Abducting tourists and other reasons for mobile strategy

Summer’s here and the weather is groovy. Tourists are filling the entry lanes to Glacier National Park and many hotels in the Flathead. They are using their mobile phones in your store comparing prices, in restaurants browsing their favorite apps so they don’t need to talk with their family, and they’re taking pictures of the bears at Avalanche Lake so they can share them to Facebook when they get back to their hotel.

Does your business have a mobile strategy to reach them? Here are a few reasons why you need one:

1. Everyone has a smartphone. OK, not 100 percent of the people, but according to Pew Research about eight in 10 adults are carrying around a smartphone. That includes tourists and locals. The providers make it easy to buy them, most homes have broadband and cell service is pretty good most places.

2. Like I said, people are obsessed with their phones. Most people check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up. According to one study, the “heaviest” of users tap or swipe on their phone 5,427 times a day. The rest of us only 2,617 times a day on average. I dare you to count.

3. You can follow the breadcrumbs right to your cash register. Everyone leaves a digital trail of their online activities and because of that you can follow them around the internet with ads and present them with compelling reasons to shop your store. Some might consider it stalking, but marketers call it gold. With modern reporting tools and GPS built into smartphones, you can now know how many people saw an ad and came into your store.

4. Learn more about your customers. After a few months of data collection from a mobile campaign, you’ll learn where else your customers shop, what they read and other little helpful tidbits to help you connect with them on a deeper level.

5. Abducting tourists. Well not really, but capturing them online while they’re here will allow you to keep them “on the hook” and re-market to them later, enticing them to stop by and visit the next time they are in town. No one visits the Flathead just once, do they?

Pro tip: Mobile marketing strategies are just as effective with locals as they are with tourists. In fact, they work great to reach anyone with a smartphone who buys stuff. If you’d like to see some examples of how we help small businesses, just give us a holler.

Anton Kaufer is the director of advertising at the Daily Inter Lake and Hagadone Digital Montana. He’d be happy to answer your questions about digital marketing and talk with you about your business goals. He might even buy you lunch if you tell him you read this column. You can reach him at 758-4410 or akaufer@dailyinterlake.com.