Pacific App Design celebrates Small Business Week with special promotion for small businesses

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SANTA MONICA — To celebrate Small Business Week, Pacific App Design is offering small business customers 20% off of new mobile application development projects and new mobile web site development projects in order to help them adapt to the changing marketplace. With the rapid growth of the mobile marketplace, new opportunities have arisen for savvy business people and Pacific App Design is committed to helping them seize those opportunities.

This program is part of Pacific App Design’s ongoing commitment to small businesses. While this year marks the 50th anniversary of National Small Business Week, Pacific App Design believes that every week is small business week.

“As an industry leader,  we are in a position to help other small businesses grow and advance their interests in the mobile marketplace,” said Kimber Johnson, Managing Director of Pacific App Design “Businesses that are employing smart strategies with mobile applications and mobile web sites are seeing great returns right now and those that are not are at risk of being left behind their competition.”

Small businesses interested in taking advantage of Pacific App Design’s Small Business Week promotion can simply call or email Pacific App Design between May 16th to May 20th, 2013 and ask to take advantage of the Small Business Week Promotion. New mobile application design projects and new mobile web development projects will be given a 20% discount this week only. This does not apply with other offers and cannot be used for projects already in process.

About Pacific App Design

Pacific App Design was originally founded in 1990 as a software development company and grew from those roots into a web development company in 1996. Since then, they have grown into a leading mobile application firm. With their years of experience, they can deliver top quality apps at rates lower than many other firms.  Pacific App Design designs and develops iPhone, iPad and Android mobile apps, as well as HTML5 mobile web sites and even Windows Mobile and Blackberry mobile apps, but they are not just a run-of-the-mill mobile app development company. Pacific App Design is relentlessly focused on high quality UI/UX design to optimize user experiences. Their expert staff of experienced designers, marketers and mobile app developers, strive with each and every project to build custom mobile applications that people will download and use over and over again.

94 Percent of Top U.S. Advertisers Now Promoting Via Mobile

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In a new report from ad monitoring service Competitrack, we find that 94 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers have now implemented some form of mobile marketing in the past year. Most of these companies have embraced mobile application development and mobile web sites, but beyond that, if we look at these 94 top companies, all have run mobile ads in the last 9 months.

One item that isn’t surprising is that these advertisers have chosen to create unique content for their mobile ad runs. According to Competitrack, “Of the 20,000 mobile creatives in our archives, 85% were created specifically for mobile devices rather than being repurposed from other media.”

The data states that mobile marketing isn’t just being utilized by big companies like Amazon, Toyota, Verizon and other large brand names. As we look at a broader scope, 64 percent of the top 1,000 U.S. brands are now using mobile to advertise.

Furthermore,  Competitrack goes on to detail the industries that have tended to embrace mobile and mentions that top categories include retail, entertainment & media, technology, travel & tourism, and automotive advertisers.

Clearly the rush is on when it comes to mobile applications, mobile web sites and mobile advertising and since this is a relatively new format, we see a wide open arena that tends to pay off well to the adventurous and forward thinking.

Location Based Mobile Marketing Takes Center Stage

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Do you know what the hottest marketing trend in practice today is?

If you answered location based mobile marketing you would be right on target.

Consumers have their mobile device filled with mobile applications and access to mobile web sites at almost every moment of the day and most importantly, they have their mobile device with them when they are shopping and making purchasing decisions. Clearly, taking advantage of this coupled with the consumer’s location is a marketers’ dream.

In a new BI Intelligence report, location-based mobile marketing looks to be a bit of a holy grail for marketers as it offers everything a marketer could possibly want: high conversion rates, tight targeting, and rich consumer information possibilities. In fact companies across the globe are rushing to location-based mobile marketing since an overwhelming amount of data is proving just how effective location based mobile marketing has been across several studies. According to  BI Reports, “That’s where location-based mobile technology comes in. It gives marketers new ways to identify and track mobile audiences, and with the aid of algorithms, it can also group them into behavioral and demographic segments for targeting.”

We see that companies are embracing location based marketing by looking at its rapid rate of adoption. In a study of brand executives it was found that 91 percent plan to increase their spend on location based mobile marketing campaigns in 2013 (Balihoo). And in a different study by Berg Insight, it was found that location based ad spending was about 8 percent of the total mobile ad spend for 2012, but that this is expected to grow to 33 percent by 2017.

Clearly a strategy that takes advantage of a consumers location and a device that is in their hand is bound to put you in a great position to increase your brand’s sales.

Mobile Coupon Use Explodes

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Along with the meteoric growth of mobile devices, mobile applications and mobile web sites, we are seeing explosive growth of the use of mobile coupons. This is no surprise at all since delivering a coupon right to a device that a customer carries all day is a dream come true for many marketers. A recent study by BI Intelligence details just how hot mobile coupons have become recently and more importantly, they show just how well they work.

The amount of money spent on retail that is generated from mobile is estimated to top 15 percent of retail e-commerce by the end of 2013. Looking back to 2010 when mobile commerce accounted for just 3 percent of e-commerce we see just how impressive this growth has been. At the end of 2012, the amount spent on retail e-commerce via mobile was 11 percent (according to comScore), which equals a massive $18.6 billion in consumer spending.

The rise in  mobile commerce was bound to happen if you look at the massive smart phone adoption rates. Along with this we see that the number of American smart phone users that are using mobile coupons is a significant 29.5 million users, which is a big step up from 2010 when we saw just 7.4 million American consumers using mobile coupons. Over the course of the next year and a half we are expecting this to grow to 47.1 million users by the end of 2014 (BI Intelligence report).

One interesting item to arise from BI’s research is that we are seeing that demographics that typically don’t use coupons are now starting to adopt their use due to the convenience of the coupon being on their smart phone. One of the demographics we are seeing big growth in mobile coupon use is with younger smart phone users. In a recent survey of college students we see that today 51 percent use their mobile device to “always” (20%) or “often” (31%) seek out money saving deals and coupons, while only 10% said they never do so. This is no surprise if you look at the high adoption rate of smart phones by this demographic. The BI Intelligence report states “For close to 50% of 12-17 year old smartphone owners, the smartphone is their primary internet access device. It follows that for younger consumers mobile commerce and buying via smartphones and tablets will be a habit and much less of a novelty than it is for older consumers”.

Coupled with recent research from Deloitte which shows that most (94%) consumers are cautious with their finances right now and with 92% saying they are choosing to be more resourceful with their spending we see tremendous opportunities when it comes to mobile coupons. One item that really stands out with mobile coupons is that they are experiencing much higher redemption rates with mobile (10% compared with print coupon rates of 1%). Additionally mobile coupons give the retailer the opportunity to receive demographic and other information for the coupon’s user. If for no other reason, the ability to learn consumer data will continue to drive mobile coupon growth.

Mobile Driving E-commerce

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Over the course of 2012 we have seen a dramatic shift in how online e-commerce business is done as mobile passed social media and has begun driving more e-commerce traffic by a large amount than we were seeing this time last year. Mobile applications, mobile web sites and the mobile industry are certainly maturing and are a much more prominent part of commerce than they were just a short time ago. According to the Monetate’s Q1 2013 report, we see tablets and smart phones are now driving more than 21 percent of e-commerce traffic during Q1 2013, while last year at this time, mobile was driving just 2 percent of e-commerce traffic.

This isn’t just due to the massive growth of the mobile industry and the wide use of mobile applications and mobile web sites, the Monetate report details how social networks are pushing much less traffic to e-commerce sites than they used too. Social media sites are currently driving less than 2 percent of e-commerce related traffic.

Just as with the the traditional Internet, search continues to push most of the most e-commerce traffic. This is most likely because shoppers are well versed in how to search for products/services online at this point and this skill has transferred over to the mobile arena. Monetate’s report states that search accounts for nearly one-third (31.43 percent) of e-commerce related traffic in Q1 2013. Other interesting findings from the same study are that tablets are driving 10.58 percent  of  e-commerce traffic, while smart phones account for  10.44 percent of e-commerce traffic. Meanwhile they also note that email is responsible for just 2.82 percent of  e-commerce traffic.

Mobile is not the coming thing anymore and any business that isn’t solidly positioned in the mobile marketplace is severely handicapping themselves at this point. Mobile applications and mobile web sites are essential to do business in the marketplace and business that have developed these items in a way to account for consumer usage patterns will have a significant advantage over their competitors.