Merge

In this Webinar Kevin and Matt cover the things you need to know about starting a mobile strategy for your business. Dive into the mobile web with us.

Matt McFadden:
Hi,
well, it is 12 pm here on the east coast. Welcome to the Merge webinar, Your
Business in the Mobile Web. First of all I just want to say thank you for
joining us. My name is Matt McFadden. I’m the director of marketing and sales
here at Merge. I’m joined by Kevin Dees, who is one of our programmers.

Kevin Dees:
Howdy.

Matt McFadden:
Howdy.
Kevin is our mobile expert. And he’s going to be handling the bulk of this. A
couple things before we start off, this webinar is going to be about 30 minutes
long. We like to try and keep these short and leave time for questions at the
end. We’re also streaming this a couple different ways. If you joined us on Go
To Webinar old school, we really appreciate that. You’re going to have access
to the screen slides. You’ll also be able to ask us questions throughout, which
we’ll probably we’ll take at the end. If you’re joining us on Just TV, you’re
getting an awesome webcam view of Kevin and I right now. You can also if you’re
on Just TV, you can hit us up on Twitter, either through our @merge, Twitter
and/or you can hit me up at @mattmcfadden. And we’ll be answering questions
from there as well towards the end.

So a little bit about Merge: Merge is a digital agency out of Greenville,
South Carolina. We specialize in digital strategies for our clients, and then
execute those strategies through web development, web design, email marketing,
search engine optimization, pay-per-click, SEM, and mobile, which we’re going
to talk about today. Kevin, do you want to add anything to that or…

Kevin Dees:
No,
I think you covered the bases there.

Matt McFadden:
Okay.

Kevin Dees:
So
what are our topics for today?

Matt McFadden:
The
topics for today, I would say, like we mentioned before, about 30 minutes of
webinar, information on turning profit with mobile, battle of web versus native
platforms. We’ll get into everything from iPhone to Android, Windows7 and the
mobile web versus the native apps for all those different devices.

Kevin Dees:
That’s
a good topic.

Matt McFadden:
And
then questions you should be asking when thinking about your mobile strategy
and how to integrate that into your overall digital strategy. And then towards
the end we’ll take questions. Should be a good time. Again, we’re going to try
and keep it short and to the point. We know it’s kind of lunch time here at
least in the east so…

Kevin Dees:
Yes.

Matt McFadden:
Yes,
maybe someone’s eating a sandwich right now or maybe they’re just ready for us
to be quiet so they can get on with their lunch. Kevin, I’ll turn it over you
buddy.

Kevin Dees:
Sounds
great. So let’s go ahead and kick it off. So let’s talk profit. Everybody cares
about profit. At the end of the day, that’s what doing business is about is
turning profit. And with Mobile, we have a chance to turn some big profit. So,
what are some of the ways that we can do that? Well, the first one is through
data. Now, that’s a thing that the web is really good at. If you’ve ever sent
out postcards or that kind of thing, the only kind of data you can get back
from that, from print and that kind of things is whatever comes back from that.
So you have to put like codes or this kind of thing and then somebody has to
tell you they called you because of that so it’s very convoluted.

With the web, you can really digest the data that comes in because devices
send certain information over about how things are set up. So, that’s a technical
side but also when you want to turn a profit with the web, you need to think
about your customer’s data, like who are your customers? So, good questions to
ask there are are they using smart phones in general? Like really trying to
take in what your customers are doing: are they texters? There’s a great
service out there called Atrilio.  Basically
what that does is it sets up your site or an application for you to where it
gives you a number and then if somebody texts your business through the website
or whatever, it can send them back a text message saying “We’re open during such
and such a time.” So if they texted hours, it would do something like that.

Matt McFadden:
Yes.

Kevin Dees:
So
you just kind of set up those dynamic things. So that may be a solution that
you can look at if your customers are texters. What if they use social media?
You know, Facebook, Twitter, that kind of thing. There are all kinds of apps
out there to help you do that kind of thing. So, we’re really starting to think
about the “Who.” Who are these people, what do they use, you know, what
describes them as your customer. And not just talking about business to
customer, but business-to-business, right?