Chapter 7 Discussion Questions

1. Describe the two factors which make social, local, and mobile marketing different from
traditional online marketing.

What’s different about the new world of social-mobile-local marketing and advertising are
the related concepts of “conversation” and “engagement.” Marketing today is based on
businesses marketing themselves as partners in multiple online conversations with their
customers, potential customers, and even critics. Today, marketing your frim and brands
require you to locate, identify, and participate in these conversations about your brand.

2. Why are social, mobile, and local marketing efforts interconnected?

Social, mobile, and local digital marketing are self-reinforcing and connected. For instance,
as mobile devices become more powerful, they are more useful for accessing social sites.
As mobile devices become more widely adopted, they can be used by customers to find
local merchants, and for merchants to alert customers in their neighborhood to special
offers. Over time, these will become more overlapped as the three platforms become more
tightly coupled.

3. Why is the connection between social, mobile, and local marketing important to marketers?

The strong ties among social, mobile, and local marketing has significant implications for
managing your own marketing campaign in this new environment. The message is that
when you design a social marketing campaign, you must also consider that your customers
will be accessing the campaign using mobile devices, and often they will also be looking
for local content.

4. Identify the objectives of social marketing.

In social marketing, the objective is to encourage your potential customers to become fans
of your company’s products and services, and engage with your business by entering into a
conversation with it. Your further objective is to encourage your business’s fans to share
their enthusiasm with their friends, and in doing so create a community of fans online.
Ultimately, the point is to strengthen the brand and drive sales, and to do this by increasing
your “share of online conversation.”

5. What are the five elements of the social marketing process?

There are five steps in the social marketing process: Fan acquisition, engagement,
amplification, community, and brand strength (sales). Fan acquisition involves using any of
a variety of means, from display ads to News Feed, to attract people to your social or Web
page. The next step is to generate engagement, which involves using a variety of tools to
encourage users to interact with your content and brand located on your social or Web
 Chapter 7 Discussion Questions

pages. Once you have engaged visitors, you can begin to use social site features to amplify
your messages by encouraging users to tell their friends. Once you have gathered enough
engaged fans, you will create the foundation for a community – a more or less stable group
of fans who are engaged and communication with one another over a substantial period of
time. The process ends with strengthening the brand and, hopefully, additional sales of
products and services.

6. What is the fastest growing mobile commerce platform and why?

The mobile platform has changed over the past few years, and there are now as many tablet
users as smartphone users in the United States: 147 million Americans use tablets, almost
60% of the Internet population. Tablets, with their larger screens, are the fastest growing
and largest source of mobile commerce revenues.

7. Why are in-app ads so important to marketers?

Mobile users spend over 85% of their smartphone time using apps. If consumers are using
apps rather than browsing the Web on their mobile devices, marketers need to place ads in
apps where most of the action is for attracting consumers. Another implication for
marketers is that rather than focus on mobile display ads that are difficult to read, the best
ad may be an app that directly serves customer interest or an ad in an app that is precisely
targeted to the customer’s current activities and interests.

8. What is the multi-screen environment and how does it change marketing?

Along with the growth of smartphones and tablets comes a multi-screen world:
smartphones, tablets, desktops, and television. The reality, and the future, of computing is
that consumers will be multi-platform. Consumers will often be using two or more screens
at once, tweeting when watching a TV show, or moving seamlessly from a TV ad, to a
mobile search for more information, to a later tablet purchase screen. The implications of
the multi-device platform, or screen diversity environment, are that marketing needs to be
designed for whatever device the consumer is using, and consistent branding across
platforms will be important. Screen diversity means that one ad size, for instance, will not
fit all situations, and that branding images will need to be adjusted automatically based on
the device the consumer is using. But even beyond screen adaptability, a multi-screen
world means merchants need to be on all platforms, and to be integrated across platforms,
in order to send a coherent message and to create a convenient consumer platform.
 Chapter 7 Discussion Questions

9. Why is location-based marketing so attractive to marketers?

Location-based marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of the digital marketing
universe. Location-based marketing targets marketing messages to users based on their
location. The more people use their mobile devices to search for and obtain local services,
the more opportunities there are for marketers to target consumers with messages at just the
right moment, at just the right location, and in just the right way to improve the consumer
experience at the moment of local shopping and buying. Consumers who seek information
about local businesses using mobile devices are much more active and ready to purchase
than desktop users.

10. List and describe some basic mobile marketing tools.

Location-based mobile marketing tools include geo-social-based services marketing,

proximity marketing, and in-store messaging. With geo-social-based services users share
their location with friends and can be used for check-in services like Foursquare. Proximity
marketing sends messages to consumers in the area of a store or outlet to generate sales
using a virtual fence around a retail location. In-store messaging, messages consumers
while entering or browsing in a store. Retailers can also collect, analyze, and respond to
customers’ real-time shopping behavior.