By George Rowand

You’re running a local business, and you have joined organizations, placed ads and have a website up and running. You think you are covered when it comes to getting your business’ name out.
It seems that you’re not. Technology has moved on, and you’d better catch up or you might be sorry. Now a business needs to be doing mobile marketing to keep their name in front of potential customers.
“More and more, the smart phone is the preferred device to access the Internet, and a lot of our local businesses are not catching up to that trend yet,” said Yvonne Herbst, owner of Herbst Marketing in Warrenton. “If you look at most websites on a mobile phone, they don’t look good. They’re too hard to read.”
Herbst’s business has an answer to this problem, plus a way to make mobile marketing pay off for local businesses.

Two ways
“Mobile marketing has two components. The first is a mobile websites that are easy to read, and the other part is mobile messaging, which is the next logical step,” Herbst explained.
The entrepreneur said that she came up with the idea out of necessity. She used to be a yoga teacher, and her former website wasn’t helping her business grow.
“My first website was very difficult to change, so I decided to do this on my own,” she said. “And because I figured out how to do websites on my own, I discovered that I was getting calls from people I never would have heard of otherwise.”
She decided to go mobile early on, and she sees that this is the next wave in advertising on the Internet.
“The smart phone is becoming the preferred device for accessing the Internet, and local businesses need to get on board,” she stated.
According to a Nielsen Research Group survey from 2013, two-thirds of adult Americans now own smart phones, and that percentage has been rising.
“The advantage to mobile marketing is that people get very impatient. If they’re looking for information on-line, they want to be able to find it fast and access it fast. And if you have a website that is mobile, you’re going to attract more customers, you’re going to get more customers, and you’re going to keep them longer.”
The second aspect of mobile marketing that Herbst’s company can provide for a local business is mobile messaging.
“This is like signing up for email, except you’re doing it for text messages,” she explained. “Your business can have a keyword for a customer to text and join, and when they text it, they can get a text with a mobile coupon. So this eliminates the need to cut out coupons and save them and, typically, lose them. Now it will be on your electronic wallet, and it will be right on your phone.”
The possible ways for a business to reach its customers are varied and extensive.
“It could be a dollars off deal or a percentage off deal, and the cool thing about it is once this goes to the customer’s phone, they can share it with their friends,” Herbst said. “When they do that, then you’ve got viral sharing, and it can all happen within a couple of minutes. And it’s very low cost.”
Herbst said that typically there is a set-up cost of around $97 and about $49 a month to send out 500 messages a month.
“This kind of promotion works best for retail, but it could work for a company like a landscape architect. They could offer a $100 coupon for the first $500 or something like that. Or they could have a seasonal special … $100 off your Autumn planting. Let’s say you are a business that is appointment-based, and you have a cancellation. If you have a text-message list, you could pop it out right away, maybe offer a discount if they can come in right away.
“The average open-rate for emails is 20 percent,” she continued. “Text messages are permission-based. The customer has to say they want to receive text messages, so you are not spamming them, and the open rate is 90 percent.”
Herbst said that her aim is to help local businesses obtain customers and to keep them coming back.
“It used to be that if you had a phone number as a business, that was good enough,” she said. “Now, if you don’t have a website, it’s like you don’t have a phone number. And very quickly it’s going to be that if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, it’s almost going to be as bad as not having a website at all.”
She has a simple question for business owners.
“Would you like to have your business in a customer’s pocket 24/7, 365 days a year?”
Herbst Marketing can be reached at (540) 937-7234. The website is herbstmarketing.com .

George Rowand is a member of the board of the Greater Warrenton Chamber of Commerce. This article is provided courtesy of the GWCC.