Mobile app development requires an adherence to a well-defined process. The process itself may not be the same for everyone, but it’s key that you work within four key areas:

-  Strategy: Initial research, which includes target audience feedback and initial wireframes, is often where we jump the gun. Develop strong goals. Base them on real-world feedback and suggestions. At the same time, of course, don’t kibosh intuition.

-  Design and Development: Layout. Colors. Interactive content. From Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to technical architecture, programming and optimizing, it’s critical you get to know your mobile app—and fall in love with it—before it goes public.

-  Quality Assurance: Testing can ensure that your best intentions deliver to a small beta testing group. Share the mobile app with those you trust. Ask for their feedback. Listen to it. There is a lot to consider before throwing the app to the lion’s den: the App Store

-  Launch: Once your mobile app is conceptualized, designed, developed and thoroughly tested, it’s time to share it on the App Store. Are you ready? It’s now time to consider mobile advertising, online marketing and many other ways to make your app known.

Ready to launch? Explore Step 3 of the iOS Developer Program at Apple.com.

In next month’s newsletter, we’ll ask Matt Hampton of Envoy Design Co. to provide his top five questions and answers from businesses with stellar mobile application ideas.

Until then, plan well. That’s how today’s mobile app trailblazers stay ahead of the curve.

ComScore reports that 7% of U.S. web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. The report goes on to mention nearly two-thirds of that traffic comes from mobile phones.

Borrell reports nearly 20% of local marketing budgets will be spent on local mobile advertising this year. Poynter.org says mobile ad spend will increase sevenfold by 2015.

Entering the mobile advertising scene comes with barriers and problems. Popular media middlemen, such as Groupon, make it difficult to target advertising to the most interested consumers. Many consumers are annoyed by full-screen, ill-targeted ads that block mobile apps for up to 15 seconds at a time. How will you advertise effectively?

Here are four considerations for your mobile advertising…

-  Consider the positive results of viral marketing. Friends share fun, useful and relevant content. Text your opt-in customers. Better yet, have them text you about an offer. Do this in a way that encourages offer sharing, and you’ll put your offer in more hands.

-  Mashable reports Facebook may include mobile ads as soon as March of this year. You probably know the positive impacts of highly targeted Facebook advertising. Imagine what mobile advertising with a potential reach of 1 billion users can do.

-  When planning for mobile ad placement within mobile apps, think about the app’s audience. Do these consumers fit your target market demographics? If you focus advertising in the same way you target users on Facebook, you’ll have better results.

-  In 2011, paid ad click-through rate is 38% higher on tablets than on PCs. 10% of consumers click paid advertisements on handheld devices. This, according to the report by Marin Software, means mobile is a viable new medium for paid advertisers.

With help reaching consumers on mobiles, contact us.

If Apple capitalizes on that patent-pending 3-D smartphone technology anytime soon, we’ll have a lot more to consider. Until then, let’s keep it simple: relevant content delivered to the right audience yields results, revenue and brand value…always.

Whether you employ text message marketing or bring offline shoppers online with compelling advertising and aptly placed QR codes, plan your mobile strategy well.

This is the year to be leading business with smart mobile advertising campaigns.

It’s becoming more difficult for brick-and-mortar retailers to compete with consumers who have shopping malls in their hands. In-store sales were up 4.1% during the holiday season. Online sales rose by 15%. Target, Best Buy and Barnes & Noble are concerned about showrooming, where visitors come in to see products, but then buy them online.

To respond to this, Target sent a letter to its vendors, urging them to help the brand compete for in-store sales. As mobile shopping-preferred browsing outdid in-store shopping growth last year, some retailers are now exploring mobile commerce.

Mobile is the newest method by which consumers can shop anytime and anywhere. Mobile shopping can bring online and offline shopping together into one solution. How do we know mobile commerce is catching on? Why should we consider mobile now?

12% of ecommerce website traffic came from mobile devices, up from 5% last year. According to IBM Benchmark and first reported by Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times on December 22, 2011, 9% of online sales came from mobile phones.

Mobile web technology—especially the emerging preference of HTML5 over mobile applications—is available to spearhead exciting new ways to shop the mobile web.

Initial success of Google Wallet—plus the growing number of Paypal accounts—may help you easily complete transactions initiated by handheld devices on the mobile web.

eBay’s mobile Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) was $5 billion in 2011, more than doubling 2010’s $2 billion. CEO John Donahoe predicts this’ll reach $8 billion in 2012.

If you wish to compete in a quickly emerging and rapidly changing mobile commerce market, you must consider responsive website best practices and mobile application development. Consider your customers. What do they want to see? Make it easy.

At Inflexion Interactive, we are focused on innovating mobile commerce by giving you the latest technology needed to help your customers shop anytime and anywhere.

2012 is the year of mobile commerce on the mobile web. Stay ahead of the curve.

Now, there’s a new way to design highly viewable websites: responsive web design.

While web design of the past gained much of its inspiration from print design and strict layout guidelines, a growing amount of unpredictability is present on screen as an array of devices try to display navigation, typography and other unscalable page elements.

Response web design uses j-query to format web pages that offer unparalleled cross-platform viewing on a range of desktop, laptop and handheld devices. Here’s the gist…

Adobe’s Hartford usergroup’s Scott B. Reynolds explains responsive web design, including sharing the trends that have led to the need for flexible website development.

Ethan Magoc has coined “responsive web design,” and he goes on to share three elements any adaptable site must have: flexible layout, flexible images and media queries. This .Net Magazine article goes in detail on each of these ingredients.

You’ve launched your site. You’ve probably considered a mobile strategy. Now what?

With responsive web design in mind, we can better ensure that every visitor who comes to your site will find easily viewable pages and ultimately have an enjoyable brand experience. To learn more, follow this blog category or reach out to us.

CanCrusade.com. Can Crusade is a national awareness campaign to communicate the usability, portability and sustainability of the aluminum can. Through a partnership with Coyne Public Relations, we helped them design the site, develop the WordPress backend and produce an easily updatable press room with logos and press photos.

XOAthletic.com. XO Athletic offers athletic protection, including mouth guards with back bite protection. To help XO Athletic launch its ecommerce business, Inflexion Interactive provided website design and web development for the Magento platform. We created a site that is easy to update with new products, text and images.

EliteCorporateHousing.com. Elite Corporate Housing offers luxury, fully-furnished corporate housing in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Since this was a newly redesigned business, we began with logo design and branding followed by website design and web development. Plus we created a custom map with search functionality.

Medco.com. Medco is a prescription health and healthcare management company. In partnership with Coyne Public Relations of New Jersey, Inflexion Interactive helped create a media room with easy access to press releases, brand guidelines and informative PDFs. We developed the site using j-query tools to maximize folder structure and functionality. The media room serves as a portal for their sponsored event—Archon Genomics X-Prize—that awards $10 million to human genome innovators.

Learn more about the websites we launch at our newly redesigned Web Marketing Case Studies page. Or contact Inflexion Interactive to talk about what we can do for your site.

Throughout the past year, we’ve helped many e-commerce businesses sell more online, from product customization functionality to WordPress CMS integration. Let us introduce you to a few of these etailers that can help you complete your holiday shopping online.

CustomGia offers custom jewelry designs for young women, including brides and bridesmaids. Shop CustomGia for classic necklaces, bracelets, pendants and earrings.

Hometown Favorites delivers candies, groceries and gifts you thought you’d never be able to find again. For nostalgic gifts, browse the tasty brands you used to love.

Perler Beads® Snapshots gives you the pattern to turn your favorite photo into a Perler Beads® work of art. Or make beaded snowflakes with your kids this year.

Chocomize is your source for custom chocolate bars. Whether you give them to family, friends or coworkers, just make sure you order enough to give yourself a treat or two.

Digz Apparel offers surfer-inspired clothing, inspired by a dear friend who recently lost his life. All t-shirts, shorts, hats and other clothing sold helps support TimboFund.org.

From jewelry for her and clothing for him to nostalgic gifts and custom chocolate, our clients offer the best in last-minute shopping ideas. Check them out. Let us know what you order, perhaps after your recipient gets it. We’d love to hear your feedback.

“We wanted to do this without having to rely on retailers,” said Bill Albanese, co-founder of Giavan and CustomGia.com. “Quite simply, they design it and we make it.”

Unlike other fashion jewelry distributors, Giavan prides itself on designing original and unique pieces by hand, rather than offering mass produced pieces.

Now, with a newly designed and developed website accompanied by its new jewelry customizer users can choose between a wide variety of colors, materials, shapes and sizes which can then be purchased online.

Whether you have particular tastes or just love creating in a fun, easy-to-use and simple fashion, CustomGia.com provides its users with a stylish tool that is sure to impress ones friends and loved ones.

Interested in learning more on how custom web-design and web applications can impact your business? Contact Inflexion Interactive.

For most businesses, negotiating with the current domain name owner or coming up with another name can be tricky. But for Coke, UPS and other major brands with a global reach and a big purse, 2012 may be the year they get their own domain name extensions, according to this ICANN press release and this recent Reuters article.

By January, businesses can file a $185,000 application to register .coke, .ups or any other corporate identity-focused domain name extension. Once ICANN approves the application, these major brands will have an opportunity to customize their web presence; however, such online branding customization comes with annual maintenance fees that could add up to as much as $75,000. This isn’t for your typical mom+pop shop.

Besides customizing online branding with a unique domain name extension, ICANN reports that international brands can register unique domain name extensions using any character or language, meaning Russia-based potash mining company, Uralkali, could register its Russian business name to easily engage with Russian-speaking investors. While Coke is known worldwide, they could potentially register كوكاكول or 可口可樂.

For any business, building domain name equity is critical to stopping competitors from using or squatting on viable domain name extensions. This decision by ICANN creates more opportunities for global brands, but it also creates a potential problem: SEO loss due to the young age of these new domain name extensions. For example: a company’s .com extension with PR4 has more credibility than .coke with PR0.

How will any business that agrees to join this new domain name marketplace compete for traffic? Most will likely keep their existing domain names. Others will have the budgets to conduct massive advertising and marketing campaigns. A few will use white-hat SEO techniques, such as blogging, press release writing and smart tagging, to make sure they inform both search engines and consumers of their new domain name.

How will this affect your online business? What do you do to reach out to customers online? To talk about your online marketing needs, including domain names, contact us.

Facebook Timeline will offer a more integrated way to view profile activity on Facebook. Instead of a list of status updates, it displays a mashup of experiences. From a personal perspective, it aims to connect friends and family experiences through multimedia profiles. From a marketing perspective, it can bring people closer to your online brand.

As you view profiles as you might view journal entries, imagine how powerful it would be to see your branded content on these pages, earmarking authentic brand experiences where your friends, family members or even customers interacted with you and your business in such a way that it became an integrated part of their lives on Facebook.

That’s the power of Facebook Timeline. We’re exploring how this new way of interacting—a feature rumored to launch in the near future—will change how we market online.

Everyone knows the power of social media. With more than 200 million Tweets per day and nearly half of the 800 million Facebook users logging on each day, it’s clear that your target audience is most likely online right now. How are you going to engage them?

More importantly, how are you going to bring them closer to your business in a way that makes a lasting impression on their social networking activities? Start a conversation.

Where a website provides the handshake in the sales cycle, social media offers the platform to start and continue bold, breakthrough conversations with your customers. The catch is finding something bold to talk about that does, indeed, break through.

What will be among the common ways to be a part of someone’s Facebook Timeline? Sponsored stories. Sponsored stories are posts that tell friends and family how that user has interacted with your brand. These word-of-mouth activities are user-generated, meaning they’re free of sales pitches and marketing speak. Here are the details. To see Facebook Timeline in action, watch the demo at Facebook.com/about/timeline.

Before Facebook Timeline launches, think about ways you can create those special moments where customers interact with your brand. Whether your business becomes a part of a socially responsible movement or you set out to adapt your products and services to real-time customer input, there’s never been a better time to engage online.

Discuss how to produce socially relevant branded content that shows up in Facebook Timelines for years to come. Talk to Inflexion Interactive about your social business.

Account Management | Hoboken, NJ

Start Date:

ASAP

Summary:

The Account Manager is responsible for the day-to-day relationship between the agency and clients, as well as creating project plans and guiding projects through strategy, creative and development. The Account Manager will generally look after client needs through direct contact, liaison, and the governing of agency resources. He or she must be knowledgeable in both the client’s business and the agency business. An effective problem-solver on a day-to-day basis is a must.

Responsibilities and Duties

• Acts as the daily client contact for assigned projects, developing relationships with clients and working closely with them to learn their business and communication needs
• Works closely with all agency department staff to develop and implement strategic project plans
• Has a thorough understanding of the planning, creative and production processes
• Proactively gathers the necessary information to plan and implement each client project
• Provides timely issuance of all documentation: proposals, project initiations, creative briefs, estimates, timelines, meeting summaries, and status and budget reports
• Manages time and financial resources to ensure client projects are on time and on budget.
• Manages project schedules
• Produces client budgets and estimate updates
• Ensures project deliverables are delivered on time and on budget
• Manages internal and external resources
• Manages client project internal and external communication and documentation
• Works in a proactive manner to provide client campaigns with the greatest amount of added value through communications
• Gathers and assembles background information and analyses as needed in development of briefs, etc.
• Receives client briefings
• Analyzes client input, together with background knowledge, research, field feedback, etc., to produce full communications plans
• Keeps apprised of all relevant client, industry and market developments
• Coordinates and authorizes quotations for client approval.
• Coordinates project timing and budgets with all relevant agency personnel.
• Writes Client Contact Reports; reviews important developments with Account Director
• Continuously works to upgrade knowledge and skills through available reading, courses and seminars
• Maintain a highly responsive service orientation in all transactions

Qualifications

• business or marketing-related degree or equivalent professional qualification
• experience in all aspects of developing and maintaining marketing strategies
• technical marketing skills
• proven experience in customer and market research
• relevant product and industry knowledge
• experience with relevant software applications

Please send your resume, portfolio to:

Inflexion Interactive
1101 Grand Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
United States

Or e-mail your resume along with portfolio web site links (if applicable) to careers@inflexioninteractive.com

(Please ensure that you state the position you are applying for in the subject line of your email.)