The news is that Facebook’s “Home” app isn’t catching on the way Facebook would have liked. That said, it’s important to note that  for every well-known app like Foursquare, Yelp, Instagram and Vine, there are 50,000 apps that didn’t make it.

So if Home falls flat, it’s in good company.

Here’s what happened with Facebook Home. It appears that after an initial surge of interest, the number of downloads has fallen dramatically. Users have given low ratings to the app, have complained that it drains battery life and say it makes it difficult to use other Android apps and service.

As if that weren’t bad enough, last week AT&T dropped the price of a new HTC smartphone that comes with the Home app pre-installed from $99 to just 99 cents.

Ouch.

Mark Zuckerberg pushed Home as a major milestone in the company’s strategy to embrace mobile. After being criticized for not doing a better job integrating Facebook into the mobile world, Facebook did an about face and has vigorously promoted some of the new features that leverage mobile.

(If you’re interested in learning how to use Facebook mobile advertising for your business, you might want to read Facebook Mobile Ads: How to Run a Campaign that Gets Results which I posted last week.)

It’s too early to count Home out. Zuckerberg isn’t giving up on Home just yet. In fact, on a May 1st conference call he said, “This product is still very early and this is just a first release in a long journey.”

That comment was yet another sign that the app will be around for quite some time. And some would even argue that it’s simply the first step Facebook is making in a long-term strategy to get into the mobile device world — a world currently owned by Apple, Google, Microsoft and, to a certain extent, Blackberry.

The bottom line is that this is just a bump in the road for Home. It’s not going anywhere. In fact, I suspect you’ll see new versions of Home being introduced in the next few months.

What are your thoughts?

Jamie Turner is the CEO of social media and mobile marketing firm 60 Second Communications and is the Founder of the 60 Second Marketer.  He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

Not long ago, I received a call from a client prospect who wanted to meet to discuss an urgent need for a mobile app. (My company, 60 Second Communications, develops social media and mobile marketing campaigns for businesses around the nation.)

“Hold on,” I said, “What are your business objectives for developing the app?”

“Don’t worry about that right now,” she said. “Just meet us next week at our offices.”

So the following week, I drove out to their offices where I was greeted by the CEO, the CMO and several other executives. The client prospect kicked off the meeting by saying, “We need a mobile app. How much is that going to cost?”

There are a lot of People Who Will Start a Meeting That Way. But it’s a clear sign that they’re thinking tactically without taking into consideration their objectives and strategies.

I spent the next few hours asking them questions about their business, their sales process, their marketing plans and how they envisioned mobile would fit into those plans.

By the end of the meeting, the CMO said, “You know what? I don’t think we need a mobile app after all.” (I knew they didn’t need a mobile app going into the meeting, but have found that unless people arrive at a conclusion themselves, they don’t generally believe it, which is why I asked them a series of questions that led them to my assumption.)

Thinking Strategy First and Tactics Second. This experience led me to the conclusion that members of the 60 Second Marketer community might benefit by reading an excerpt from Go Mobile, the book I co-authored with Jeanne Hopkins.

What follows is a detailed description on how to plan, set-up and launch a mobile marketing campaign. Hopefully, it’ll guide you as you move dive into mobile marketing. After all, your customers are in mobile already, so it’s time for you to be there, too.

The First Step — Do Some Background Planning. When starting any marketing campaign, you should begin by asking the following questions:

• What is the objective of this campaign?
• Who is your target audience?
• How long will this campaign run?
• Are you using other media to support or supplement your mobile media plan?

Define Your Objectives. What do you want your campaign to accomplish? Are you trying to increase awareness of your company, boost sales of a certain product or service, establish your branding, or something else? Clearly identify what it is you want to accomplish with your campaign before moving forward with further planning.

Identify Your Target Audience. Immediately after defining the objective(s) of your marketing strategy, you should identify your primary target audience. This will help to ensure that you tailor all elements of the marketing strategy specifically to this audience, enabling you to communicate with these customers as effectively as possible.

A good way to identify a target audience is to create a profile of a sample member of this group. Answer the following questions to get started:

1.   Who would have a need for the specific product or service you are trying to market?

2.   What is the ideal, manageable size of your primary target audience? Avoid being either too specific (e.g., “31-year-old male businessmen living in Manhattan”) or too vague (e.g., “teenagers”) to find an audience that is the right scope for your campaign.

3.   Which methods of communication would work well in connecting with this audience?  Look at demographic information about which age groups and types of people use mobile devices, and how they use them.

Different groups of people respond variously to what they see and read. Their tastes and preferences will affect how well they respond to the type of communications they receive, so make sure to research your target audience thoroughly before making other plans.

Develop Your Campaign Approach. Now that you have clearly defined your objectives and identified your target audience, you can start planning campaign strategies. Even though you are planning a mobile marketing campaign, you should decide which methods of mobile communication you want to use (audio? video? mobile websites?). You should also choose whether you want to push information to customers, or pull them to your company to start a dialog.

Push-based campaigns mean you send information out to customers and hope they respond by purchasing your product or service. Push can include sending text messages to everyone on a mailing list or informing them of, say, an album release or new promotion.

Pull and dialogue-based campaigns will require more planning and effort, but they also tend to be more effective at turning potential buyers into actual sales. Pull-based campaigns focus on “pulling” customers back to your company, such as by using SMS to send out a link to your website, or building an application customers can download, which will inform them about your product.

Other Considerations. There are several other factors to consider when you’re in the strategic planning stage of a campaign. Is your campaign intended to be brand-oriented or promotion-oriented? A brand campaign is designed to create a connection with your customer over the long term. A promotion campaign is designed to give your customer a reason to buy your product or service immediately.

The diagram below illustrates how several different kinds of companies might explore the nature of their campaigns. The Y-axis indicates whether the campaign is brand-oriented or promotion-oriented. The X-axis indicates whether the campaign is location-centric or nonlocation-centric. For example, if your company is a brick-and-mortar retailer, your campaign will be location-centric, because you want to drive people to your location. If you’re a nonprofit organization, your campaign won’t be location-centric, because you don’t usually need to drive people to a specific brick-and-mortar location.

Determine the Length of Your Campaign. Once you’ve specified strategies for your mobile campaign, the next step is to decide how long it will run. Will your campaign be a one-shot action, or will it be a series of actions? The length and duration of the campaign will affect how you design it. If you want this campaign to run for an extended length of time, be sure to repeatedly “inject” it with advertising activity. Otherwise, customer response will slow to a halt.

Incorporate Other Media. Finally, determine what other media you will be using to promote your mobile marketing strategy. Are you going to inform customers about a mobile application through email and web advertising? Will you tell people to sign up for text message updates through radio commercials? How you use other media should have a profound effect on how you design your campaign. Likewise, your campaign objectives and your target audience should affect your selection of the types of other media you will use.

The preceding are basic considerations, and may even seem obvious, depending on your marketing background, but they are worth addressing here because they are so important. Without clearly defined answers to these preliminary questions and considerations, your mobile marketing campaign won’t set off in the direction it should, to succeed.

Budgeting and Scheduling. Now that the preliminary background planning phase is complete, you’re ready to move on to budgeting and scheduling. Ask these questions to help you determine the budget you’ll need to produce your campaign, and how to schedule it:

• When do you need the campaign ready to start?
• How much money do you intend to spend on mobile media?
• How much do you intend to spend on other forms of media?
• How many messages are you planning to send?

Set the Launch Date. Choose a date you want the campaign to start and work backwards from there to draft a preliminary schedule. For example, if you want your campaign to start on June 8, and you need to have advertising materials ready to deliver a week in advance, set the deadline for advertising material to June 1. Work backwards in this way for all campaign components until you have established all the dates for your campaign. Don’t forget to include the dates for other forms of media (if you are using them).

Assess the Costs of Mobile Media. There are several cost considerations to make when planning mobile media for your campaign. Creative, promotion, and messages all have their own costs. How much will it cost to set up a mobile website or to develop a mobile application? Determine these line items before moving forward.

Calculate the Cost of Other Media. If you are incorporating other media into your mobile marketing campaign (such as print ads, Internet ads, radio, etc.), factor in those costs as well. Mass media is very expensive. Make sure supporting your mobile media campaign with other media is worth what you’ll have to pay to do so.

Determine the Number of Messages. Finally, determine how many messages you intend to send as part of your campaign. This will depend on your campaign strategy, as discussed earlier. Are you focusing on a push, pull, or dialog-based campaign? Deciding that will help you figure how many messages you need to send and how frequently you need to send them. Note that the cost per message decreases the more you send. For example, the cost per message to send 5,000 messages might be $0.055 per message; but if you send 20,000, that cost would drop to $0.035 per message.

After you have lined up your budget and schedule, you can begin planning the actual message of the campaign.

Content and Production. With the background information, budgeting, and scheduling completed, and with a good idea of the scale of your campaign in mind, you can start planning the types of message(s) you will send. It’s important to wait until this phase to plan the details of your message so you can accurately assess whether to deliver it all at once or in waves, whether you want to target it to a large or small audience, and other considerations.

Answer these questions to help direct you as plan the content and production of your campaign message:

• What kind of message do you want to use in this campaign?
• How will you distribute your messages?
• Who will produce the message content or mobile application?
• Who will test the campaign?

Choose Message Type. Decide on the type of message you will use as part of your mobile marketing strategy. Will you send out SMS? Mobile display ads? A mobile application? Examine your target audience and background information before deciding on the method(s) of communication that would be most effective for connecting with your customers.

Make sure to consider the strengths and limitations of each type of message. For example, SMS messages are inexpensive, and are read by customers almost 100 percent of the time, but they are limited to 160 characters. Examine the benefits and drawbacks of each method of communication.

Decide on Distribution. Decide who will provide the platform necessary to implement your campaign. Are you going to do everything in-house, or will you outsource the implementation of your campaign to another firm? Look at your resources, with particular focus on the time frame and skills of your marketing team, to determine whether it would be more cost-effective to do it yourself or to have someone else take care of it.

Choose a Production Strategy. Once you’ve decided who will distribute and implement your campaign, you next need to choose how you will produce the messages you send out. If you are using a mobile application, will you produce it in-house, or will you hire an outside group to develop it? Who will design the SMS campaign or mobile website? Again, evaluate all your resources before making this decision.

Conduct Testing. Testing your campaign is probably the most important step. Simply put, all of your other planning will be wasted if your campaign doesn’t work. You must leave sufficient time to conduct exhaustive testing before launch, to work out the bugs in the technology. You must test each and every aspect of your mobile campaign (SMS, mobile application, mobile website, etc.).

After you’ve taken these steps, you are ready to move on to the final stages of planning for your mobile campaign.

Other Considerations. At this juncture, you understand essential background information about mobile marketing, you’ve established a budget and schedule, and have taken care of content and production. Now you’re ready to plan the final elements of your campaign.

Here are three questions to answer before you enter this final phase:

• Who will organize and coordinate multiple media implementation?
• Where will you get your customer contacts?
• What will be measured?

Coordinate Multiple Media Implementation. If you are going to use multiple forms of media, decide who will coordinate how your media works together. Have the activities for other media been properly planned? If your mobile marketing campaign relies heavily on other media forms to support it, it’s very important to make sure this has been addressed.

Collect Customer Information. If you plan on using SMS or other push methods to communicate with customers, how will you get their information? In the United States, selling opt-in lists is prohibited by law, so how else can you collect customer information? You might consider directing customers to a website where they can sign up for updates, or provide a phone number where they can text a keyword to sign up.

Take Measurements. Another very important part of any marketing campaign is to determine how you will measure the success of your campaign. Many metrics are available for mobile marketing, such as number of messages sent, number of messages actually delivered, number of “stop” messages, number of customers who follow through with a message, and others. Establish the metrics you will you so you can evaluate accurately how effective your campaign is.

Action Steps for You:

• Treat mobile as a channel by testing mobile-specific features such as SMS messaging, applications, or location-based services.
• Use mobile as connective tissue, with the potential to link the online and offline consumer experiences with brands. Michael Becker, managing director of the Mobile Marketing Association, uses the expression “connective tissue” to describe the capability of mobile to become an indispensible, fully integrated part of marketing and business overall.
• Don’t name an internal owner of the mobile channel. Without a designated in-house mobile expert, a mobile strategy will not be effective.
• Don’t place mobile in a silo, where it may be left out of the overall marketing strategy. Communicating cross-functionally (not just with the marketing team) and cross-company is crucial to achieving long-term success with mobile.

Not long ago, my friends at BKV Digital and Direct Response wrote a blog post called “5 Quick Tweaks to Optimize Email for Mobile.” The post included several good tips on how to optimize emails for the mobile screen.

I wanted to share the tips with you on the 60 Second Marketer blog since it was packed with great advice that I thought you’d find helpful.

Here goes:

1)      Subject and Pre-Header Length

Limit your subject lines to 35 characters and your pre-headers to 80 characters. Several studies have shown that shorter subject lines dramatically outperform longer ones. This will also ensure that your message can be fully viewed when opened on a mobile device.  Make sure that when your email is opened, your pre-header is linked and located above the “view this message as a webpage” option.

2)      Keep your Preview Pane in Mind

Here are some hard numbers: about 53% of B2C email subscribers and around 80% of B2B subscribers view emails in a preview pane. So, by moving your offer up and having copy and CTA on the left, this ensures that Android users don’t just see a background or partial image. If you’re optimizing your email templates properly, these few inches of space can entice viewers to move from preview to open.

3)      Font and Button Size

Assume your audience has bad eyesight and large thumbs: using 16px font size and 48px wide buttons are a good place to start.  Sure, your desktop version’s fonts could end up being a bit larger than your readers might be used to, but that’s OK – your mobile users will be happy.

4)      Consider Your Content

Evaluate the content of your emails: What links garner the most clicks and what are your best converters?  Not everything deserves the same real estate, and some of your content might not deserve any at all. Include the top 3 or 4 navigation links and lose the rest.  You can always test links back in later.

5)      Fake It ‘til You Make It

Initially, you can create an optimized email marketing template without going anywhere near the media queries required to fully adapt your email. Plus, you can do it without sacrificing the desktop experience.  Think of your email as a single column of stacked rectangles:

Then just fill in your content! This works because it’s simple, easy to scan, and clickable.

By making these relatively painless changes to the user-experience, content, and structure of your email template, it will make the transition over to a truly optimized template easier in the future.

Content marketing has become the buzzword of the decade. Businesses are starting to realise the value of attracting potential leads to their website, and understand that by providing high quality content, they can stand out from their competitors.

However, content marketing isn’t cheap or easy to undertake. Therefore you will need a budget, and you should expect to have to explain what value this budget will provide. Here are 4 ways to show the return on your investment on your content marketing.

Understand What Your Business Wants

If you are working with other people in a business or a consultant, agree KPI’s. What are you and your employers expecting from the content? Understanding what defines the campaign as successful is essential.

Often you will be able to set Primary and Secondary goals, and plan how you are going to measure them. It is very important to align your business goals with your content marketing objectives.

Primary: Sales – Conversions – Website Visits

Secondary: Brand Awareness – Cross Selling – Repeat Purchase

Define these goals and alter your content marketing strategy to match. Google Analytics is a brilliant and free tool to monitor your website visits and sales. For example you can set up a goal that monitors and reports on each touch point of visitors coming through to your content, to your main website and then contacting you. You can then use this data to see where people are dropping off in the sales funnel, and find out how to set up a goal on Analytics here.

Use Data to monitor your calls to action

There are so many tools available to track your conversions. One conversion type that many people forget about, particularly for high value products or services is phone calls. ResponseTap and other similar companies offer call tracking software that allows you to analyse which of your marketing channels is driving phone calls to your business and how many are leads or progress to sales.

This allows you to attribute value to your marketing more accurately. For example, although by looking only at web analytics you may think that your content is not leading to conversions, by using call tracking you can see the pages visited by the caller before, during and after the phone call, and this not only shows you that your content is being seen, but also which content is actually driving leads via the phone as well as online.

Tofu? Mofu..? Bofu….?

Don’t forget about your top, middle and bottom of the funnel content! True content marketing is about creating a little something for everyone, and targeting each piece to the correct potential customer.

For example, if you are a hand dryer distributer, it may appear that you are rather limited in the content you can offer which will really get anyone excited.

However, think about someone who could benefit from installing a hand dryer, what kind of content would they look for? As an example, let’s say a pub landlord provides paper towels instead of hand dryers. Why not write a piece of content looking at the cost and damage to the environment of paper towels used by pubs? The landlord may be looking for alternatives to paper towels online, and find your article. This offers value, and places your brand in the mind of this visitor.

Understanding your online sales funnel is essential to creating content that will resonate with your customers. Think outside of your niche and look at your vertical. Produce a range of materials such as case studies, white papers and price lists; this ensures that you have something for every visitor.

Work out ROI on organic traffic

Content marketing can be used to increase brand awareness or to create a community, but your ultimate goal should be the SEO benefit you will receive from relevant and high quality resources linking back to your website.

If you have correctly optimised your On-Page SEO, these links will give your website a boost of authority and ultimately allow you to rank highly on search engines for organic terms that you are optimised for.

In Google Analytics, you can set up a filter and monitor how many conversions you are making from organic traffic and how much value this is adding.

By monitoring how much the content creation is costing, including things like wages and other expenses, you can actually work out the return on your investment from a completely profit driven point of view.

The equation to do so is:

((Monthly Total of Organic Revenue in May – Figure for May last year) – Content Marketing Spend) / Content Marketing Spend = Percentage ROI

For example, if you made $2000 last year and $3400 this year, and currently spend around $900 per month on your content marketing, your ROI would be:

((3400 – 2000) – 900) / 900 = 0.55 therefore you will have achieved a 55% ROI

This is possibly one of the most powerful tools you have as a marketer to show others the actual bottom line value you are adding. Remember to explain that you are creating lasting value to your website which will ultimately give you a competitive advantage over your online competition.

It’s the future…

Google and other search engines are really rewarding great content, and therefore without content marketing, you will have to rely on other paid forms of advertising. If you get content marketing right, you are creating constant value and the returns on investment will be huge.

To Do…

• Unify your business and marketing goals – understand exactly what it is that will allow you to be a success in your role
• Use calls to action and monitor them using analytics software
• Think about your sales funnel (draw it out if it will help) and think about different content for different customers. Do you have something for everyone?
• Calculate your ROI to prove you are adding value

Jonathan Dempster is writing on behalf of Call Tracking providers ResponseTap who deliver innovative voice-centric marketing technology, which enables business to maximize their marketing success.