BMA B2B Marketing Blog

What’s your favorite business productivity, marketing, or sales APP?   Many of us or using iPhones, smart phones, iPads and tablets and one of the best things about these devises includes the great APPs for business. But finding, downloading and reviewing these apps can be a hassle. 

An easy way to find out about great apps is from your friends, colleagues and co-workers. One of my favorite apps is Cardmunch. You just scan a business card, upload it, it is sent to a REAL person, and then it comes back to you ready to click to send an invite to join you on LinkedIn. Plus you receive a Vcard and file to add to your CMS, Outlook or other contact software. I use to pay someone to do this for me. Now I'm sitting in meetings and with a few clicks have the person's contact information and an invite to LinkedIn.

So share with us some of your favorite productivity, marketing and sales apps.

Comment below and tell us YOUR favorite APP!  No sales pitch here please. Just sharing info :)

Mobile marketing could prove to be a strategic competive advantage for companies looking for new ways to connect to their target audience. Yesterday’s lunch presentation by Jun Febella of Maritz was fascinating and well worth the time. The mobile marketing statistics alone should convince you that you need to get into the game.

Consider that:

“Apps are now running above 30 million downloads per day and that figure is still growing..” – Asymco (a Helsinki-based mobile analyst); January 16, 2011

PayPal recently announced that it has seen a six-fold growth in mobile transactions from $25m in 2008 to $141M in 2009..trending towards more than $500M in 2010.

A six-fold growth – that’s enough to wake up and get on board.

Juniper Research indicating that mobile transactions will quadruple from $170 billion in 2010 to $630 Billion in2014.

Adobe Mobile Experience Survey (Oct. 2010) ..advance in wireless devices, cheap and easy access to mobile broadband are making mobile phones..less about making phone calls and m ore about text, shop, read, play and engaging.

In March of 2010 Nielsen estimates that by the end of 2011, Smartphones will overtake feature phones in the U.S.. One in two Americans will have a smartphone by Christmas of that year, Nielsen forecasts, compared to just one in 10 in the summer of 2008.

One of the most interesting claims came from Forbes in November of 2010. They said that “….the evolution from Internet to Mobile internet and related data services will be far more profound than the evolution from the brick-and-mortar economy to the Internet.

WOW!! The evolution from the Internet to mobile will be more profound than from brick-and-mortar to the Internet. Now that’s a big claim.

Also, consider last month at the BMA, Risa Teksten from YouTube said that Google research indicated that very few companies have mobile ready Websites!

Well, that’s good news for a company like mine and other Web marketing companies, but very poor showing for most companies. It also gives smaller more flexible a great competitive advantage – at least in the short term—if they jump in mobile marketing prior to their larger counterparts who are unable to move fast.

To gain the competitive advantage quickly, companies need to:

• Understand customers’ wants and needs
  
  • Learn the utility of mobile marketing
  • Develop a comprehensive strategy and tactics
  • Acquire technical expertise to implement the strategy
  These bullet points were discussed at lunch yesterday and if you attended the luncheon and are a member of the St. Louis BMA you will receive Jun’s presentation notes.