Location based marketing (LBM) is a direct marketing strategy that delivers targeted communications based on where your audience is standing. With the proliferation of mobile devices in today’s market, there is tremendous potential to leverage this emerging technology. To help you navigate through the geofences and beacons, we’ve developed a cheat sheet that outlines these and more! (more…)
Introducing the new Starmark eTips app — an interactive library of hundreds of marketing tips, organized by category (branding, advertising, direct, interactive, mobile, public relations, analytics).
The eTips app complements our fourth edition of the eTips book series, 50 eTips for Market Leaders. With the new app version of eTips, our clients, partners and friends can now receive our weekly tips right on their mobile devices, plus they’ll have instant access to Starmark’s full library of eTips.
From the latest in Google’s mobile algorithm updates to the impact of influential social media celebrities on your brand – you’ll learn from members of our team who live and breathe these concepts every day. From geo-fencing to beacons, the app features several location-based marketing technologies, and when you visit Starmark, you’ll see it in action!
The Starmark eTips app is available at the App Store for iOS and on Google Play for Android. Download today and keep up to date with the latest developments across all things marketing.
Marketing with native mobile apps and location based technologies is an important part of any integrated marketing program. Often written about and discussed, technologies like push notifications, Beacons and geo-fencing are a lot easier to understand when you can have a demonstration of them in action.
Before developing any mobile app, at its core it needs to be useful to the users who you want to download it. If the app is not compelling, it will be difficult to expand adoption. So, the Starmark Innovation Lab brainstormed and outlined a mobile app that is not only packed full of cool tech that’s easy to demo, but also a useful marketing reference guide as well.
One resource that Starmark has been building upon for over five years is our library of eTips. Creating an app that could include all of the eTips as a searchable reference helps our technology demonstration app meet this requirement. With over 200 tips, and new ones added every week, we decided to build the Starmark eTips App and make a useful reference guide.
We also wanted the many location based technology demonstrations built into the app to be useful.
To demonstrate geo-fencing we created a “Directions” tab in the app to for users to get directions to our office. When users are outside the geo-fence, the app provides driving directions Maps. When users enter the geo-fence – which is about 2 blocks around our downtown office – the app alters the content on the Directions screen to focus on nearby parking, the valet, and the location of the office front door.
To demonstrate beacons, we installed several around the office which are configured to compliment a tour of the office. Not only did we want to demonstrate how beacons work, but also some of the possibilities of marketing via beacons. One is setup to drive users to video content, an example TV commercial produced by Starmark. Another is setup to demonstrate a social connection by driving users to check in to Starmark on Facebook. The third is setup to prompt users to download an App.
And, if you have not yet downloaded the Starmark eTips app while you are on an office tour, we also setup a demonstration of Smart Posters which have an NFC antenna built into them. This allows Android users to hold their phone over the poster and receive a prompt to download our App. Another demonstration of location based marketing technology that can be applied to any piece of paper, from a poster to a name badge.
Lastly, a feature most people are familiar with but still has a wide variety of marketing applications is push notifications. With the Starmark eTips app we can notify users when a new eTip is loaded, or for other announcements and event reminders.
The Starmark eTips app is available in the App Store for iOS and on Google Play for Android. Download today and keep up to date with the latest developments across all things marketing.
Reprinted from the South Florida Business Journal.
A few months ago, the Apple Watch was the new technology on the horizon, and marketers wondered if the timepiece industry would ever be the same. Today, we are looking at another potential game-changer: virtual reality headsets. (more…)
Periscope is a new app launched by Twitter that lets you broadcast live video streaming from your phone and because of its integration with Twitter, you have an instant community of followers to share your live streams with. (more…)
At the end of June, Starmark advanced the Marine Industries Association of South Florida’s efforts in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale with a major triumph! By raising the association’s profile through news coverage and strategic editorial placements, the Florida Legislature and Governor Rick Scott signed off on an incentive for visiting boaters around the world to have their boat repairs done in the state with a $60,000 sales/service tax cap. (more…)
An executive dashboard has become a very useful tool to help keep executives and key stakeholders abreast of the company’s ongoing performance for a specific effort or for the organization as a whole. In a nutshell, dashboards are a visual representation of performance that gives executives a quick and easy way to view results in real-time. (more…)
Reprinted from the Sun Sentinel.
The communications firm that dreamed up bikinis in ice cubes and a Beachmobile filled with models to promote Broward tourism has been hired to develop a new brand image for the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. (more…)
Cumbersome URLs are not only a challenge for marketers to remember, but rest assured the public at large isn’t going to remember them either. So what’s a marketer to do? A vanity URL , if you remember, is a unique web address that can be branded and used in marketing executions. The main reason people use these types of URLs is to facilitate Internet traffic flow by helping to find a specific domain that may be difficult to remember.
Some of the reasons brands use this approach include:
In recent years, “URL Shorteners” have also become a popular way to create a vanity URL. Shortening the URL is useful for easier memorability as well as when you have a strict limit on character counts, such as Twitter. There are many services out there that can shorten any URL and track the clicks on it, in fact, you can even register your own branded shortener in some cases. Be careful when using these offline though as some of them are case sensitive.
Whether you want to drive traffic to your website or your social media channels, consider the use of vanity URLs to increase your performance and remain top of mind.
Reprinted from South Florida Business Journal.
Most of us with smartphones have been surprised by the occasional highly targeted mobile ads that not only reflect our interests, but also our location. (more…)
We’ve asked three CMOs to share their thoughts about this updated list of critical success factors (for them) when they’re in the process of selecting a successful agency partner.
Whenever Google updates its algorithm, it always generates a lot of buzz!
Our first Mobile eTip highlighted “Responsive design and why is it important” to have a mobile friendly site in today’s world. Although some have coined Google’s latest update as “Mobilegeddon“, it’s all not doom and gloom however, you may not like the results. (more…)