Whether business owners want to admit or not, mobile marketing is the wave of the future. It has more power than any of the current marketing mediums when it comes to generating increased profits. It is significantly more powerful than email marketing, has a greater coupon redemption rate than print media and greater branding impact than either television or radio. Most importantly, when combined with those other strategies mobile marketing actually enhances their effectiveness. But the ultimate question is: how does a small business owner get start in mobile and how does that business owner choose a provider? The first question that a business owner has to answer is this: do I want to purchase mobile media from a website or do I want to work with a local mobile media professional? If you were to run a Google search for mobile marketing companies you would get pages of results. In fact there were over 25 million results when i last did a Google search this morning. The offerings are all over the board, ranging from systems that use ad words and an unlimited number of messages to systems that offer a limited number of keywords and charge by the message to systems that offer QR codes only. So, lets analyze the choices and applicable considerations. 1: Do I want to work with a local mobile media professional? There may be a number of reasons why you might choose to work with a local professional. First, that professional is there to help you fully integrate your mobile marketing into your entire marketing strategy. Second, the local mobile marketing professional can help you choose the type of campaign to implement.
Consumers’ privacy is highly intruded by mobile marketing. It poses serious threat on a user’s identity, location, information and choices. With the advancement of cellular technologies and of mobile hand sets there is huge quantity of technology mergers. In this environment of enhanced technologies, legal system seems far from sufficient. Legal system often fails to protect ethical issues of marketing and to guard users from threat posed by rampant mobile marketing approaches by merchandisers. Using the open directory of consumers, mobile advertisements are sent to customers’ mobile numbers. Thus sender has free access to other information regarding the customers’ identity. If the sender is a person with malicious intentions, then sender can use the identity information of customers and become sufficiently dangerous for the consumers. An opt-out option plays the tricky role in confirmation of identity of a user. The open directories often carry information on active as well as deactivated phone numbers.
This implies that you could adopt larger HTML ads, indulge the consumers with fascinating ads & enhance your branding. 1. Search : Smartphone users just don’t use their phones to call or text. They use to browse the internet, search on the move & access their social networking accounts. Search via GPRS or 3G has a different domain usually ‘m’ prefixed before any website to give access that streamlined for view on a cell phone. 2. SMS Campaign : Sending a quick viral text to thousands of mobile users via service providers or internet based websites is a sharp idea. SMS marketing campaign is simple & doesn’t require too much effort or manpower. Just establish your geographical audience preference, select various parameters and a marketing budget and its ready. 3. Apps online: Smartphone users download millions of apps everyday. So develop your brand app today & post it on various apps stores online – from Apple to Blackberry to Google. 4. Social Media Integration: People love to access their social networking accounts on the go. Twitter, people like to stay connected and check-in every minute detail on their pages. So make sure you have a check-in place established for your brand so that every time your customers visit you, their entire network gets a buzz. Better still, offer discounts to those who check-in frequently.
In short, the engaging customer features available, the ease of complete control of the content and the affordable price, the native mobile app built using a template (NMAT) is the next best marketing tool, to improve the bottom line and increase customer loyalty. To be clear, custom built native apps that are built from the ground up, require hand coding for each app on each mobile platform, Apple, Android, etc. This is a very expensive process. Coders are very well paid and the end result provides a great, custom, UX. The new alternative, NMAT, is building an app using an already coded template system that can be customized in appearance, function and content. This option provides similar features as the custom app, to choose from, at a fraction of the cost, with a very similar UX and can be totally controlled on-line. Here is a quick look at the comparison of benefits between mobile website and native apps.
Mobile marketing is a specialised area. Having a back-office at their disposal to create and store contacts, break them into different profiles and then send them texts of up to 450 characters is what is required. Mobile marketing companies are different to those that do SEO and pay per click and ad agencies should recognise that fact. Gartner, Inc. is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, they predict that by 2013 mobile phones will have overtaken PC’s as the most common way to access the internet. The key implication is that companies need to ensure that their websites, portals, and web applications adequately support mobile devices. To date only a small percentage of companies have had their website adapted so it can be viewed properly on all phones. A recent statement from Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay marketplaces. Bay buyers and sellers have rapidly embraced mobile commerce this year, and this holiday season has been a mobile commerce tipping point.
The term ‘mobile marketing’ is thrown around a lot these days, but many people are only vaguely familiar with what it actually is. It’s important to understand the fundamentals of what this new breed of marketing is, how it works, and why it’s important to begin utilizing it for your business. Nearly every business can benefit from using mobile marketing and advertising methods. Whether your business is virtual, brick-and-mortar, or both, you can utilize this new and powerful marketing tool in some way. Broadly, this refers to mobile phones, smart phones, wireless handheld devices such as the iPad or ultra-portable netbooks, and so forth. Usually, the focus for mobile marketing is on mobile and smart phones, however. The term ‘wireless marketing’ is often used, though this is less descriptive. Marketing to cellular phones didn’t really hit the main stream until about five or six years ago. This was due to the introduction and wide adoption of short message service (SMS) text messaging. At first, the methods were pretty ad hoc with a lot of hit-and-miss attempts (and angry consumers).