Archive for March, 2010
Building Your Mobile Presence
Posted by admin in Mobile Marketing, Uncategorized on March 19th, 2010
Like with any marketing “endeavor”, before you can begin “construction” on your mobile presence, you should first build a solid foundation with a mobile strategy. Determine your target audience, the best ways to target them and what type of experience you want them to have. But, remember, the “experience” and information that your target audience seeks will be different from when they are sitting at a computer.
Smartphone Demographics:
BlackBerry: The typical user is a “salt-and-pepper” businessman who uses the phone primarily for email and messaging. He doesn’t surf the web much and doesn’t use many apps, save a few utility programs.
iPhone: Tech-obsessed, wealthy (highest percentage of users rake in more than $100,000), less likely to have kids (62% don’t) and are an active bunch.
Android: It’s growing fast, so these stats can change, but for now, it’s a phone for geeks – 73% of its users are male and 33% are single.
Palm: Most popular with older users who advertisers assume were fans of the old Palm Pilot – but there are fewer and fewer of them. Its smartphone market fell from 8.3% to 6.1% from September to December 2009.
Smartphone technology is continuing to expand by the day, so it’s important to develop and implement your mobile strategy to reach your target audience, but remain flexible to meet the ever-changing technology.
Mobile Web Design
Every company should have a mobile website. People are beginning to expect information to be instantly at their fingertips, and having a mobile website can give your audience the information they want and help you gain the leading edge over your competition.
The Marion Group can provide your company with custom mobile web design that allows your new mobile website to have the same look and feel of your “regular” site. However, in certain ways, your new mobile website should be different than your regular website.
The most obvious difference between your regular site and your mobile site is that your mobile site should be “skinny” – minimal images, only necessary content, the quickest and easiest way to contact you and maybe a map of your location, if it will benefit the user. By keeping your mobile site “skinny” and pared down, you can decrease the load time of your site on the user’s mobile device, creating faster access to your information, and making the information easier to locate on a teeny-tiny screen.
Advantages to having a mobile website:*
- Mobile websites can work on 100% of mobile devices that have browsers, allowing you to reach a broader audience
- The user experience can be optimized to highlight your common denominator
- You can publish content when you want – no approval is needed from the manufacturer app store
- It doesn’t require your customer to download a new version every time you update the site (like a mobile app does)
- It can be cheaper to develop because you don’t need to port it across different operating systems
- Marion can gather metrics regarding visitors to your mobile site and determine your return on investment (ROI) on your mobile efforts
Mobile App Development
Mobile apps aren’t for every company, but under the right circumstances, a mobile app can be an excellent supplemental effort to your mobile strategy. A mobile app can give your customer a richer experience than your mobile web site could ever provide.
And that brings up an important fact: your mobile app should not be a repeat of your mobile site, but, again, it should have the same “look and feel” as your other marketing efforts.
Advantages to having a mobile app:*
- Mobile apps allow you to build a richer experience for your customer without affecting data speeds
- Mobile apps can take advantage of your phone’s features like GPS, camera and voice
- When self-contained, mobile apps can work offline when the user is not connected to the mobile Web
- Mobile apps are relatively inexpensive to build and maintain, given only one operating system is involved
- Mobile apps can become an extension of your brand
For more information on how The Marion Group can assist your company in developing a mobile marketing strategy, building a mobile website or creating a mobile app, give us a call at 713.623.6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.
* MobileMarketer.com and Lenati.com
Kobelco Cranes North America’s New Website Promotes Dealer Sales and Service
Posted by admin in Web Design on March 15th, 2010
Marion recently completed the design, search engine optimization and programming for Kobelco Cranes North America, Inc.’s new website at kobelcocranesnorthamerica.com, which was presented at the AED show this past January.
Kobelco specializes in selling Lattice-Boom Crawler Cranes; however, all sales are handled by dealers. The goal of the new website was to improve the way dealer information was presented and drive traffic to the dealers. Since dealers are determined by counties, Marion developed an interactive county-based map that allows users to click on the appropriate county and review contact information for that dealer. The dealer locator application is intuitive and simple to use.
Additionally, Marion repositioned the homepage message to reflect Kobelco’s main differentiator, a lower cost of ownership. The site was also flattened to allow an easier understanding of the benefits Kobelco has to offer. The crane models and images can be viewed directly from the homepage with a quick guide of the product differentiators. Users can easily click to crane product pages and find complete, detailed information about each lattice-boom crawler crane’s features and transportation plans.
The site has become a valuable resource for customers and dealers, especially with the addition of crane training videos.
Since the site has been so successful for the U.S market, Kobelco wanted to make it available as a resource to the Latin American market. Marion just launched the Spanish and Portuguese versions of their site at kobelcocranesnorthamerica.com.
Future updates include adding a Ground Bearing Pressure Calculator, which will help determine safety requirements for crane placement.
From the Kobelco North America team:
“Thank you and congrats guys! The new website is incredible. We have had several calls coming from dealers this morning about the site and it is rave reviews! Also our service guys have already been sending people in the field to the videos section of the site and they were happy to get on and look at specific information they needed. That was quick. We’ve made them happy. Very impressed. You guys made us look good!!
I want to thank you for all the hard work that has been put into this; seeing the end result, it has been well worth it!
I know we still have some pieces to work on, and a few big ones for the future, but it has been a real joy working with all of you and I look forward to continuing……
Thanks again for everything!”
To view this website, go to http://www.kobelcocranesnorthamerica.com/Xdefault.asp
More web designs by Marion can be viewed at marion.com/portfolio.php.
For your own custom web design, contact The Marion Group at 713.623.6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.
.com Turns 25
Posted by admin in Web Design on March 4th, 2010
Marion would like to wish a very “Happy Birthday” to .com who turns 25 on March 15th. That’s right, it’s been 25 years since the conception of .com.
VeriSign, the global registry operator for .com and .net, released an industry brief discussing the performance of .com and other Top Level Domain Names (TDLs).
In the past 25 years the Internet has transformed lives around the globe. It has radically altered our world-view by providing access to people, places, information and things that at one time were unattainable and unknowable. It has made us all virtual explorers not only on our own journey but also, collectively, as part of others’. It has narrowed the definition of neighbor to mean not simply someone who lives next door but rather a person in London, Moscow, or Beijing with whom one shares a common experience, shared interest, or personal struggle. In doing all these things, the Internet has opened our minds to a world of endless possibilities, created new found opportunity, and inspired action like nothing else before it.
In our of .com’s birthday, we thought that we would post some fun and interesting facts about .com and other TDLs:
- The first .com was assigned to symbolics.com on March 15, 1985
- At first, .cor was proposed as the domain name for corporation, but when the final version came out, it switched to .com
- 2 ½ years after the first registration, only 100 total .com domain name registrations existed
- By 1992, there were still less that 15,000 .com domain names registered
- 88% of .com and .net domain names resolve to a website, meaning that an end-user visiting that domain name would find a website
- At the close of 2009, there were more than 192 million domain name registrations, an increase of nearly 15 million since the close of 2008
- While .com continues to have the highest number of total registrations, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net and .uk (United Kingdom) follow
- While .com actually ended the fourth quarter of 2009 with a 1% decline, previously it had seen growth as high as 467% year over year
- The fourth quarter of 2009, VeriSign saw 52 million Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day, with peaks as high as 61 million per day
- Marion received their domain June 16, 1995; Google.com received their domain name in 1997; Linkedin.com received their domain name in 2002; Flickr.com received their domain name in 2003; Youtube.com received their domain name in 2005
When interviewed, Jack Haverty, one of the Internet pioneers at MIT, speaks about his amazement about the creation of the Internet:
“I don’t recall anybody ever thinking we were creating an organizational structure to encompass hundreds of millions of entities covering the entire planet in support of all human activities. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to last for 30+ years, even as an experiment. It just happened to turn out that way.”
For your own .com and custom web design, contact The Marion Group at 713.623.6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.
See the entire VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief.
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