Integrated Marketing Strategy – How to Integrate Search, Social for eCommerce

by Eric Tsai

It seems as if all the talk in web marketing these days center on algorithm updates, social signals, mobile and display opportunities. Marketers and brands are eager to make adjustments trying new strategies to drive sales and increase profits.

I think it’s important to know the difference between a sales channel and how sales are made.
Search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO) and social media are all channels to engage and carry out your message with prospects and customers.

Simply put, the medium is not the message. It’s a venue for you to generate demand and drive qualified visitors to your conversion funnel.

And we all know what conversion funnel is all about – getting those sale!

This is why it’s important to figure out how these channels work together (and independently) to help drive qualified traffic to your web properties.

Not only will this increase the chance of converting that traffic into sales (higher conversion rate), it will also bring clarity to your marketing investments.

The key is to realize that social media is turning customers social as a result transitioning eCommerce to social commerce.

The Social Customer: More Research, Less Impulsive

Today, if you want to find a restaurant or buy a product you can start by getting opinions from your social circle on Facebook and Twitter or read reviews on public venues such as Yelp and Amazon. In addition, you get to compare prices across multiple deal aggregators and coupon sites.

It’s indicative that consumers are no longer buying based on impulse but cold hard facts.

According to a recent survey conducted by Yahoo! and Universal McCann to help marketers understand the new dynamics in the path to purchase, “The abundance of online tools has evolved shopping, empowered consumers and ultimately renewed passion and excitement within the path to purchase…Consumers have learned what information sources to filter and what sources they can rely on. And when it comes to media, Internet comes out on top as 2 in 3 people stated they trust the Internet for researching their purchases.”

I particularly like the recommendations under “Implications for Marketers”:

Marketers should contribute to the social ecosystem by becoming part of the conversation. Leverage your brand as a contributing member of 3rd party communities (e.g., fan page, micro-site, etc.) to create a more personal and authentic relationship with your customers.
Create reward systems that deliver the “consumer win” by making the consumer feel special — such as tailoring deals to their expressed interests and encouraging viral sharing.
Marketers don’t necessarily need to be considered a consumer’s “friend,” but should leverage the right media to aid consumers — like expert reviews. Trusted sites perform better.
Online sources influence purchases just as much as, if not more than, offline sources so it’s important to make sure your brand is integrated in the online experience.
As shoppers use digital tools to gather info and narrow down options, your presence doesn’t need to be purely rational. It can and should delight emotionally.

If we can identify the potential “decision path” and buying landscape of our prospects then we can build better campaigns to truly engage in a relationship that brings value to both sides.

Social Commerce: Why Consumers Connect with Brands

Whether it’s through social media, organic search or paid search, it helps to understand why certain types of consumers elect to go down a specific path that ultimately led to a purchase.

Once you figured out the complex scenarios of a purchase funnel, then it’s time to craft a campaign that can effective in gaining your prospect’s attention.

Why attention?

Because more attention means higher chance of clicking, and more clicks brings in more traffic. You may want to read the post on Why Attention is the New Currency Online.

The important thing about traffic is that we want convertible traffic not media with strenuous acquisition costs.

Social media is a complicated media where customers are willing to interact with brands but it’s difficult to track and measure.

According to a joint research project by Shop.org, comScore and Social Shopping Labs, “42% of online consumers have “followed” a retailer proactively through Facebook, Twitter or a retailer’s blog, and the average person follows about 6 retailers.”

Here are the top reasons shoppers follow a retailer:

As you can see from the data above, most people connect with brands with some level of transactional intent in nature.

The key is to realize that this type of digital relationship is built on mutual benefits.

For brands, this means being creative with incentivized-advertising that leads to trial, trial to purchase, and purchase to become a regular customer.

And it’s very likely that some if not the entire process take place online.
Each contact point may be discoverable by search forming a contributing factor to influence the purchase experience.

This is a high level way of viewing social commerce. And it requires careful planning beyond marketing.

This is why for example, customer service, sales and marketing needs to stay connected. It’s about linking different part of your business to help optimize the social commerce experience.

And to do making each department social is a great place to start.

Social Media: Turning Search Social

In order to combat Facebook, Google decided to counter with Google +, a social network that mimics many social features of Facebook. (I’ve just started using this and will keep an eye on it as it grows.)

The value of SEO and the success of Google is undeniable but the fact is Facebook has become the central hub of the increasingly social web.

Accordingly to ComScore, time spent on Facebook nearly doubled compare to Google even though Google continues to attract the greatest number of unique visitors in general.

What this tells me is that there is a fundamental shift in how we fit the Internet into our lives.

This also means that search is evolving from a utility-focused function (of finding information) towards a more connected engagement environment.

The initiate discovery builds meaningful relationship that’s based on the human network.
This is the reason why all social networks are gaining traction, not just Facebook.

For example Twitter is also becoming a force to be reckoned with according to Compete:

Twitter is the preferred platform for learning about new product updates. While those who follow a brand on Twitter and “Like” a brand on Facebook do so to learn about discounts and available “free stuff” to a similar degree, the Twitter followers are much more likely to use the platform for “updates on future products” (84% to 60%). Clearly Twitter is viewed as a medium in which consumers can directly communicate with the stewards of the brands they are most interested in. See chart below for details on why consumers choose to follow or Like a brand.

And the next interesting insight was shows that Twitter has the potential to drive sales.

Twitter is more effective at driving purchase activity than Facebook. 56% of those who follow a brand on Twitter indicated they are “more likely” to make a purchase of that brand’s products compared to a 47% lift for those who “Like” a brand on Facebook. This is further evidence that marketers can drive ROI with Twitter by engaging followers through compelling content. See the chart below for more details on usage outcomes across Twitter and Facebook.

Of course, not all engagements are created equal and this is where online marketing is changing.

Consumers will decide which channel to use for their own benefits so as marketers, you need a approach these venues with meaningful engagement in mind aggregating valuable conversations over time.

It only make sense to start your engagement strategy by understand today’s consumers. Once you gain an understanding of the larger trend, then it all comes down to narrowing your target audience and tailor your message to fit the medium.

The Take Away

You can now purchase or bid on highly targeted media to carry out your ads that gets distributed instantly.

The result can be tracked and analyze through various attribution models.

Although there are still limitation to data transparency across all channels, one thing is clear, modern marketers now must try to understand all the touch points prior to conversion (making the sale) to get an idea of the impact of these channels.

It’s time we realize that social media provides significant influence across the social web.

It’s not just about page rank with SEO or ad rank with PPC; you now must consider measuring the depth of engagement as a competitive advantage within your marketing toolbox

What are you doing beyond search?

Why Social Media Can Improve Your Business

by Eric Tsai

After my last post on “How to use Google and Twitter to Find your Customers,” I’m following up on how to abstract value to improve your ideas.

Whether it’s for your marketing research or product innovation, the intention for gathering these data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in.

If you can become part of what people are interested in, you will have a better chance of connecting. Therefore it’s best to utilize permission marketing when executing your communication strategy.

Getting more data is great, but it’s not intended so you can just add more people to your weekly email blast.

Making quantitative analysis can help you create interesting ideas that differentiate your brand and drive actions.

So how can social media create opportunities for you?

Understand The Social Network Ecosystem

First, learn how each social network ecosystem works and the habits of the emerging “social consumers.”

Think of each social network as a town and the ecosystem is basically the infrastructure of the town.

Knowing how each social network is used is like having the map of the town.

Once you have knowledge of the streets around town, the next step is to find and connect with your customers.

This is where my last post comes in handy, if you can identify a social consumer online, he or she is more likely to have multiple social networking accounts which can help you to further profile your target audience.

This is especially helpful if you use a CRM (Customer Relationships Management) system such as GoldMine, Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.

Let’s look at B2C (business-to-consumers) social consumers; these are people that are willing to share their personal information on social networks engaging in activities such as updating their Facebook status, displaying their locations on Foursquare, leave their product reviews on Amazon or restaurant reviews on Yelp.

If you apply the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, you can expect the power users represent 20% of the users that’s generating 80% of the activities.

Accordingly to the latest study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, “consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers…The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch.”

Facebook_Twitter_consumer

The idea is to focus more on the power users that command influence within the social networks. Keep in mind connecting with “medium” and “light” users also helps to earn social proof and trust via the long-tail.

For B2B (business-to-business) the leading examples are LinkedIn, BusinessInsider, StockTwits, OpenForum by AmericanExpress and BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange to see how businesses building communities that connects and shares information.

They represent how social network can be utilize to build a community by providing practical value whether it’s a piece of software, platform, resource center or networking destination, they give back in return to what participants put in.

I recommend doing some in-depth research to get useful data on demographics of your target audience.

Then identify the appropriate social network(s) that fits your demographics to go after.

The key to success will be your understanding of how your target social consumers think, act and make decisions.

What and who influence them?

How much research was done prior to the purchase?

What was the second or third option?

social_consumer_decision

Implementing Accountability and ROI

Now that you’ve got your customer profiles and social network(s) identified, what’s next? For businesses serious about ROI (return on investment), it’s time to increase accountability of your marketing efforts.

You can do this by using existing data or the customer insights from your research (profiling, surveys, CRM) to create campaign projections, a realistic goal that you aim for.

Then create a mix of financial and nonfinancial metrics that you NEED to measure, not what you can measure.

This is to help you understand how your marketing activities impact the bottom line and how you can optimize them by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Make sure you track your marketing cost as well as where the money is coming from to justify true ROI and conduct performance analysis.

How much does it cost to run a local campaign vs. national campaign?

What results are you getting targeting moms instead of kids?

Can you compare the effectiveness of your marketing investments in direct marketing and affiliate marketing?

Share Your Insights

Another great use of these valuable customer data is to share the insights with your customer service representatives, sales staffs, product development engineers, design teams, or anyone that will benefit from them.

If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch.

If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products.

If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

You can also involve them in the insight generation process to help increase the adoption and with regular distribution of these insights, everyone will take part to improve your business incrementally.

Ultimately you want to have a holistic view of your customer data so not only do you know what they’ve purchased, but also what they think about your industry, how they talk about your brand, and why they react to your campaign a certain way.

Simply put, it all comes down to keeping up with the shifts in how people think and act as well as the technologies used.

If you’re unable to keep up then outsource part of your social media efforts to marketers, consultants or agencies; but make sure you understand the implications.

Here is an short and excellent report on how social media influences paid search by GroupM Research.

The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

The take away: The key to effective marketing communications is to have a solid brand strategy.

It’s indicative that social media must work together as an integrated whole of your brand strategy because your brand lives day-to-day in communication platform such as sales presentations, company brochures, product packaging and now the semantic web.

Synchronizing these efforts assures consistent communication of your brand’s strategy, helping to create brand awareness and recognition of who you are and why you matter.

Moving forward, there will be an increase demand for marketing ROI as more data becomes available and new measuring tools are developed.

As always, focus on the signal instead of the noise, maximize the value of social media to improve your business beyond marketing.

What do you think?

Love to hear your thoughts and feel free to share your ROI metrics.

he study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch. When asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?” they said the following:

How To Keep Customers Coming Back: 6 Trends You Should Know

by Eric Tsai

Living in southern California I love going to restaurants, cafes and retails stores to experience what companies are doing to attract customers.

From merchandising to customer service, I’m gradually seeing three popular marketing trends that everyone is doing to spread their brand voice.

First, almost every company is in on the social media bandwagon specifically leveraging Facebook and Twitter to engage with their fans and broadcast their offerings.

Second, companies are finding ways to collect your contact information to build their email list by offering discounts, coupons or customer loyalty programs.

And third, businesses are aware of their reputation online on places such as Yelp, Consumer Reports, OpenTable, BizRate, Amazon and CNET.

Some of using these information as a way to improve products and identify service gaps.

All three marketing tactics are proven to be somewhat cost-effective in terms of managing their reputations online while funneling leads and converting sales.

There is enough free information out there that business owners and marketing managers can find to start immediately so I’m not surprise that everyone is doing it.

In fact, I always check out the Twitter or Facebook page of where I’ve visited to see what level of engagement and following they have as well as to identify how the platform was utilized.

The result I found is that companies fall into two categories of social media marketing buckets.

First are the highly engaged profiles with regular updates and a large following that creates instant social proof. Second are the uninspiring profiles with the lack of updates and little to no interactions.

This is the same observations made by Jeremiah Owyang, who recently posted on his blog that, “many brands are jumping on the social media bandwagon, without giving proper thought about the impacts to their marketing effort. In particular, many brands are putting ’social chicklets’ on their homepage to “Follow us on Twitter” or “Friend us on Facebook” without considering the ramifications.”

This is the problem with low barrier to entry tools such as Twitter and Facebook that many brands are using without a real deliberate strategy.

I encourage those of you that are serious about your digital marketing efforts to use Jeremiah’s matrix to help make your decisions.

Keep in mind, you must understand not just the rules of the game but also how it applies to your specific industry, your customers and your organization.

There is no doubt that the internet has made it easier to find what you’re looking for while connecting you with like-mined individuals from networking to referrals, relevant information is available in abundance.

The questions is where do people get those information and how will these content providers be perceived?

First you need to realize that all of the answers have changed.

Same Questions, Different Answer

Although the internet has forever changed our expectations in media consumption and in communication, one thing remains constant for businesses today: the question of how do we attract more customers to us?

How do we get customers to spread our brand? How do we get customers to buy more and buy often?

As a marketer today you must realize that we’ve been asking those same questions for decades and in order to answer them now you must first understand the following 6 fundamental social change in customer perception and behavior:

1. Choice overload: Customers are bombarded with choices; the market is saturated with selection.

And people get frustrated when they have to make a decision from tens and thousands of product categories, brands and price points.

Everything looks the same, everyone sounded alike and it doesn’t help when people have shorter attention span as we become more distracted everyday.

2. Conflicting information: We’re in a hyper-connected marketplace where people are using social media to discuss new products, do their own research, cross referencing information in the blogosphere and everything goes from frustration to confusion.

There is simply too much information and how can an average consumer know who’s right and who’s wrong?

3. Customers know marketing: Over time, customers understood the game of marketing regardless of B2C or B2B.

Described by Tom Asacker: We’re no longer passive consumers but active discerners participating in how products are marketed at us.

This is why there is an increasing trend in banner blindness and average web users will give you only 8 seconds to decide if they’re going to stay or not.

4. Lack of trust in the marketplace: There is a sense of distrust in the marketplace. People simply don’t trust individuals let alone corporations.

We’re conditioned to identify the tactics such as sense of urgency (buy now and save!), risk reversal (money back guaranteed!), or scarcity thinking (for a limited time!).

Watch any TV infomercials and you’ll find those tactics in most of them.

Simply put, these tactics are losing their effectiveness and even if they worked that led to engagement opportunities, you must meet the customer expectations otherwise it’s hard to fool them twice.

5. People define your brand: Brand messages only sets the initiate expectations of your target audience and ultimately people make meaning out of things themselves.

When push comes to shove, people go with what feels right not your product features or service benefits.

It’s how you make them feel, not what you tell them how they should feel. If they can relate to your message, it only means they’ll give you a few more seconds to keep going down your path to purchase.

Your brand is defined by how you make people feel about the decisions they’ve made not just your messages.

6. The shift towards frugality: This is the simplest concept to grasp as the recession has permanently changed the way consumers behave and perceive value.

It goes beyond pricing strategy and product promotions.

Whether you’re a retailer, a B2B service provider or a marketer, this means extracting deeper customer insights to build meaningful, differentiated messages that communicates relevancy.

This is best described by a recent article “The New Consumer Frugality” in Strategy+Business, by Booz & Company, in which the authors defined six frugal consumer segments.

After a thorough understanding of the above trends, you should also be aware of the fact that brands are becoming publishers creating opportunities that’s leveling the playing field.

And in order to be successful moving forward, you either have great content strategy or you have unique customer experience (in product or service innovation).

Content Marketing Creates Relevancy

Recently Joe Pulizzi of Junta42.com, a content strategy evangelist published a post after speaking at the Online Marketing Summit 2010 on how companies focus solely on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media that produce without a real content strategy.

Specifically he noted that “any online marketing, whether social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, landing page conversion, etc., does not work without first having content strategy.”

As a brand strategist that focuses on marketing integration, I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve heard business owners and marketing executives realize the need to change their strategy, but it’s often due to the need to “keep up” with the current trend. “We must get into social media because everyone’s doing it,” or “We need to engage our customers on Facebook and Twitter.”

But what does engagement mean to your organization? How will that benefit your bottom line or increase sales?

It’s easy to setup a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a LinkedIn Group.

The key is what will you be pushing out to generate meaningful conversations?

How will you provide value that sparks engagement?

Why would people spread your idea or pass on your name?

What’s the call-to-action when people get to your website, your blog, or your social media pages?

Product Innovation Creates Loyalty

The other way to win in the marketplace is to deliver awesome products or services that build brand loyalty via innovation.

An easy example would be what Apple is doing with their continuous innovation in products from iPod to iPhone to last weekend’s release of iPad.

Amazon’s endless pursue to have everything available, fast and easy via their online store regardless what you’re looking for.

Zappo’s unmatched customer service in finding and delivering not just the shoes you ordered but what you may also like.

For restaurants, it’s the food you cater, the service you provide, the price tag you put on as the total experience that says “we’re different.”

Customers will automatically go on to Yelp and OpenTable to give you reviews and recommendations. Your customer will decide what quality is and what value means to them.

I love what James Surowiecki wrote in an excellent piece in The New Yorker: “the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.”

You’re going to struggle if you don’t deliver brand experience that’s worth talking about.

Everyone have access to the same tools and resources, if you can deliver a mix bag of value using content marketing strategy on your innovative products, you win.

The take away: Brands must adapt to the new realities that everyone is a content producer and we are no longer competing on eyeballs and clicks only, but value that builds long-lasting relationships in a trust-driven era.

It is essential to establish clear, integrated marketing strategies for various media channels in order to deliver personalized messages that properly aligned with your business objectives.

If you don’t know your desired outcome, why are you implementing tactics where you can’t see what success means to you?

If you don’t have exceptional products perhaps its time you should rethink your product strategy.

Are you re ready to get actionable to integrate your marketing efforts?

How Augmented Reality Affects Marketing

by Eric Tsai

I received some feedback and questions on Augmented Reality (AR) after my last post and thought to provide some additional inspiring ideas with regards to where AR is heading. The best example can be seen from Yelp’s Monocle app that allows users to see location-based reviews from their iPhone screens.

The result is crowd sourced commerce with social proof data to enhance purchasing decisions on the spot. It’s an integration of social media with physical space to bring relevant information based of our physical behaviors such as the places we’ve visit or the reviews we’ve posted online.

This new technology integrates real-time social networks, location-based tracking, and the semantic web to aggregate qualitative data. Information you want will run towards you instead of the other way around, fully customized to your personal taste based on your friends, location, and how you search online. The cultural ramifications represents a step forward towards artificial intelligence.

As for marketers, it’s important to monitor how consumers and businesses interact with AR technology that creates deeper and more meaningful engagements which may lead to new marketing opportunities. However, everything does hinges on privacy policy so it’ll be highly regulated on what information can be abstracted.

The fact is, consumers are more incline to take action if the ads are what they want to see from providing coupons to what’s on sale at the moment on location. From a brand’s perspective, it helps to improve data quality to deliver impactful, targeted integrated marketing campaigns enabling a dynamic social commercial connection through multiple touchpoints. It improves the branded experience.

If you haven’t look into AR, I suggest you to checkout some of the examples below.

Here is a demo at TED2010, where Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. This one shows you how far technology can go, very inspiring.

As augmented reality applications get better, and people have the ability to aim their camera at any real world object and get real-time information on the fly, it’ll be interesting how consumers will take interest in utilizing this feature. Here is an alternative way to improve online shopping experience using AR.

Augmented reality on print is probably the simplest to start, the idea is to integrate the AR with your offline marketing activities as part of the sequential advertising to tell your story like the examples I’ve provided in the last post. For brand experience, a great example is the Adidas Augmented Reality Sneaker Experience.

I think it’s worth reviewing the cost of integrating such concept on a smaller scale just to keep an eye on it. Ultimately it’s another touchpoint marketers can use as part of an advertising campaign but also an added element in abstracting ROI. I welcome any thoughts on this, what do you think?

5 Ways to Engage Social and Mobile Customers

by Eric Tsai

If you’ve been keeping up with the current marketing trends, you should be in the process of exploring how to utilize social media to benefit your business.

By now, most of the “how to use” social media content is everywhere especially from reputation resources such as Mashable, Social Media Examiner or Twitip to name a few.

While most large organizations such as Fortune 500 companies are slow in adopting social media, many have started pilot programs to experiment with this new tool. Brands such as Dell, Coke Cola, Ford, Starbucks, Zappos, Best Buy and even sports league like NBA and NFL have found rapid growth by allowing fans to engage directly with athletes.

Share content that people find useful and want to share with others is the new mantra for new media marketing.

Particularly small businesses have found social media as a way to demonstrate leadership and command influence in niche communities.

The latest data from the Small Business Success Index shows that “Social media adoption by small businesses doubled from 12% in 2008 to 24% in 2009. The biggest expectation small business owners have from social media is expanding external marketing and engagement, including identifying and attracting new customers, building brand awareness and staying engaged with customers.”

The small and medium size businesses (SMBs) get it. They are using this recession as an opportunity to connect and expand their sphere of influence.

While social media is still in its early phase, the business benefits of social networks are very real.

Every small business is looking to integrate “social” into their eCommerce sites, direct mail campaigns, webinars, blogs and SEO tactics hoping to build top-of-mind brand awareness.

Certainly you’ve heard that it’s about conversation, customer engagement and providing value.

However; it’s also quickly becoming a spam destination and experienced users have started to be very selective on who to connect and how to communicate.

Sure, you can learn all the tricks and tactics in getting followers on Twitter, ramp up fans from Facebook and connects with hundreds of professionals through Linkedin but the real engagement is when you involve the entire community to take action and interact with your brand.

Understand Social Media Users

Social media is about conversations. It is important to understand why and what kind of conversation users are more incline to engage themselves in.

Accordingly to the latest survey of social media users conducted by Crowd Science, “Users want to be heard. Overall, 45% reported liking when others notice them—leading some to stretch the truth or reveal too much personal information… But 36% believed others are simply interested in what they have to say. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to marketers, who know many users will tell all their contacts about good (and bad) experiences with products and services.”

Detailed Study Results

These new social customers will look up Yelp for reviews and tweet customer service for support.

It all boils down to the fact that every single customer from B2B to B2C has increased their influence throughout the buying process, gaining control of your brand’s perceived value, commanding more attention to satisfy their needs.

Lior Arussy wrote an excellent article in CRM magazine describes exactly that: “There’s a significant gap between the transaction as perceived by the employee and the outcome value as perceived by the customer. In short, what you sell is not what they buy.”

The truth is, even if you have the most market share in your industry it doesn’t translate to loyalty, and loyalty generates word-of-mouth. This is the reason why customers today are able to demand more for less, a loyal customer is worth more than a passive one and brands are fighting to gain trust. With the space getting crowded, consumers are already flooded with choices not to mention most don’t have the desire to spend in the first place.

In an effort to drive business success, companies must become more customer-centric by focusing on the needs of each individual customer to earn their trust and meet their needs.

More social means more conversations and when you add in the increasingly mobile factor, you have a whole new dynamic to reposition your brand to deliver a differentiated value proposition.

Here are 5 ways to help you address the increasingly social and mobile customer needs.

1. Start with local

Just because the internet can reach across the world doesn’t mean you need to do an all out global campaign.

Often you will find hyperlocal campaigns to be more cost-effective and can benefit from hybrid campaign where you combine online with offline promotions.

Find mobile advertising vendors that can help you target your local customers to drive traffic to your local stores or promote an event.

2. Provide free resources

With the emerging trend of the Freemium business model, free is the new standard.

In fact, it gives your prospects a reason to give you the time of the day so you have an opportunity to earn their trust. Establish yourself as a resource by sharing your knowledge.

Add value to the conversation by offering your thoughts and commenting on blog posts that your audience read, tweet resourceful information from your Twitter account, or by answering a question on LinkedIn Answers.

Free resource such as buying guide, e-books, product recommendations from third parties or even free trials on your product are great ways to nurture leads with drip marketing campaigns.

According to the recently released ChoiceStream 2009 Personalization Survey, “65% of m-commerce shoppers indicate that they would buy more products from their mobile devices if it were easier to find products on them from trusted retailers.”

3. Mark it easy to pass along

A simple word-of-mouth tactics that’s often overlooked as companies look to pack in all the features and benefits of their products and solutions on their brochures and websites.

Go with something that’s easy to pass along without making it difficult for your customers to explain to their social network.

Just like Twitter with 140 character limitations, mobile devices have limited viewing real estate so make sure your messages are simple and to the point.

Provide a link to your content if you have more content to disclose, but make sure the link is short by using a URL shortener.

4. Use location based advertising (LBA)

Since people almost always have their mobile phone with them, LBA provides highly targeted reach.

And because customers are in control on how they receive ads on their mobile devices, customers receive more personalized, relevant information in real-time resulting in greater customer satisfaction to help you build brand awareness, create loyalty, and drive purchase decision.

Keep in mind that successful LBA is a permission based so establishing trust will be important and a privacy policy must be in place.

5. Tell a story, create passion

– Reporters loves a great story because they know readers love them too. Often times a great story can get viral because well, it’s a great story!

The increasingly social web has vastly increased the fragmentation of media. Leverage sequential advertising to tell a story and lead your prospects down a path of related messages with continuity of the call-to-action.

Each engagement touch point should evoke a compelling response with fresh information and unique impression.

Don’t forget to keep any eye on the emerging trend of Augmented Reality on the social web and on mobile platforms:

Samsung

Home Depot

Esquire Magazine

The Take away: The real challenge for company embracing social media is finding the sweet spot that fits their business needs without draining their resources.

The key to success is to understand and measure the direct business impact of social media campaigns and identify the gaps between the customer experience and expectations as we continue to become more social and mobile.

Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with social media?

Where do you see your brand go in the next 18 months?

What do you think?

Are you looking to do any mobile marketing in 2010?

I’d love to hear what you’re doing to engage social and mobile customers.