making a purchase from their phones (over just two percent last year).

Even if your business isn’t in retail, these reports still show just how much smartphones are changing the landscape of web-usage. By making it easier to access information like contact numbers, driving directions, and service availability, a mobile web design simply makes it easy for willing customers and clients to find you.

Make sure your company doesn’t get stuck behind the curve on these trends. Our Dallas mobile web design and mobile marketing experts can help.

New year. New possibilities. A fresh look for your company might just be a great way to start 2011 off on the right foot.

Let’s review for a bit what’s possible, what’s emerging, and what you should demand from your company’s web design:

Catchy, Competent Content and Design

We use flash animation to grab attention. We build attractive sites that accurately reflect your company’s capability, history, and service to society. We use compelling web content to inform visitors, pique their curiosity, pull them further into the site, answer their questions, and satisfy what it is they came to find. We design our sites to be intuitive and easily navigable, based on user-tested navigation patterns. And we employ a host of cutting-edge e-commerce applications that make it easy to get on with the actual business of doing business.

Cutting Edge SEO

Search engine optimization, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the process of making a website rank high in the search results for certain relevant term. For example, if you own a auto body shop in Dallas, you’ll probably want to see your site at the top of the results page when someone searches for “Dallas auto body shop.” In other words, you’ll want to be there when customers come looking for you.

It’s a tricky process, however, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) are constantly tweaking their search algorithms to perfect their own functionality goals—and they’re not exactly eager to tell everyone what they change and when they do it.

The last thing most business owners we work with want to do is spend their days tracking these endless, minute changes and figuring out how to stay atop a search results page. But at Masterlink, we’re a little bit obsessed with it, because we understand just how important a healthy search ranking is for our clients. And we employ a multi-pronged approach to optimized web design, seamlessly integrating into our clients’ sites (and updating) all the elements that search engines love.

Mobile Websites

We talk about it all the time here on the Masterlink blog, but mobile websites simply matter. Increasingly. Smartphone usage has caught fire, and with each passing year, more and more people expect to be able to surf the web and find the information they need (from companies like yours) while out and about.

At Masterlink, we design mobile versions of websites that are uniquely tailored to the needs and expectations of smartphone users—and these days, we offer iPad and tablet-friendly web designs as well.  This means simplified sites featuring larger text, fewer graphics, easy access to information like phone numbers, maps, and driving directions, and easy opt-outs to the regular, more detailed sites. And we design these sites without sacrificing your company’s well-crafted marketing angles that shrewdly pull visitors further into your site.

Check out our online web design portfolio, or contact our Dallas web design gurus for more information. Let’s make it a great year.

Behind the whirlwind of emerging technologies and latest, greatest social media trends, nothing is more important for your small business than an effective, catchy, pull-em-into-the-store-like-a-five-pound-bass web design. But web design itself is a field that’s also perpetually free-wheeling—yesterday’s hottest trend is today’s Sega Dreamcast (did anyone, anywhere actually own one of those?).

But every year still brings with it a handful of new web design techniques and elements that permanently alter the web design landscape—and 2010 was no different.

Let’s review just two of the most important web design trends that truly gained steam this year:

1. Mobile-Ready Website Design

Mobile websites were hardly new this year, but with the introduction of two related technologies, the need and demand for mobile-friendly and tablet-compatible websites soared:

1) Tablet computers like the iPad. Smartphones have for a couple years now shed the “early adopters only” tag, but the percentage of web usage done on devices like the iPhone and Droid truly went mainstream this year. The introduction of the iPad just confirmed how the web landscape has changed for good, by making more general web-usage easier to do while out and about. Simplified websites that are highly compatible with smartphones or tablets are becoming the norm—without one, and with only a more cumbersome regular site ready for users searching for quick information on-the-go—your company might just get left behind.

2) Location-based searches. With more and more and more people surfing the web via smartphones, what users expect from the web (and, therefore, from the websites of companies like yours) has therefore changed. Users search for products and services based on their current location. If they’re looking for a tire shop, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and just about anyone else in the search engine game can provide for them the closest tire shops to where they’re stuck with a flat on the side of the road.

Mobile sites are preferred on smartphones because they make essential information about your company much more quickly accessible. Make sure you have a site that rapidly gives them the information they’re looking for, where they’re looking for it.

2. SEO Blogs

A company blog integrated into your web design makes it easy to connect (and hear from) your customers, provides an effective on-website platform for announcements like discounts and product launches, and increases the amount of dynamic content on your site, giving visitors a reason to return over and over again. In other words, they’re cool.

But perhaps more than anything else, search engines love them. They build links. They’re loaded with keywords and phrases. And they keep your site fresh. At Masterlink, we highly recommend integrating a regularly-updated blog into your social media marketing strategy, and can help you do just that.

It’s an old rule with a new twist: getting customers in the door is only half the sales battle.

According to Web Pro News:

9 out of 10 mobile Internet users have accessed the mobile web while at a store, according to a new study from Yahoo and Nielsen. Furthermore, 51% of those users indicate that they make a purchase after doing research on their mobile device.

In other words, nearly half of all mobile internet use inside of stores is used by customers to do things like check out product reviews, compare prices with other stores, etc. In fact, the study showed that 16 percent of people who use mobile web inside stores do it for shopping research (comparing, say, your prices to those from another store), and another 57 percent of mobile internet users (and 41 percent of non-mobile users) said they’d like to do exactly that in the near future.

Three takeaways:

Be Preemptive For Customers in Your Store

If you anticipate what kind of questions they’ll be asking or concerns they might be looking online to assuage, you might be able to keep them from looking around in the first place. Also, go that extra mile to reassure customers that they’re getting a fair deal, and they’ll be less likely to feel compelled to check.

Be Ready and Waiting For Customers Elsewhere

Have a mobile-friendly website design, and have one that appeals to the sorts of things customers are searching for: prices, features, benefits, and product reviews. Again, anticipate what customers we’ll be searching for on their smartphones, and you can achieve the function that they were about to demand from the world wide web.

Make It Easy For Customers to Share

It’s the age of Twitpics and texting, and customers often want to shoot quick pictures of a product out to family or friends before deciding whether or not to buy. Find creative ways to make your product stand out, and snaps of it will get passed around.

Similarly, “check-in” location-based apps like FourSquare and Gowalla can be used to create a bit of buzz about your business, if a bunch of people are all benefiting from a discount or deal on the same day.

Apparently, all those distracted folks you see tooling around on their smartphones at restaurants, movies, church, weddings, and while floating in space are shouting something profound about the future of mobile web marketing.

A recent study done by Opera—a popular web browser for mobile devices—showed mobile web use growing by leap and bounds over the past year. In fact, the software company reported that most 18-to-27-year-old Opera Mini users use smartphones to access the web more often than a regular computer.

According to the report:

“In October 2010, Opera Mini had over 76.3 million users, a 7.1% increase from September 2010 and more than 92% compared to October 2009.” Also, “Since September, page views have gone up 12.6%. Since October 2009, page views have increased 142%…. In October 2010, Opera Mini users generated over 616 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since September, the data consumed went up by 15.1%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 5.7 petabytes of data in October. Since October 2009, data traffic is up 134%.”

At Masterlink, we’re eager to help small businesses capitalize on these growing trends, and stay on the leading edge of technological development.

This generally means two things:

A mobile-friendly website design:

Think about what a customer would be looking for if pulling up your website design from a smartphone: To find contact information. To get driving directions. To get the basic gist of what the company offers or serves.

In other words, you need a site that’s simple, informative, easy to navigate, and easy to load on slow internet connections (and one that connects seamlessly to your regular website that’s more fully informative and tailored for sales).

Use of Google Maps and other local search elements:

For example—let’s say you run a pad Thai palace in Plano. When someone in the area gets a hankering for such scrumptious stir-fry, a simple Google search for “Thai Food in Plano” would bring up for them not only website results, but a Google Map showing the closest nearby Thai restaurants, contact and website information for each that have submitted the corresponding information, driving directions, and customer reviews. Make sure your restaurant will be there.

As a company, it’s important to submit and maintain the kinds of information that people need in the places where people will be looking for it. And with the rise of smartphones and mobile web technology, with this sort of information increasingly demanded on the go—a host of innovative applications will become available to provide it. We can help you maintain a local search marketing edge.

Let’s say you’re out running errands in Dallas, and need to make a last minute stop for some, let’s say, size-15 stilettos — but you don’t know where to find a pair. The wonderful, magical world of local search already makes it easier than ever to find a shoe store: Search “Dallas shoe store” on your smart phone, and Google gives you an interactive map chickenpoxed with area shoe stores (including contact information).

But Google’s just taken local search a step further—bridging the web and local businesses together in a way where customers can now—at the push of a few buttons—find out if those shoe stores even have the Sasquatchian stilettos in stock… without ever setting foot in the store.

In other words, instead of local searching for a specific store, you local search for a specific product. Google shows you where to find it.

Cool? Information overload? The end of the Internet is near?

Google’s Paul Lee tells a story illustrating the company’s hope for the service:

One weekday evening a few weeks before our son was born, my wife commissioned me to find a box of raspberry red leaf tea for the delivery. I promptly drove to the nearest grocery store, which has an awe-inspiring wall of tea. After diligently scanning the wall and not finding the tea, I began to wonder if it even existed. Was the similarly-labeled raspberry tea the same thing? What about red leaf tea? Stumped, I pulled out my phone and looked up “raspberry red leaf tea” on Google. Beneath the “Shopping results,” I saw a red map marker for a nearby Vitamin Shoppe and a link, “In stock nearby,” next to a picture of Alvita Raspberry Red Leaf Tea. I hopped back in the car, and 15 minutes later had accomplished my mission. Two weeks later, my wife accomplished her much more important mission and we welcomed Benjamin, a healthy and happy baby boy, to our family.

To take part, your business would need to do a few things:

1. Make sure your business is listed and verified on Google Places.
2. Fill out a local shopping interest form.
3. Submit an “accurate and complete” data feed, including UPIs.
4. Wait for Google to accept your submission (they aren’t accepting every business right away, but are keeping submissions on file until they can).

It’s a natural progression considering Google’s aim to be able to provide searchers with any type of information needed at any time, and it should come in handy for local search-adept smartphone users. But like most new tech marvels that should ostensibly make life easier for everyone, it’s worth asking the question: is this good for your business?

There are a few obvious drawbacks: Fewer customers coming into a store means less opportunities for sales pitches and impulse buys. And less personal interaction with shoppers could make it more difficult to build lasting customer relationships.

But it could also help you reach potential customers who otherwise might not ever have reason to come into your store. And if your competition offers the service while you don’t, you could definitely miss out on local search-using customers.

Either way, it’s a development worth watching, and one more way that local search should be an important part of any company’s Internet marketing strategy.

Want free ice cream? Just click around Facebook a couple of times.

According to Web Pro News:

Baskin-Robbins Facebook fans can sign up for “Group Scoop” on Facebook and start their own group or joins someone else’s. Once the number of people in a “Group Scoop” reaches 31, the organizer and all 30 other members will receive a coupon for a free 2.5 oz scoop of ice cream or a 3 oz swirl of soft serve.
“Group Scoop is a fun way for our fans to enjoy a free scoop of Baskin-Robbins ice cream with their Facebook friends, even if they are miles apart,” said David Nagel, Baskin-Robbins Director of Brand Excitement. “Groups of 31 Facebook Fans will be able to enjoy a scoop of their favorite flavor, on us.”

Simple. Smart. Social media savvy. Let’s take a look at how Facebook has created marketing capabilities for the ice cream icon that simply didn’t exist before the social media age:

Creates Incentive to Share

Basically, something like this encourages Facebook users do the heavy lifting of getting your word out. Tell your friends (in an easily doable and provable way), and we’ll reward you. It’s simple.

Exponentially Expands the Promotion’s Capabilities

These sorts of marketing ideas aren’t new—at least in theory. In the past, Baskin Robbins could‘ve taken an ad out in the paper saying something like “Bring three friends, get one ice cream free.” But with an online platform like Facebook, it’s much easier to ramp up the numbers involved with a promotion.

In other words, “Bring 31 friends all at once to our store and get free ice cream!” would seem like a non-starter, and would probably draw a discrimination lawsuit from lonely people. With Facebook, the promotion could easily be for 50 or a 100 people, because that kind of viral organization requires only a few clicks from each customer.

And isn’t this what all those met-once-at-a-party or took-math-together-in-high-school-I-think-but-am-not-entirely-sure acquaintances you have listed as “friends” on Facebook are for?

Creates Incentive to Check Back

Internet marketing campaigns like these create a feeling that the Facebook Fan Page is a way for customers to shrewdly beat the system (and get free stuff). As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the single biggest reason Facebook users become “fans” or befriend the page of an online business is for the possibility of promotions and discounts.

Furthermore, with elements like “Flavor of the Month,” Baskin Robbins is using their Fan Page as a spot where exclusive announcements are made — the fourth biggest reason why customers become fans of companies on Facebook.

Grabs User’s Full Attention

When a Facebook user comes to your Fan Page, the opportunities for reaching them are much more powerful than, say, an ad on the side of a news article they’re reading that you simply hope will catch their eye. Instead, a visitor is committing their focus specifically to your message when they arrive at your page.

Even if customers only come to read the details of the promotion, the opportunities to reach them within those details are endless. And once you get them in the room, you’re giving all your fancy graphics, pictures, and copy a chance to shine.

Say it smart. Say it with heart. And say it in as many different ways as possible.

Some interesting stats were released this week from a new Nielsen Three Screen Report about how people are watching online video.

According to Web Pro News:

High-speed broadband access, now in 63.5 percent of homes, has created a better user experience for watching online videos and nearly a quarter of households have smartphones, allowing people to “place shift” and watch video anywhere.

Despite the common perception that viewers of videos on mobile phones are mostly teens, more than half (55%) are adults aged 25-49. While mobile online video viewing is still fairly limited, year over year growth is notable at 51.2%.

[…]Also in the first quarter 138 million people watched video on the Internet spending on average 3 hours, 10 minutes.

When it comes to mobile video, 20.3 million watched mobile video in the U.S., spending on average 3 hours and 37 minutes each month.

So online video is officially mainstream. How do these stats affect your web design and Internet marketing strategy?

Basically, it just means that there’s more and more reason to effectively integrate video into your comprehensive web presence. It can pay big dividends: Catchy content tends to get passed around. Shared links both spread your message and boost search engine rankings. Video platforms like YouTube give viewers the chance to respond and interact with your company. And with the rise of mobile video, these elements could be targeted in ways that will benefit users on-the-go, potentially giving your company a critical edge.

In other words, there are limitless ways now to creatively reach potential customers.

At Masterlink Interactive , we recommend a multi-faceted approach to Internet marketing and web design. All of our clients provide great products and services—our goal is just to help broadcast those impressive capabilities via as many different platforms as are needed to reach their potential customers. Different people will respond to different modes of communication, so it’s important to modify your message where possible.

Beyond video, this also means integrating elements into your web design like social media marketing, flash design, and e-mail marketing.

Contact our Dallas interactive marketing experts to learn more about video elements in web design and internet marketing.