SoLoMo? MoLoSo? LoSoMo? The words social, local and mobile were mashed together quite a bit throughout SIM Partners’s second annual SIMposium yesterday; about 85 clients, partners and sponsors of SIM Partners gathered at theWit for the daylong invite-only internet marketing event. (And it was generally agreed upon that SoLoMo is the correct terminology, if you were wondering.)
Six speakers each addressed their own in-depth research on SoLoMo marketing and also shared their personal experiences in incorporating SoLoMo practices into their businesses.
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Opus Research analyst Greg Sterling, a returning speaker from last year, gave an overview of how social, local and mobile searches have become increasingly intertwined with technologies like Facebook Graph Search and Siri. Google, too, has morphed into a social search engine, Sterling said, with Zagat, Google+ and an algorithm that is becoming less about links and more about real people.
SIM Partners CEO Jon Schepke echoed Sterling’s message, yet strongly emphasized the ‘Lo’ part of SoLoMo: local searches convert users two to three times better than paid advertisements, he said.
In addition to presenting his company’s Velocity and Velocity Social products, which help clients with many local locations achieve SoLoMo marketing success, Schepke offered this advice to companies with multiple locations:
- Create a Google+ and Facebook page for EACH location
- Encourage customer reviews (need at least 6-10 to be considered credible)
- Verify the Google+ page and link to company site
- Work with a Facebook representative to set up a parent-child relationship between pages, so check-ins, etc. will be linked to the parent page
Diving right into the ‘Mo’ aspect of SoLoMo, xAd VP of Marketing Monica Ho (also a returning SIMposium speaker) shared research that discovered 91 percent of adults have their phones within arm’s reach 24 hours a day and, on average, look at their phones 41.5 times a day.
xAd has leveraged this knowledge with customers such as Dunkin Donuts, Pinkberry, Calvin Klein and Outback by initiating campaigns that incorporate geo-targeting and geo-fencing. For example, xAd created mobile geo-fences that sent $1 coupons to users’ phones within a certain mile radius of a Pinkberry store.
Ho also said that, by 2017, $17 billion will be spent on mobile marketing efforts with 54 percent of that spending being location-based. That prediction alone should be enough to kick your company into a very necessary (as yesterday’s SIMposium proved) SoLoMo frenzy.
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