Mobile Marketing Potential For Local Business in Canada

According to the “Small Business Technology Poll” in US from AT&T, mobile and wireless technologies such as smartphones, Wi-Fi hotspots and laptop data cards are becoming more important for small-business owners.

More than one-fifth of respondents said they could not be in business at all without wireless technologies, and a further 43% claimed it would be a major challenge. That makes mobile and wireless critical for about two-thirds of small businesses. This reflects the increase in use of mobile and wireless tech among small businesses over the past two years.

You must be asking how’s the mobile usage between Canadians.

In 2008, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) commissioned Harris/Decima to assess the penetration of wireless phones among Canadian households and to help them understand key usage trends, behaviors, and attitudes surrounding wireless phones.

The results from the 2008 study reveal that not only has wireless phone usage increased significantly over the past 10 years, but that the way in which wireless phones are used has also changed a fair bit.

Text messaging and taking pictures tops the list of the most common activities that are performed with cellular phones (excluding voice calls). Canadians use mobile phones to send or receive text message at 44% of the total usage; to take pictures at 36% usage; to search on the internet at 7% usage.

Since more and more people use mobile phone to browse the internet, especially searching for local information, i.e. local weather, local news, local restaurants and stores, there are huge potentials for local businesses to approach their potential buyers through mobile marketing.

In a press release dated February 24, 2009, BIA/Kelsey predicted that mobile local search ad revenues in the U.S. will grow to $1.3 billion by 2013, from $20 million in 2008, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 130.5 percent.

Additionally, BIA/Kelsey also predicts that mobile local searches will make up for 35% of all searches in 2013, up from 28% in 2008.

“As mobile data consumption rises, we expect local marketing to be a big winner,” said Michael Boland, program director, Mobile Local Media, The Kelsey Group.

Canada Internet Users

Canada’s Internet population continues to grow – by 2013, it will hit 25.9 million, or nearly 75% of the entire nation. That’s is really impressing. The total population as of January 2009 is around 33.5 million, while 69.2% of them (23 million) are internet users.

Many of these people are among the world’s most committed Internet users, spending 45 hours or more online each month. Since over 70% of the internet users are searching for local related content according to Google, local business marketers should be adapting to the online search surge.

While nearly 65% of consumers in the country own a mobile phone, they do not prize them as highly as Americans do. And the majority do not feel compelled to pay for a data package to surf the Web while away from home.

But traditional media isn’t dead — television still dominates, especially in the highly desirable over-35 audience.

(resource: emarketer)

Does Your Business Have Multichannel Marketing?

In the early days of online shopping, the big retail chains were slow to invest in an e-commerce channel because they thought it would cannibalize their store sales. Eventually they realized the Internet was not a threat, but an opportunity. Now retail chains account for a sizable share of total online sales.

Multichannel retailers (with retail chains or catalog/call centers) accounted for 56% of the Web sales generated by the Internet Retailer Top 500 Websites, and the magazine estimated that the sales of the 500 largest Websites represented 74% of total sales by online retailers in 2008.

Retailers covet multichannel shoppers because they spend more than single-channel shoppers.

Today, many retailers conduct business in multiple channels—brick-and-mortar stores, Websites, catalogs and call centers—but few are adept at coordinating these channels.

The Multichannel Retailing enables retailers to offer a superior shopping experience and gain more loyal customers—and more profit.

Favorite Leisure Activity Different from Male to Female

This is a report from “Magid Media Futures” report by Frank N. Magid Associates. It shows,

For men, the most popular leisure activity was watching TV, followed by using the Internet, playing console games, and sports and exercise.

Surfing the Net was the most popular activity for female Web users, followed by watching TV, reading books and listening to music.

Girls ages 12 to 17 were more likely than average to say their favorite thing to do was listen to music and send text messages.

For both sexes, going online and watching TV were the top two leisure activities. Least popular were reading print media, text messaging and talking on mobile and home phones.

With the exception of those ages 55 to 64, more women said going online was their favorite leisure activity than men of the same age.

Why people go online

According to Ruder Finn, 100% of US Internet users surveyed in Q2 2009 went online to pass the time.

Other popular reasons were education (96%), connecting with others (92%), researching (89%) and sharing (86%).

The least common intentions when logging on were to make purchases (33%), manage finances (30%), comparison shop (28%) and join causes (26%).

With more and more consumers being aware of the advantages of shopping online, and the way of comparison shopping, local businesses are going to face even more competition unless they take actions to start marketing themselves online.

iPhone vs BlackBerry, What’s Your Pick?

Apple hits the sweet spot.

According to the “Smartphone Usage and Brand Study” from Crowd Science, 13% of mobile phone users surveyed worldwide (with approximately half from the US) use iPhones, overtaking Blackberry at 9%.

Not only are iPhone owners more satisfied—and more brand-loyal—than any other smartphone users, they use the most smartphone features.

Highly satisfied customers add up to big brand equity for Apple. Fully 82% of iPhone users told Crowd Science they would probably or definitely purchase an iPhone again, and 97% would recommend the device to someone else.

What’s more, 38% of smartphone users without an iPhone said they would probably or definitely buy one next, compared with just 14% of non-BlackBerry users who would purchase a BlackBerry.

The most commonly used smartphone functions, on average, were the Internet (80% of respondents), camera (74%) and e-mail (73%).

Web surfing, of course, it’s one of iphone’s biggest advantages. Nowadays, people use build-in camera a lot. What do they usually do with it? Record videos and upload them to tons of video sites. It is fun and it is one of the most powerful marketing ways: video marketing.

Video marketing is a must to build credibility with your potential customers no matter whether it’s a live one or recorded one. And it is pretty easy to do: use your build in camera (iphone or blackberry or many other cell phone), introduce you and your business in front of the camera, then record it. After that, upload the video to some video sites, i.e. youtube.com, dailymotion.com, yahoo video, etc.

As part of my consulting service, I also provide video marketing services for local businesses. I record and make professional looking videos, upload them to your site and broadcast them to hundreds of video sites. Contact me for details.

Home Broadband Is A Must Even In Today’s Downtune

Consumers of all income levels are cutting spending because of the economy. Where will they trim the fat first?

Strategy Analytics surveyed household decision-makers to find out.

When it came to home entertainment and communications budgets for the next year, 69% of the households said they would either keep or increase their spending on home broadband.

Other services, including pay TV and landline phones, were not so lucky. But mobile data plans were most vulnerable.

Nearly one-half of respondents (48%) said they would drop the mobile data services completely if forced to scale back, while a further 17% would move to a lower-tier plan to save money.

“These results suggest that, while American consumers consider home broadband service to be a vital utility, they see mobile data service as simply a ‘nice to have,’” said David Mercer of Strategy Analytics.

According to The Pew Internet & American Life Project, 22% of US adults cut back on mobile service in the year prior to March/April 2009 to save money. Just 9% canceled or cut back on Internet subscriptions.

Ask yourself: will you survive without using internet everyday?

Will your local business still survive tomorrow without sharing even a tiny portion of trillions of searching traffic everyday from internet?