Mobile marketing may some day rival social media as a unique form of marketing that has an immediate impact on consumers. Although it may be considered a breakthrough marketing trend inspired by a high tech audience, its more of an appreciation for the possibilities of integrating marketing with the multiple usability functions of mobile devices.
What Is Mobile Marketing Anyway?
Since mobile devices are often directly related to personal computers, mobile marketing can be considered as using the medium of common killer apps like email clients and forums, digital and video cameras, calendars and book readers, websites and blogs, search engine indexes and directories to piggyback marketing messages.
The idea is that since people are surfing, shopping, and researching online through a mobile device, the same commercial strategies that work for internet marketing can work here, too. Whether a marketing message is being broadcast or has to be found, it’s an opportunity to capture attention and engage customers. How these mobile devices are used for marketing can range from text coupons to brand promotion.
How It Works
Just as an internet marketer will optimize his website for Google, Yahoo, and Bing searches, a mobile marketer can develop SEO strategies for Google Mobile Blog, Yahoo Mobile, and Bing for Mobile.
Similarly, just as an internet marketer needs tools like Google Analytics, or similar software tools for tracking visitor behavior, a mobile marketer needs metrics on how many people are visiting and viewing a website through a mobile device. New software tools like Google Analytics for mobile, Mobilytics, a free tracking tool, and Bango, a paid tracking tool, make this possible.
The Current State Of Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is already much more than simply offering mobile coupons for online or offline purchases.
Savvy webmasters can tap into the attention of mobile surfers by creating a mobile version of their website. Although a designer can create a small, simple, easier to navigate version of a website, mobile site converter software is also readily available to do this, including adding SEO features like sitemaps and analytic tracking. Examples are Wordpress Mobile Pack, MoFuse, and EverywhereIGo.
Future Success Of Mobile Marketing
Once audience behavior is learned and understood through analytic software, many innovative methods will emerge to promote anything from a brick-and-mortar restaurant for the trendy crowd to digital products that can be downloaded.
These innovations will correlate with the advances made in internet marketing, computer technology, and audio-video telecommunications. Most innovations will be refinements of existing systems, while others will be utterly new. Just as internet marketing really took off once PDF files imitated book formats to became e-books, creating a way that authors could get instantly published and sell their ideas in a digital format, so will unique uses be found for mobile services.
Limitations Of Mobile Marketing
For the geeks amongst us, mobile marketing has more opportunities than limitations, but for those who consider uploading a file to their website or downloading an attachment from their email to their desktop a major accomplishment, mobile marketing can be even more of a challenge. Many marketers don’t know how to add marketing message and many users don’t know how to use interactive software features.
You must log in to post a comment.