Mobile Marketing Has Arrived
Many online marketers are now exploring the growing trend of Mobile Marketing to reach a growing pool of potential customers. The potential for successfully reaching prospects is huge given the large number of mobile phone users. What exactly is mobile marketing, and how can it be put to work in current marketing campaigns?
Firstly, The Mobile Marketing Association defines it in these terms: “Mobile Marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.”
Mobile marketing, also known as SMS Marketing, allows for marketers to interact with potential customers or subscribers through the use of cellular phones and mobile devices. With current Smartphone technology, it’s possible for people to have fully functional internet access in the palm of their hand. Also, as you’ve probably noticed, most people you know or see have a mobile phone capable of sending and receiving text messages. Connection speeds to the internet from these devices is improving almost daily, which makes this a great medium to deliver promotional messages.
A couple of the more successful strategies in traditional internet marketing have been opt-in e-mail marketing and pay per click advertising. Opt-in e-mail marketing involves building a list of interested prospects usually by offering informative e-books, software, or special reports in exchange for permission to send e-mail messages pertaining to the particular category or niche. There is always an option for the subscriber to opt-out should they wish to no longer receive the e-mails.
Pay per click marketing campaigns involve the marketer using certain networks that will deliver internet traffic based on bid pricing on certain keywords that users may be searching for. Both strategies can be very effective, and is usually dictated by advertising budget, and nature of the website the marketer is attempting to send traffic to.
Keeping the above traditional internet marketing strategies in mind, mobile marketing is now providing the same options with the ability to reach a much larger audience. The statistics are staggering when it comes to number of users, and future projections continue to rise. In 2010, The AP ran a story that projected the number of cell phone users worldwide at around 4.6 Billion people. 98% of mobile phones in the US are equipped with SMS capabilities. If you do a search on for mobile marketing, you can see even more staggering numbers and get an idea on how huge this is becoming. The creation of apps that allow for phone number capture are growing and marketers are beginning to use these opt-in phone number lists in the same way traditional opt-in e-mailing. There are now pay per click mobile networks that work the same way networks such as Google AdWords. What we’ve discovered is how amazingly cheap the bid prices are running in comparison to traditional keyword bidding. This suggests a truly ground floor opportunity that will soon get saturated. Admob is one such network and shows global ad impression statistics at a count of 853,591,270,392.
The true winners of this marketing trend will be those who get in early, and combine the traditional online marketing with this growing trend of mobile marketing. When used together, this can be a very powerful way to organize run advertising campaigns.
