If you’ve visited more than one website on your iPhone or other various smartphone, you can probably tell the difference between a responsive website and one that is not. How? Well, for starters if the site is easy to read on your smartphone, you are probably viewing a website built with a responsive design.

So, what is responsive design? As little as few years ago this term was, to say the least, on the design backburner. However, with the rise in popularity of smartphones and tablets alike in recent years, it’s a household word in the design community, so to speak.  Internet users accessing the web rose from 800 million in 2009 to roughly 1200 million in 2012 according to a recent ComScore Survey.  Statistics expect mobile internet usage to outnumber desktop internet usage by 2015.  The numbers don’t lie- if you don’t have a responsive website yet, you may want to think of changing soon.

1. Localize

National brands with local physical locations typically spend more time and effort on national marketing, limiting or eliminating the local message. However, that can be a mistake. Local efforts are instrumental in driving increased local business. 

One of the first things consumers look for when considering a purchase is a review of the product or service. They look to their peers for input and advice and trust those voices far more than your brand's, especially if they've had little to no interaction with the brand.

How do you get those first few reviews to help curb the concerns of new purchasers?

1. Why should you encourage online reviews?
2. How do you encourage online reviews?
3. How do you respond to negative reviews?

Local relevance and timing are key when converting mobile browsers to buyers, though specific consumer needs and verticals influence the way mobile devices are used for purchases. A new study investigates not only mobile consumer behavior, but preferences as well.

It’s important to understand how mobile users engage with your brand.  It’s even important to think of how their engagement may differ from a mobile phone to a mobile tablet device.

Here are four tips from the study:

We help our clients bring their national strategy into a local context.  It’s great when we hear from clients that want to start a local marketing program.  It’s a new channel that’s not easily understood unless you’re like us and you do this as your job.  We see several opportunities for new clients that want to start a local marketing program.

Here are some eye-popping marketing stats for the growth of Internet Marketing and Mobile Marketing in 2012.  These stats come from a recent usage report done by eMarketer. 

The amount of money spent on advertising online is way below the usage of online.  Mobile advertising is just a blip right now compared to the amount of time people use their smart phones.  The two media channels where companies spend way more than the usage is in TV and Print.  Companies are spending 75% more on Print advertising than the usage of that channel.

This information is based on results from ad spend compared to time spent on each media channel within 2011.  The results show the obvious shift consumers are making from the majority of time spent on things like TV, magazines, etc. to a more balanced usage across traditional and digital mediums. 

As you can see in the graph, consumers are moving away from the amount of time they spend on TV and especially print media.  However, the ad spending in TV and print are higher than the usage of those two channels. 

If you’re business operates in multiple locations you can’t ignore the importance of local search marketing. It should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.  Local search marketing can help you significantly increase sales.

What if you could add your customers to a text message program where they receive instant offers from their favorite local location.  What if the local location could send out an offer when they had overstocked inventory, perishable items, great weather locally, just beat a local rival in a sport, etc.  You can do all of this.

We can setup a centralized collection process where all your ads, local POP, etc. can direct customers to your website or Facebook page to enter their phone number and ZIP code to start receiving local instant offers via text messaging.  This can be combined with our email-marketing program so the customer has one place to control their communications profile.

The consumers this year would be much alike from last year. The speedy networks will encourage people to acquire web-centric smartphone devices. According to IBM Benchmark, the sales from smartphones and tables accounted for 11% of total online sales which raised 5.5% in December 2011.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will be patronized by the users. Other new social networks that are gaining popularity will also be invaded

More and more companies are outfitting their sales staff with iPads.  This is great but moving from one application to another to make a presentation is still to clumsy.  Ontarget is building an iPad Sales App that will allow each company to create their own presentations, product catalog, usage videos, specification documents, etc.  All of this information is stored in a very clean iPad interface that would WOW any prospect.

The company administrator can add new product information and the next time the salesperson launches the iPad Sales App they are asked if they would like to download the new information.  The system is completely standalone so the salesperson doesn’t have to worry about having access to the Internet to make their presentation.

Marketing is changing at an alarming pace.  The industry is spinning itself around like
a top.  New Internet marketing and mobile marketing ideas are coming out every day. 
With the new economy adding to the pressure of a CMO it's easy to distracted.  To keep
up with this pace CMOs must work harder than ever to stay ahead of their competition.

To make it easier for our CMO friends we have put together five major changes taking shape
in 2012 that a CMO should not ignore, unless they are willing to commit career suicide. Feel free to contact us if you need any help, it's what we do.

This is a question we get a lot.  Let’s first look at some statistics.  Research shows that people spend almost as much time on the Internet as they do watching TV.  However, advertising spend for the Internet is one third of that spent on TV.  Internet is still a new channel to some and thus the marketing budgets are still playing catch up.  So in essence the amount of your marketing budget for the Internet should be roughly the same as that of TV.

Local searchers and local businesses will see a fairly substantially different Place Page the next time they’re poking around Google Maps/Places. The company announced a new look and promises more changes to come. This is just the start of what looks like Google’s new move to control local marketing.

The new layout of Place Pages puts a heavy emphasis on reviews. More specifically, it emphasizes reviews from Google users and no longer shows review content from third party sites. (Google had issues with both Yelp and TripAdvisor over review snippets last year, you may recall.)