So how you do figure out your marketing budget? Let’s take a look at some general stats. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) suggests between 2% – 10% of sales, while other figures suggest between 1% – 30%. Startups may spend up to 50% the first year. Take these figures for what they are because the right marketing budget will be specific to your business, size, industry, how fast you want to grow and other factors.

Often, small businesses estimate their sales revenue, cost-of-goods, overhead and salaries, and then gross profit. Anything left is considered available funds for marketing support. That’s not such a good idea. … If you are the new competitor in the marketplace, you will have to spend more aggressively to establish your market share objective.”
- SCORE

Once you have a marketing plan in place, an important next step is to define your marketing budget. While a marketing plan will give your business marketing goals – essentially this is your blueprint – a marketing budget will help you figure out how you are going to achieve your goals by attaching a realistic spend. Don’t worry, you can tweak this throughout the year as needs adjust. For example, you may decide to reallocate more funds towards mobile advertising because it is generating better ROI than email marketing. Good marketing involves continuous optimization.

Companies go about determining their annual marketing spend in several ways:

1. Percent of Revenue.

2. Percent of Net Sales.

3. Flat Budget.

Budgets typically cover marketing staffing, advertising, PR, website development/optimization, print and events. Over the last several years, businesses have been shifting more dollars away from traditional marketing (e.g. TV, print, radio) towards digital marketing (e.g. SEO, social media, paid search, mobile advertising, videos). How you divvy up your budget depends on your objectives and the tactics that support it. This graph illustrates the shift in spend.

We’d like to hear from you on how you calculate your marketing budget. Also happy to talk one:one if you need some assistance coming up with a smart marketing budget.

Research by Equity Research found that two out of three mobile users have encountered problems when accessing websites on their phones over the past 12 months. Load time is the top complaint, and more than half reported trouble accessing a site from the phone. While these are legitimate reasons for considering a mobile-friendly site, not all businesses need one. Google’s interest in offering this is it get more people to create mobile-friendly sites, which in turn allows Google to offer and sell more mobile ads.

They did a nice job of explaining the why, what and how of mobile sites – check it out: http://www.howtogomo.com.

Source: Google GoMo

This is a quick tip that we wanted to share with you. Have you tried to re-tweet a post and add your commentary only to find that there is no space left?

While 140 characters is a tough quota to stay within, keep your readers in mind and try to leave room in your tweets. Use tricks like acronyms and abbreviations where you can and use discretion so you don’t end up sounding like a rapper or a 16 year old kid.

Here’s an example of a tweet that is 138 characters to show you how quickly you can hit the limit.

Common Twitter Slang:
LOL – Laugh Out Loud
IMHO – In My Humble Opinion (also common is IMO)
THX – Thanks
U – You
R – Are
BRB – Be Right Back
RT – Retweet
b/c – Because
fab – Fabulous

There are many others that we haven’t included. What are some other common Twitter slang that you’ve seen?

50% of mobile queries have local intent, and 46% of mobile queries pertain to infotainment. This means that consumers are searching when they’re on the go, when they’re looking to find news and movie theaters. In short, they’re ready to take action or make a purchase — they’re using the web to figure out what to do and where to go next. Not surprisingly, mobile search tends to pick up on the evenings, on the weekends and during weekday lunch hours.
[SJM: Are you showing up on mobile search?]

Mobile has a few advantages over the desktop: click-to-call and GPS search, for instance. Over 500,000 advertisers on Google are running click-to-call campaigns — those ads see a 6 to 8% increase in average click-through rates than ads running without the click-to-call feature.
[SJM: Click-to-Call is a relatively new form of performance advertising. It's typically free for your customers to call you via their PC, and the fee gets passed on to advertisers. We can help you integrate a Click-to-Call campaign - give us a shout!]

Google shared this data on the type of searches conducted on mobile devices:

• 15% of searches are related to “Consumer Electronics”
• More than 29% of searches are related to “Restaurants”
• More than 16% of searches are related “Auto”

[SJM: Good news if you're in one of these categories. Searches on mobile apps fall into a different category in our view, which we will share more on in another post.]

If you’re currently running mobile search campaigns, what have you learned so far that could help others?

Mobile Technical Requirements

Google, the largest search engine with about 90% global search share, essentially says there are no mobile-specific technical requirements from a SEO standpoint because their Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile view desktop and smartphones the same:

For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.

That being said, Google calls out a difference between “smartphones” and “mobile phones”, the latter being phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages (think the phones your parents or grandparents might be using!). Googlebot-Mobile does crawl mobile phone content, in which case following their technical requirements would be helpful. This might be a good time to take a look at your site analytics for the composition of smartphone and mobile phone users.

Mobile URLs

You may have seen mobile URLs like m.sitename.com in increasing use. Don’t worry, you don’t have to run out just yet to get yourself one of these hot off the griddle. The URL structure does not matter to Google from a technical standpoint.

For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too. For example, if you redirect mobile users from www.example.com to m.example.com, that will be recognized by Googlebot-Mobile and both websites will be crawled and added to the correct index. In this case, use a 301 redirect for both users and Googlebot-Mobile.

If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.

Having two different domains with similar content is bad for SEO. If you must have separate content for mobile, just be sure to do a 301-redirect to your primary domain. Don’t just throw all that SEO hard work out the window!

Multi-Sites for Multi-Screens

This is another misnomer that we hope to save you time, expense and headache. When was the last time you created multiple versions of your website for different PCs and monitor sizes? Mobile screens are just smaller versions of desktop screens. Okay, while that might be too simplistic, the easiest trick is to use device detection and canonicals. John Mueller from Google best tells it:

John Mueller – @Paul If you have “smartphone” content (which we see as normal web-content, as it’s generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don’t need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect .

In Summary

The same fundamental SEO best practices for a desktop website applies to mobile sites. If you want your users to get the most out of their mobile experience, then build an app. If you have any mobile optimization stories and myths to share, do tell.

On a slightly different topic, we’ll cover mobile search next. Google recently announced that mobile optimization affects how ads are served. We’ll give you our perspective, so stay tuned!

Just what does “mobile marketing” mean? Wikipedia offers a few definitions:

Marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a cell phone using SMS Marketing.

Mobile Marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and
                                       relevant manner through any mobile device or network.

Before deciding that your business needs to run out and get a mobile app and mobile website, STOP. Think about what makes the most sense for your users and how they would engage with your business, products and services through a mobile device. According to Jakob Nielsen, a web usability expert, two very common use cases are those who simply want to kill time while waiting for something, and others who have some goal to accomplish with minimal time (like checking email on the phone and saving time consuming e-newsletters for the laptop or desktop). People don’t use mobile for research or comparing large amounts of information (at least not today).

There are certain fundamentals to keep in mind when marketing on mobile devices:

• Focus, speed and usability
• Focus by keeping content simple and ultra-short. The best mobile experiences do less than their traditional website counterparts, but do them better.
• Speed matters especially on mobile devices because people are on the go and want information quickly and without having to wait.
• Usability is about making it easy for users to get the information they need.
• Devices come in varying screen resolutions, definitions and orientations. Rather than develop a website just for the iPad or Android, go with a responsive website that allows your site to automatically adjust to a devices resolution, orientation and feature set.

If you don’t remember anything else, just keep in mind these key tenets: focus, speed and usability. Stay tuned for more mobile marketing topics, best practices and tips-n-tricks. We’re listening to your requests and mobile is definitely on your (and our) minds!

In the meantime, show off your mobile websites and apps by sending them to us at hello@strawberryjammarketing.com. We’ll pick some to share with you the next time.

• who doesn’t love strawberry jam? men, women, old, young, americans, koreans – it is universally appealing
• it’s a name that is easy to remember (how often have you scratched your head trying to recall the galactical name of a company you came across once… recall techzolon inc?)
• strawberry jam is sticky, and we want to be sticky all around – our name, with marketing strategies, ideas, clients, employees and in the minds of customers

We’re sharing these mobile marketing stats from the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

1. The growth of the iPhone is 10 times faster than the growth of America Online.

2. It takes 26 hours for the average person to report a lost wallet. It takes 68 minutes for them to report a lost phone.

3. There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. 5.1 billion of them own a cell phone, but only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush.

4. In some countries, there are more mobile subscriptions than there are people. (How can this be? It’s because some people own more than one mobile phone.)

5. It takes 90 minutes for the average person to respond to an email. It takes 90 seconds for the average person to respond to a text message.

6. 70% of all mobile searches result in action within 1 hour.

7. Mobile coupons get 10 times the redemption rate of traditional coupons.

8. There are more mobile phones on the planet than there are TVs.

9. 91% of all U.S. citizens have their mobile device within reach 24/7.

(Source: Mobile Marketing Association)

Mobile Marketing Takeaways

To understand mobile marketing you have to try it for yourself. The next time you see a QR code, scan it and see what the experience is like and think of ways it might help your business. Sign-up for text updates from one of your service providers, say your phone guy like AT&T, and see how they leverage texting to keep you informed. I recently got a short text from my phone provider with a reminder that the bill is due on x-date. Play around with different mobile apps on your iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. and ask yourself if your offering could benefit from a mobile application and in what ways. Oh, and don’t forget to optimize your Website for mobile viewing. More and more people are pulling up Websites through their smart phones and tablet devices; if they can’t view your Website properly, they’re going to go next door to your competitor.

We’d love to hear how you have used mobile marketing and the lessons learned.