Mobile, Local, Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

screen shot moblr.me Moblr is a marketing platform for localized businesses. Restaurants, retail stores, and other small businesses that rely on local customers use Moblr to build and communicate with a list of loyal local customers.

Moblr is currently in private BETA. I created Moblr to take aim at the daily deal space. Independent business owners are getting creamed by the daily deal sites. Many of them fail to consider the full ramifications of the deals they’re offering to the public from these sites. The results from a daily deal (Groupon) campaign are often disappointing and more than occasionally disastrous.

The hypothesis for Moblr is this: Daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social can be horrible for businesses. The ‘value’ these sites bring are almost exclusively the email lists that they’ve built (and some good copywriting) and they only exist because the local proprietors have failed to build their own lists.

Local businesses fail to build their own lists because:

The tools available on the market are too much, there are too many features, they’re too confusing for many small business owners who are not technical.
It’s one thing to capture customer information online it’s another to capture company information in real life.
The busy daily operations of most businesses don’t allow a manager or business owner to sit down and wade through complex marketing campaigns and strategies.

Moblr takes aim at these problems by offering a simple interface paired with solid in-store, print, outdoor and online lead/customer information capture tools. The system can be used from any device which means that business owners have the power to reach their audience at any time from anywhere.

Examples:

A school snow day is announced, at 11:00 AM as a pizza shop owner you send a message to your high school list and announce a special ‘snowed in’ pizza deal. Subscribers receive the message via text message or via mobile optimized email. Right target, right time, right offer.
You have a popular pub that suffers, like most, in the beginning of the week. You build a Monday night football list with in-store marketing during your busy nights. Monday at 4:30PM your customers are looking forward to the end of the day. You offer them a special reason to come in and your Monday night football marketing is a huge hit.

There are endless possibilites. The point is, if you haven’t guessed, to b very specific with your marketing. Sending a ‘snowed in special’ to adults working 9-5 isn’t going to do you any good and worse it’s going to make a lot of people angry when they’re receiving such useless messages, they’ll unsubscribe. The point is to have permission. Permission based marketing opens a whole new realm of marketing possibilites.

Moblr makes permission based marketing dead simple and lets localized business reach customers who want to be reached when they want to be reached.

About Building Moblr

Getting the Moblr BETA out the door quickly, with limited expense but built in such a way that the application could grow through customer discovery were the goals. We achieved these by leveraging some existing assets and not building everything from scratch.

The backend of Moblr, the desktop admin and mobile admin, are both built on ‘off the shelf’ templates.

Responsive Web Design

The front end of Moblr was built by me on a responsive css framework. That means that website recognizes what size browser you’re using and adjusts the view accordingly. Using a responsive web design allowed me to avoid using a subdomain and redirects to show a mobile formatted site. We do still redirect the admin logins to another directory but the front end of the website is fully responsive.