Can Customers Find Your Business on GPS?

Travelers are increasingly using Global Positioning Systems during their trips to find information including lodging, restaurants, activities and attractions. These locations are collectively referred to as Points of Interest or POIs.

GPS is available in two basic forms: stand-alone devices such as Garmin, Magellan and Tom Tom and mobile devices such as cell phones and smartphones. Stand alone devices have the data such as hotel addresses and whatnot loaded onto them. Cell phones and smartphones connect to this data via the internet. With either type of device a traveler can pinpoint their own location to within several meters and search for POIs by category, and the device will show them POIs that are near their present location. Smartphones such as Apple's IPhone appear to be eclipsing the stand alone devices because they can pretty much the same GPS functions plus full internet access, phone, texting etc... for a similar cost.

It is difficult to pin down the number numbers of such devices that are out there, but here are a few statistics to consider.

There are more than 150 million cell phones with GPS capability.

40% of smartphone owners use the devices for turn by turn directions while on a trip.

80% of IPhone owners use the devices for turn by turn directions while on a trip.

By 2013, there will be 300 million smartphone users.

So, the opportunity exists to sell lodging, restaurants etc... to millions of travelers while they are on the road.

The problem right now is that the devices are only as accurate as the data they are drawing from. If your hotel is not in the database, or not under the correct category or has the wrong address, potential customers cannot find you. This is quite common.

There are essentially three companies that manage separate POI databases that feed nearly all the GPS devices in the country.

W.A. Fisher Interactive can help our clients make sure their businesses show up in the correct locations, under the correct categories, with the correct contact information to give them an advantage in reaching travelers to increase sales.

Optimizing Websites for Mobile Users

The number of people using cell phones and smart phones for accessing the internet is growing rapidly. According to the Pew Center, "use of the Internet on mobile devices has grown sharply from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2009". The study further finds that 32% of Americans have used a cellular or smart phone to access the internet for e-mailing, instant-messaging or information seeking which represents a growth of 73% growth in the 16 month interval between surveys.

The problem is most websites, including most travel/tourism sites, are not designed for or optimized for use on such devices. These sites are likely to display poorly, be very difficult to navigate or not display some content at all. As a result, the user is likely to search elsewhere for the information.

To view how your site appears on various mobile devices, you can find emulators online such as this dotMobi site: http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php

W. A. Fisher Interactive can optimize websites for use on mobile devices to ensure our clients don't miss out on significant sales to users of such devices. After optimization, the web site essentially reads what browser is calling up the site and displays the content accordingly. On a desktop device, the user sees the regular full-screen web site, but on a mobile device, they would be redirected automatically to a separate site that has been designed for the most common mobile screen sizes and browsers.

Social Networking Sites Present Marketing Opportunities

Social networking websites are by far the fastest growing media segment, presenting advertisers with entirely new and innovative ways to reach potential customers and communicate with current customers.

Facebook and myspace, the two most popular social networking sites, had more than 2 billion combined visits in January of 09!

The micro-blogging site, Twitter, is quickly gaining ground with more than 55 million visits. See the attached chart.

With this volume of traffic, it is small wonder that advertisers are clamoring to reach this lucrative market.

The basic idea is get as many people as possible to follow your, tweets, blogs and facebook pages and to share them with their networks of friends. Social sites are beginning to compete with search engines as a primary means of finding information online. Travel and entertainment are particularly popular categories of information to share through these networks.

W. A. Fisher Advertising & Printing has created extensive social/viral campaigns for clients including Iron Range Tourism, for which we have created a number of local spokespersons to focus on a particular market segment. One of the tricks to social marketing is not to come across as a corporate sales pitch, but rather as an individual with a shared interest.

Our volunteer spokespeople are local people that have a passion the outdoors, golf, ATVing, skiing, etc... Ideally, they will write and submit all their own content and may incorporate videos, how-to demonstrations, tips, trail conditions or whatever their followers or "friends" wish to see.

The Iron Range Tourism social campaign has been very effective in expanding the client's reach in various niche markets at a relatively low cost.

Website Marketing for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a combination of alterations to the programming and content of a web site to make it more accessible to the search engines for various terms or phrases. The following is a very basic explanation of the steps we follow for Search Engine Optimization and a brief explanation of the difference between SEO and Sponsored Listing or Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. This is a highly simplified explanation directed at web marketing beginners. I am posting this because we are being asked questions regarding these two options more and more these days as clients are looking for the most bang for their advertising/marketing buck.

First we develop list of keywords/phrases based on what it is you have to sell. Then we do some research to find out other relevant terms and to help determine which phrases are actually being searched most frequently. We would then run a search engine ranking report to determine how well your web site performs for each of these keywords/phrases - ranking each for each major search engine or telling us if your site does not ranking in the top 30. They way to look at is this: if you do not rank in the top 30 for any term, your site is essentially invisible to any body searching under that term. A very important thing to remember about search engines is that people normally search generically, meaning they search for a product or service they are looking for rather than a brand. 

After we run the search engine ranking report for a benchmark measurement, we start the process of optimizing the site for those keywords that we need to make improvements. The back end or programming things we do for SEO is changing page titles, addresses, descriptions and keywords to include the terms we are targeting. This helps but is far less important than the actual html text content on your site. Therefore, we also edit the text on various pages of a site to make sure that targeted keywords/phrases are included in text and links in sufficient frequency and prominence to improve search engine ranking. Search engines like google prioritize in a hierarchal manner. They look at your home page first, with each layer of sub pages getting less rank. They also place greater emphasis on headlines (any large text) and read from top to bottom. So a large heading at the top of a page will have much greater weight then using the same term buried in the text at the bottom of a long page.

You cannot buy search engine rankings. The only way to improve your rankings is to have more relevant material on your site than your competition.

On the other hand, pay per click (PPC) listings, or sponsored listings such as google adwords really have no relation to content relevance beyond the buyers desire to purchase any given term. On PPC, we bid on search terms, saying how much we are willing to spend per click for each term. The more competitive a term (how many people are searching) the higher the bid required to rank highly for that term. 

We often use PPC campaigns to augment SEO. In some cases keywords are so competitive that is virtually impossible to optimize for them without adding dozens of pages of new content. In those cases, it may be much more cost effective to rely on PPC to reach people searching those terms. You can spend as little or as much you like on a PPC campaign by setting a maximum amount to be spent each day. One important thing to be aware of regarding PPC campaigns is that people tend to be more likely to click on organic search engine listings (those listings that are ranked by the search engine by virtue of their content) than they are to use the sponsored links, because they understand that organic listings are more likely to be relevant to their search. But sponsored listings will get clicks and will increase traffic on your site for sure. One major benefit of sponsored listings is you are only paying for those that actually click on or visit your site. It's like buying a yellow pages ad but only paying for those people that actually call you. Even most banner ads are priced by the number of people who view your ad, not by the number that visit your site.

We have clients like outfitters and resorts who might spend $2-3,000 on PPC and/or the $1,500 basic SEO package as per the price sheet I sent you. We have other clients like resort associations who might spend $10,000/year on either SEO or PPC. Bottom line is either SEO or PPC tend to have a much higher return on investment than traditional media.