Before you do anything else, you need a database of customers. Be sure to you are given permission to text them.

To get started, think of everywhere you interact with potential customers:

· Internet
· Advertising
· Your store or office
· Networking
· Events
· Direct Mail
· Phone

Now that you have your list of places where you engage with your customers, compare it to the following six ways of marketing on mobile:

Events
If you have a big sales event, you can remind customers on their mobiles. This will ensure they don’t forget and miss your important event.

QR Codes
QR codes are free and easy to obtain and can be scanned into any Smartphone to access your website. QR codes could be included on your flyers, business cards or advertisements.

Mobile Coupons
A mobile coupon that has an excellent offer and an expiry date will usually win you a sale. If they know the deal expires and they will never again get it at that price, it will usually be enough to prompt them into action. If there is a convenient way to pay, even better.

Most Smartphones have payment processors built into them.

Text Offers
This is different from mobile coupons in that it is just text – no codes, no graphics. Just a spur-of-the-moment offer if you need more sales for the day.

Price Comparisons
It is easy to compare prices from different places on the mobile to make sure you’re getting the best deal. To stop your customers from doing that, give it to them yourself. Send them a text comparing your price to two or three other competitors, and win the sale.

Snap and Share
Encourage your customers to take pictures of your products and share with others. Most smartphones can also share on social media like Twitter and Facebook. This way you can get extra sales from referrals. Make it into a contest if you want.

Anything you want your customers to fill out on the mobile device needs to be superfast and user-friendly. Long and drawn out is difficult on the mobile. Make it easy for them.

More and more, people are using mobile marketing because it works. You have direct contact with your customer 24/7 which he or she will welcome if you aren’t sending messages too often.

Here are 15 steps you can take to ensure a successful campaign:

1. The same as with other marketing media, you should start with deciding what your goals and objectives are; what you want to achieve. Plan for mobile – don’t just use a campaign that was developed for another media.

2. Understand the people you’re targeting, what their needs are and why they will buy.

3. Decide which action you want your customers to take. Mobile marketing is highly interactive allowing you to engage with them. Make sure your customers feel engaged.

4. Do try something new because mobile marketing is a relatively new field. Dare to be different. Yes, there always is the possibility of failure, but at least you will know what doesn’t work.

5. Don’t use it because it is technology and new. Make sure it is a well thought out advertising campaign.

6. Keep it simple. Make sure any customer can repeat your offer to another prospect in one sentence or less. All winning campaigns are simple.

7. Target several niches for maximum effect. To call your campaign effective, you need to target all your customers – do not exclude anyone.

8. Make sure your messages are relevant to ensure maximum engagement. If your messages aren’t relevant, they will not engage your customer.

9. You need a clear call to action so your customers know what to do. If they are unclear on the next step to take, you will lose them.

10. Don’t forget about your brand. You need to keep the brand in customers’ minds to build loyalty to your brand.

11. Make sure you use the opportunities that are unique to mobile, such as location-based services and text campaigns. Also offer content that is exclusive to mobile so you don’t alienate your PC readers.

12. Look for evidence that your campaign was a success and that you have achieved a return on your investment. This is, after all, why you created the campaign.

13. Is your presentation up to scratch? If not, you may lose some customers for whom this is important.

14. Don’t forget to test everything first to make sure it looks good.

15. Test results so you know what to avoid or concentrate on in future.

Mobile marketing is the trend of the future and, if you know how to use it to sell and generate leads, your business will grow.

You should market to as many media as possible to reach as many people as possible. Concentrating on mobile marketing only excluding the other media will narrow the results you can expect. Concentrate on engaging with your customer through as many media as possible.
Including other media can enhance your mobile marketing campaign. For example, when you use QR codes in your marketing, that can be scanned by customers with mobile phones.

• Not respecting the privacy of your customer
If you continually bombard your customer with push messages, and do so more than once a week without engaging them, you are going to lose them. Texting a mobile offer once a week is more than enough. When your customer subscribes he or she is literally giving you access to them 24/7. Don’t abuse it.

• Not proofreading or testing your message
Everyone makes mistakes. If you want your marketing to deliver results, make sure you know exactly how it looks. Do all the links work? Is there a phone number so they can call you back? Do the graphics show? Are the words a jumble? Not testing can be fatal for your campaign.

• Mismatching content with mobile messaging
Make sure your links to all content work on every mobile device available so everyone with a mobile phone can interact with your campaign. Don’t send someone with a normal mobile phone a link to an iPhone app. Make sure there are different versions corresponding to each mobile device.

• Building an app without a plan for promoting it
If you build an app and just wait for people to find it, you will be disappointed. When developing the app, make sure you plan how to promote it. You can use text messaging, e-mail, traditional ads and mobile advertising. You should continue to promote the app with regular updates, advertising any new features you release.

• Not targeting a specific audience or too much targeting
It is tempting to send mobile ads to everyone. However, you have a great tool you can use to target very specifically. You can decide who gets your ad: are they young? Old? Male? Female? What are their interests, geographic areas and shopping preferences? You will have a higher conversion rate if you target your ads.

However, doing this without a plan can also hurt your campaign. If you try to optimize your targeting for every possible scenario, you may try to reach groups that are too small, thereby diminishing your return on investment.

Instead, you can use the data you collect to market your messages to similar groups.

• Not adding your phone number
It is easy to forget your phone number but, as with any marketing message, your customer needs a way to contact you.

• Putting a QR code in any location where the user has no wireless access
QR codes are an easy way for a mobile phone to get your contact details or your app. However, I have seen QR codes in the strangest of places. The back of a bus, a bus shelter — how should your prospect scan it from there? Make sure you put the QR code where your customer will have easy access to it.

• Your mobile ad or app should do more than one thing
Your content should be fresh, new, exciting and only found on your app, nowhere else. Under no circumstances should its only function be to go to your website. This is because people like discovering new content and experiencing something different. Make sure they have that experience.

• Directing your customers to a non-mobile website
A common mistake for people new to mobile marketing is to direct their customers to a beautiful flash website that doesn’t work on mobile. Your customers aren’t going to hang around if they can’t even see the website.

Look out for these mistakes — you will have more success with your mobile marketing campaign.

Mastering SEO is not difficult. There are three things to remember: Keywords, sitemap and content.

Keywords
It is crucial to have the right keywords and to optimize them for the search engines — this is the foundation of SEO because all search engines use keywords on which to base their searches.

You will, therefore, want to find out what people are searching for, which keywords describe your website the best and which keywords your competitors are using. Google’s Keyword tool is ideal tool for your keyword searches. After ensuring your keyword is relevant to your website, you need to look at the monthly number of searches for your keyword. This will give you an indication of how many potential visitors there are.

Make sure you have five to 10 keywords optimized. More than that will hurt your website’s ranking. Also, your keywords need to be found in a few places of your website: headings, page titles and in the content, specifically the first paragraph. It would be great if your keyword is part of your domain name as well. This will help your rankings even further.

Sitemap
Most people equate SEO with Google because of Google’s monopoly as a search engine. Google also has totally unique features like PageRank and Google Sitemap. Google Sitemap is an important tool to use because it makes it easier for Google to crawl your website when it’s looking for fresh content. Your visitors shouldn’t be able to see the sitemap — it is an xml file only for search engine robots. When search engines find this file, they can do a more complete indexing of your site than without it.

A sitemap not only make a complete index your website, it tells the search engines how often your site is updated so they know how often to crawl it. This ensures your new changes will show up in the search engines sooner.

Google uses the sitemap you put on your website to learn about its structure and to be able to present searchers with fresh content. Adding a sitemap will help Google find, index and rank your blog or website.

Content
Good content on your website is everything. The reason for this is not only information your prospects are looking for, but the quality of prospects Google will send your way. This is why you need to make sure your content is informative, useful and engaging to keep visitors coming back for more.

Your content should be:

• Search friendly — keywords optimized, and sitemap in place.
• Easy to understand and to-the-point, otherwise your audience won’t hang around.
• Informative — this is why people are using the Internet; to get information so they can make a decision.
• Engaging — prospects should feel welcome and able to interact with you.
• Friendly with simple content — so people can better relate to it.

Without good content on your website, you are not going to succeed.

If you get these three basic steps right, you will establish a good foundation for your website’s visibility in the search engines.

Here are 15 steps you can take to ensure success:

1. The same as with other marketing media, start with deciding what your goals and objectives are; what you want to achieve. Plan for mobile – don’t just use a campaign that was developed for another media.

2. Understand the person you’re targeting, what their needs are and why he or she will buy.

3. Decide which action you want them to take. Mobile marketing is highly interactive, allowing you to engage with your customer. Make sure your customer feels engaged.

4. Try something new – mobile marketing is a relatively new field. Dare to be different. Yes, there always is the possibility of failure, but at least you will know what doesn’t work.

5. Don’t go mobile just because it is a new technology. Make sure it is a well-thought out advertising campaign.

6. Keep it simple. Make sure any customer can repeat your offer to another prospect in one sentence or less. All winning campaigns are simple.

7. Target several niches for maximum effect. To call your campaign effective, you need to target all your customers – do not exclude anyone.

8. Make sure your messages are relevant to ensure maximum engagement.

9. You need a clear call to action so your customers know what to do. If they are unclear on the next step to take, you will lose them.

10. Don’t forget about your brand. You need to keep the brand in the customers’ minds to build loyalty to your brand.

11. Make sure you use the opportunities that are unique to mobile, such as location-based services and text campaigns. Also offer content that is exclusive to mobile so you don’t alienate your PC readers.

12. Look for evidence that your campaign was a success and that you have achieved a return on your investment. This is why you created the campaign.

13. Is your presentation up to scratch? If not, you may lose some customers.

14. Don’t forget to test everything first to make sure it looks good.

15. Also, test the results so you know what to avoid or concentrate on in future.

You can go from number 30 in the search engine results to number 3 just because someone in your Google+ circles shared your link.

A link from a high ranking website can jump your post from number 9 to number 1. Clearly, we can’t afford to ignore Social Media any more.

The benefit here is that any business can rank high in the search engines regardless of their look or size.

You should already be using Social Media as a marketing strategy. However, now is the time to make sure Social Media helps your search engine optimization. Failure to use social media can cost you dearly. Your website will simply be lost in the crowd.

Here are steps you can take immediately.

1. Get a Google+ Presence Immediately

Google+ has become too important for search engine optimization to ignore. Even G+ posts, related pages and users are displaying in normal search results. When you jump a few places in the search engine rankings because someone put you in a circle, you will realize the benefit.

2. Concentrate on Increasing Your Followers and Building Relationships

Articles you write and thoughts you share can now appear in the search engine search results of your followers, even if they don’t belong to the social or bookmarking site you used to share the link. The search engines see your friendships on other networks. This means your online relationships now have a huge impact on your search engine search results.

It is therefore in your best interest to have more friends and followers on the major social networking sites.

3. Start Posting Your Articles on Social Media Straight Away

Posting your new article links to the major social networking sites now helps your blog to get indexed faster. The last blog I made for a client was indexed within a week.

To get indexed even faster, you need to make the posting automatic. You can use a service like Onlywire for this.

4. Focus on Sharing Your Content with Your Followers

Sharing your blog posts and having your friends share them to their networks makes your posts go viral which means the networks of your friends will be able to see and share them too. This will boost your search engine results tremendously.

5. Add Like and +1 Buttons to Absolutely Everything

Even advertisements now have +1 buttons next to them.

6. Use “Rel=me” & “Rel=author” Tags

Ask your web designer to add the “Rel=me” and “Rel=author” tags to your “single.php” file to tell the search engines that you are the author of your work. This will cause your photo to appear next to your article in the search results. and will encourage people who like what they read to click on your photo and connect with you.

7. Get a Pinterest Account

Pinterest is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with and gives higher search engine results than Twitter, apparently. For this to work, you need to optimize each picture with a keyword.

8. Add Social Media Buttons to Your Site

You need to have social media buttons at the bottom of every post so that people who like your content have a way of sharing it. You need the usual ones like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ but also Pinterest and Stumbleupon.

Again, Onlywire is quite good and if you install the Onlywire Plugin to your blog, all the social media and bookmarking buttons are there and people just need to open it and click on the one they want.

Because social media is becoming increasingly important in search engine results, you owe it to yourself and your business to get a social media strategy in place.

Pinterest is still very young but even so, many marketers have already realized that pinboards equal publicity. There are ten things that probably aren’t so well known about Pinterest.

1. You are already on Pinterest. People are pinning pictures off your website if they like it. You can stop people from repinning your pins by adding a code to your website.

2. Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site ever. It is already the third most popular social media site. Pinterest boasted 104 million visitors in March this year, with Twitter just ahead with 182 million and LinkedIn just behind with 86 million visitors. This is remarkable growth if you consider Pinterest only started up in March of 2010.

3. 65% of users are women. Pinterest has the reputation of being favored by the women-folk, but men are catching on quickly. Early in 2012 the percentages were 65% women and 35% men.

4. The top three categories are home, fashion, and crafts.

5. The average visitor spends more time there. When it comes to the number of visitors, Facebook is still king. However, Pinterest beats Facebook in the time spent on-site category. The average Facebook visitor spends 12 minutes per day on Facebook, whereas on Pinterest the average visitor spends 16 minutes per day on the site.

6. Self-Promotion is now allowed on Pinterest. From a marketing perspective, it was difficult to use Pinterest when self promotion was not allowed. However, clever marketers figured out a way to just share valuable content, keeping it fun and interesting. This is what you can learn from them: People will be attracted to you when you keep content interesting and fun.

7. You can now pin videos. You can do this by pinning a YouTube or Vimeo symbol.

8. Pinterest also uses hash tags. This is not yet widely used. If you mark an image with a hash tag, it allows others to see every image that has been pinned under the same name.

9. Link building. Links that are attached to images are no-follow links. To get around this, you should use coding in the description of the image.

10. You can sell things. When you add a figure in the description of the image, Pinterest adds a flag to that automatically and shows the purchase price.

You may have wondered if Pinterest is worth your effort and time. It actually saves you time as you can link your Pinterest account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, making it only once you have to share. It is a great way to share socially and visually, and it is great way to explore as well.

Take another look at Pinterest as a marketing tool. You will be glad you did.