New Company Helps Small Businesses Use Mobile Marketing

When Eddy Puig was a kid growing up in the 1980s in the Dominican Republic, he played the Atari and dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. Now, he runs a mobile marketing company based in New Port Richey.

 “I didn’t have the height, and I struck out too many times to play baseball,” Puig, 37,  said. So he went to business school and did accounting for a Philip Morris International affiliate in the Dominican Republic.

Puig moved to New Port Richey nearly eight years ago after a short residence in Bradenton. He did sales for Pinch-A-Penny but quit his job three years ago to care for his now 4-year-old son.

In August 2011, Puig started Expose Mobile, a mobile marketing company that helps local small businesses create mobile websites, text messaging (SMS) campaigns and more.

“Before, it was if [a business] doesn’t have a website and email, they were dying,” Puid said. “Later, it was if they didn’t have Facebook. By 2014, it’ll be mobile-friendly websites.”

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 35 percent of American adults own a smartphone device. Eighty-seven percent of those access the web or email on their phone, with 68 percent of that group accessing such information on a daily basis.

Puig helps his clients tap into the growing trend of smartphones by setting their businesses up with QR codes that direct customers to mobile-friendly websites he helps them build.

Businesses can also send out SMS messages with coupons up to eight times a month to customers who opt to be on the list.

“Most people have several email addresses they may or may not check regularly but they usually only have one phone number,” Puig said. “Email marketing is dead. With a mobile device, I have your attention 100 percent because if you get a new text message, you’re going to open it.”

Puig got into the business of mobile marketing while researching jobs he could do from home on the Internet. He reached out to a Missouri man helping businesses create databases and mobile websites under the name of AvidMobile.

Puig said his biggest challenges in making potential clients understand why they need to have mobile-friendly websites and why they need to market to those with mobile devices.

“Some people don’t believe in this,” Puig said. “My main focus right now is finding clients who already have [regular] websites. If you at least have a website, you believe a little bit in the technology.”

It’s not enough to just have a regular website anymore, Puig said. The Pew survey also said nearly 25 percent of smartphone owners say that their phone is the primary Internet connection in their lives over a traditional desktop computer or laptop.

This makes it important for businesses to have websites that are easy to navigate on a phone, Puig said. Otherwise, a potential customer could get frustrated trying to access a regular website on the smaller screen of a phone or tablet.

“I think that in 2012, people are going to alter their minds more,” Puig said. “Some business owners are older and say they don’t use smartphones, they don’t use tablets but I tell them, ‘Hey, that’s you, but what about your customers? What do they use?’”

Since August, Puig has worked with just under 10 companies like Angela’s Pizza in Odessa to build mobile-friendly websites and send out coupons via SMS. He said it takes four-eight weeks to get an app created and approved by the iPhone and Android stores and he has to follow the guidelines of the Mobile Marketing Association.

“I’m here and this is not a big business,” Puig said. “Small businesses have the opportunity to build databases like the bigger companies. Every single thing that the bigger companies have, they can have it, too. I can help them.”

Right now, the company consists of just Puig. His dream is to build the company to the point of having employees under his wing so that he can assist even more small businesses in embracing the future of mobile marketing.

Eddy Puig can be reached at (727) 481-4127 or info@exposemobile.com. Text Expose  to 72727 to view Expose Mobile's mobile-friendly website.