After careful analysis of our website activity, we decided to develop a mobile friendly website.  This will allow you to review our most recent client successes, browse open job positions, and most importantly, submit requests for marketing consultants – wherever and whenever you want!

Grab your smartphone or tablet and start browsing our website today!

Lastly, watch this video to see how you can make the website even more accessible by adding it the home screen of your mobile device(s).

What do you think of our mobile site?!

February 2013 e-Newsletter Topics:

• McKinley’s Mobile Website
• Create a Successful e-Newsletter
• Evolution of e-Commerce
• Featured McKinley Consultant

View the e-newsletter here.

McKinley Marketing Partners is happy to announce that we will be rolling out a mobile-friendly website in the coming months and we are glad to be a part of that 52%!

Should your company have a mobile optimized site or utilize mobile advertisements to reach customers?

Here are a few good reasons why your company should go mobile:

1.      Gain a competitive advantage.  Having a mobile website allows clients and prospects to view your business’s website via a mobile device that can be accessed at anytime and anywhere.  Many businesses may be hesitant to employ mobile strategies, because they don’t know enough about its capabilities and/or are skeptical about its return on investment (ROI).  McKinley was prompted to design a mobile website platform after we ran a web analytics report and learned that we had a 99% year-over-year increase in mobile device users visiting our website.  A simple analytics report might also let you know if it’s time for your organization to go mobile.

2.      Strengthen email marketing campaigns.  If you have an email marketing campaign, chances are your email will be viewed for the first time on a smartphone.  Noticing a drop in your response or click rates?  It may be because your email template is not mobile friendly; images may not appear or the content may be too large or small for a phone screen.  To leverage the full potential of your email marketing campaign, switch to a responsive email design that automatically adjusts the layout to mobile device screens.  Responsive design templates are currently used by newsletter platforms such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor.

3.      Improved mobile marketing analytics.  Google Analytics recently developed a tool, Universal Analytics (UA), to provide better insights on how visitors interact with a website using smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and digital appliances.  It also tracks online and offline customer contact points such as marketing campaigns, sales calls, and store visits.  Before UA, marketers were only able to measure a visitor’s interaction with their website using a desktop or laptop computer and a smartphone.  With UA, marketers can obtain a more complete vision of their entire marketing funnel. Contact your technology and website team to determine if this new tool could be beneficial to your marketing efforts.

These are a just a few reasons why McKinley is going mobile-friendly.  Does it make sense for your company to go mobile in 2013?

Here are the top three marketing devices, in my humble opinion, to be thankful for:

1.)    YouTube

YouTube provides companies with a platform to create videos to enhance marketing and advertising programs.  It is also a great tool for customer service.  Specifically, companies can conduct interviews with experts, post video footage from presentations given, showcase their products and company cultural, and provide clients with how-to videos.  ComScore reported U.S. Internet users watched 39 billion online videos in September 2012.  Online video usage is increasing and data has been collected from the past three years to support a marketer’s usage of YouTube to drive revenue.  Here’s some great video usage data to convince your company to start a YouTube channel today!

Oh and how could I forget!  YouTube has also introduced us to Nicole Westbrook, the star behind the song, “It’s Thanksgiving!”  It’s not my fault if this song gets stuck in your head for two days.

2.)    Blogs

Blogging is a powerful tool to create a community around your favorite topic or area of expertise.  A few blogs have turned into popular movies (Julie & Julia) and successful books (Post Secret).  Thanks to WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, you can set up a blog in a few clicks and have an online space to share your passions and knowledge with the world.  Blogging can be highly profitable for businesses.  A company blog gives businesses the opportunity to not only demonstrate their expertise and promote business partners, but also to improve SEO and SEM to generate revenue for the company.  Check out the New York Times blog, You’re the Boss, to learn more about the art of business blogging.

In a little more than four years, Nate Silver went from a little known statistics blogger to a worldwide phenomena and established data/political guru.  This was all thanks to his blog FiveThirtyEight where he began publishing analyses and predictions of the 2008 United States presidential election.  His popularity caught the attention of the New York Times who purchased licensing rights to his blog in 2010.  There are already movie rumors that Hollywood will be adapting his story for the big screen.

3.)    Smartphones

Smartphone usage is increasing by the day.  On September 11, 2012, The Pew Research Center reported, “45% of American adults own smartphones. They are particularly popular with young adults; 66% of those ages 18-29 own smartphones.”

A smartphone allows users to talk on the phone, check email, ‘check in’ on FourSquare, check the stock market, check the weather, update their Facebook status, pay bills and etc.  We should be thankful for smartphones, because they also allow users to take high quality pictures and immediately share those pictures through multiple social media tools like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.  Studies have shown people respond and decipher pictures much more quickly than text and these social media tools have revolutionized the power of a picture.  It is recommended that every marketer should use visual content within their marketing content mix.   HubSpot has put together ‘19 Reasons You Should Include Visual Content in Your Marketing [Data]’.

Pictures have also allowed pet owners to take snapshots of their pet’s worst household misdemeanors and reveal them on Shameyourpet.com.

The guidelines state that consumers should have the information of how the data is collected and what it is used for written at a level that the average consumer can understand. Addressing the issue of sharing personal data with third parties, the MMA strongly suggests that consumers be made aware of to where and how the data is shared. The MMA guidelines also state that users should fully understand opting out policies for everything from uninstalling the application to opting out of giving information to help the implementation of targeted advertising campaigns.

In the end, these guidelines should be helpful to marketers rather than constraining. These guidelines take the first step in allowing mobile marketing to become a more accepted marketing platform, which in turn should increase its effectiveness and usefulness for both consumers and marketers.