BENTONVILLE -- Bettering a company's mobile marketing strategy is what should keep its leaders up at night, Matthew McHale of Google told Northwest Arkansas business leaders and owners Tuesday.
"You have to have a mobile strategy or you're not being an effective marketer," McHale told a crowd of about 175 people at the Arend Arts Center at Bentonville High School. The Google Partners Digital Breakfast was held in partnership with the NWA Tech Council.
Next Event
The NWA Tech Council will hold a day-long BizEd Expo on June 23. The event will be held at Bentonville High School and will provide an opportunity for students to help a few local businesses solve specific business challenges. The solutions will be judged and a winner awarded at the end of the day. There also will be several business breakout sessions designed to help the small business owner.
Source: Staff Report
McHale and Marla Johnson, CEO of Aristotle, spoke Tuesday.
Aristotle is an Arkansas interactive agency and Google Partner, a program that gives Aristotle connection to Google with access to special events, training and product updates, according to a news release.
McHale said he considers himself a marketer and that everyone in attendance was too.
"This means you're going to be laser focused in understanding what consumers are doing nowadays and putting your product, services, specialty, brand in front of that in a meaningful way," he said.
McHale highlighted changing consumer trends in relation to the ever-increasing digital and mobile world.
Mobile accessibility has changed the consumer. People don't go online, they live online and are logged into multiple accounts all the time. That provides many ways to reach a consumer, but marketers' thinking is still linear when trying to reach their audience, he said.
Points of influence leading consumers to buy products include word of mouth, store visits, social media, company websites, newspapers and magazines, television and online searches.
Consumers also don't want to buy items that just solve a functional need. They want to buy from companies that promote a larger purpose or need, McHale said.
He used Clif Bar as an example of promoting nutrition and an active lifestyle rather than just selling something to eat. He showed a GoPro advertisement to illustrate how the company elevated an adventurous life and not just a device that shot video and took pictures.
He challenged local business leaders to find a "higher level" or purpose to engage with customers.
Ultimately, marketers and consumers aren't doing things differently; they are doing the same things, but differently, McHale said. Brands are still trying to interact with consumers, and consumers are still trying to sort through a lot of information.
Consumers' attention is so divided in today's world, and every brand is competing for that attention Johnson said when she began her talk, "Video Messages in a Digital World."
The average person is exposed to 5,000 messages a day, she said, adding that videos are good promotion because 16 percent of digital consumption is spent watching them.
People get passionate about what they watch and share it, Johnson said.
Tadeu and Kristine Dias, owners of Soccer Language, a soccer consulting business in Bentonville, found the speakers helpful in providing ideas to grow their business.
"We know that technology moves quite fast," Tadeu Dias said. "We want to make sure that when people of this caliber come to talk about it, that we get the very latest."
Dias resonated with the concept that businesses are in charge of their own marketing and that there are many different ways to reach consumers so there's no set formula for success.
"That's exactly the world we live in today. It's not cookie-cutter anymore," he said.
NW News on 05/20/2015