Create a Media Section on Your Mobile Site

You may be interested in creating an entire media section on your mobile website, rather than simply having a single media page. Rich media such as photos and videos are engaging and help keep people on your mobile site. This post will walk you through the easy steps of creating a "media section" on your mobile website in the mobile management area of Squareberry.

Start With a Sub-Menu

The first thing you need is a sub-menu. On the Mobile Content tab select the "Add Page/Sub-Menu" button. Then select "Add Sub-Menu on the popup. This will take you to the Add Sub-Menu screen.

On the add Sub-Menu screen, provide a name for your sub-menu. This will essentially be the name of your media section. You could call it "Media", "Photos & Videos" or anything else you want. Once you create this, it will be added to the menu structure of your mobile site. You will see the sub-menu on your Mobile Content.

Add Media Pages

Now you need to add media pages to the sub-menu you just created. On the Mobile Content tab, click on the sub menu you just created. This will take you to that sub-menu. Click the "Add Page/Sub-Menu" button to add a page to the sub-menu, which means you are adding a page to your "media section".

Squareberry's Mobile Management area has several page types which can be used in this scenario, including Photo Gallery and YouTube Video. Photo Galleries allow you to quickly upload multiple photos to easily make a touch-friendly photo gallery. YouTube Video pages simply show a YouTube video for quick and easy play.

Alternatively, you can use the Custom page type to add any combination of photos, graphics and videos you want. These pages will all be added to the sub-menu you created, effectively building a mobile media center.

Track How Your Events & Promotions Perform

There is a lot of talk about analytics, metrics and return on investment when it comes to online marketing. Most of the time the focus is on how many clicks your organization gets, how much traffic you see or your number of "Likes" on Facebook. For most organizations, the most important thing to measure is how they actually do in the real world. Squareberry's event and promotion features are designed to help you market real world activities and specials that can lead to greater attendance and higher sales.

Events - Count It

Tracking the effectiveness of your "Events" is pretty straightforward. Simply count the number of people who show up for your event. This can be accomplished by having someone at the front entrance who's job is to count, running a raffle that everyone participates in or by counting "groups" based on number of transactions/checks.

Getting any kind of count can help you in your long term goals. If you track the attendance of your events you will be able to recognize trends and adjust to them. If your numbers begin to drop, you will know you need to mix it up or promote your event in different ways.

Promotions - Count It

For retails stores and restaurants, counting promotions is fairly easy. Your Point of Sale (POS) system should offer a promotion/coupon feature. You can input the promotion manually each time someone shows you their coupon or you can utilize the barcode feature to scan the coupon right off printed coupons and mobile devices. Your POS system should keep track of how many times your promotions was used by customers.

Sales - The Last Word

For businesses, the most important things to track is sales. This is obviously something you will already be doing. You may want to look at sales during periods or on days where you run promotions/events compared with days when no special happenings are going on.

Sales should be the last word and determining factor. You may feel your promotions or events was not as popular as you hoped, but your sales may have still seen a healthy boost and the effects could be ongoing from that boost. Sales numbers will always be king.

Using QR Codes for Your Mobile Pages

Recently we released new enhancements to the Mobile Management area which makes it easier than ever to link directly to a mobile page or utilize a QR Code to send people directly to a page on your mobile website. Every page you create in the Mobile Management area has a unique URL and a unique QR code that points to that page.

Utilizing QR Codes to Boost Your Brand

At the top right corner of the edit screen for each mobile page is a button "Link & QR Code to This Page". Click on this button to get a QR Code for the page you are currently editing. You can easily download the QR Code at that time.

Calendar Pages

Calendar pages are always great to utilize. Add a QR Code to your restaurant menu, in a local publication or on a mail-out. You can quickly send people to your events/promotions page on your mobile site to help draw them in to your location. Calendar pages help you carry people from printed material to mobile-friendly site, from mobile site to real world events and promotions.

Contact Forms

Your printed advertisement, brochure or mail-out can quickly be given an easy call-to-action by utilizing a contact form. Add a QR code on your printed material that links to your contact form. This allows anyone who sees your ad or brochure to instantly contact you via contact form/email. This can help generate leads, generate sales and get registrations.

Photo Galleries

QR Codes are perfect for enhancing printed materials. Local newspapers, magazines and publications can utilize mobile photo galleries and QR Codes to take their printed items to another level.

Start by creating a photo gallery page type. Upload photos related to the article or topic you are covering in the publication. The QR code can then be placed on your printed publication next to relevant information/articles. Now, people reading your publication can easily scan the QR Code and get a touch-friendly photo gallery on their mobile device to enhance their reading experience.

Using the New Image Uploader for Mobile Galleries

The photo gallery page type in the Mobile Management Area allows you to create simple, sleek and touch-friendly photo galleries for your mobile website. Photos are organized into a gallery view and can be viewed as a slide-show when you select an image.

Recently, a new image uploader was put in place for Photo Gallery pages in the Mobile Management Area. This new uploader allows you to upload multiple images at once, making creating photo galleries faster and easier.

Uploading Multiple Photos

When editing a photo gallery page in the mobile management area click the "Add Photo" button. This will bring up a popup with 3 buttons: "Select Files", "Upload" and "Clear". Click the "Select Files" button. This will bring up your system's file browser. To select multiple files on Windows hold the Control button and click on the files you want to upload. To select multiple files on Mac OS hold the command button and click on the files you want to upload.

Then click "Open" or "Select" on your file browser window. The images you selected will now appear in your upload popup. You can select more files, clear the selected files or click "Upload". If you click the upload button your images will being to upload.

Once the images are done uploading you can close the popup and your images will now appear under "Photos on This Page". You can drang and drop to reorder the images in your gallery. Click "Save" at the bottom of the page when you are done.