Hi again, I hope you had time to digest the information I gave you last time. We’re going to dive right in and talk about the various forms of mobile marketing that exists today. Consumers are often seeking information on their mobile devices that is needed at the moment, to fill a need while waiting, or to look up common information such as the weather.
You can reach out to your customers by understanding when and why they might use a mobile device to interact with you or contact you. You can also make it happen by being at the right place at the right time. But, it helps to understand why mobile is important too, as well as the pros and cons involved.
• SMS — This is known as texting to most people and involves sending text based messages to consumers with permission. The consumer signs up to receive text messages from your business and you send out timely information to them.
• MMS — A lot like text messages except that it includes images, audio and video. So instead of just a text message you could send, with permission, a quick video to your customers.
• Mobile Applications — You can design or have designed a specialized app for your target audience that the can download and use free, or that they can buy. Mobile apps can be used for productivity, such as a calendar, or a grocery list from a recipe. Apps can be used for location based services and more.
• Proximity Based Marketing — Bluetooth wireless allows for marketers to send relevant ads to someone’s phone in the form of an sms, mms, or other when you come within a certain mile radius of the business.
• Click to Call — You can create mobile ads with phone numbers inside for your target 
audience to call. You only pay for the ad when your customer actually clicks to call. This is a lot like pay per click marketing on the PC.
• Voice Marketing — Some marketers use recorded advertisements to call a mailing list of numbers to pass on important information to people who have signed up to receive the information. The information could be a marketing message, but it could also be a motivational message.
• Mobile Banner Ads — Just like you can create and buy banner ads to place on websites, you can also buy banner ads to be shown on mobile devices while they are looking at mobile friendly websites.
• QR Codes — You’ve likely seen these funny little squares of code, called Quick Response Barcodes. A customer can scan the bar code in print material allowing them to visit the mobile version of the webpage or a specialized landing page to sign up for more information.
• Location Based Marketing — This technology available due to GPS allows marketers to send users information on their mobile device when they get into a certain location. This happens when you go on a trip, and search for restaurants in the area based on your location.
• Social Media — Pretty much all social media that you should be using has mobile friendly versions, from 
Linkedin.com to Facebook and Twitter most people access social media using their mobile devices. You can use these social media sites to drive traffic to your mobile friendly sites.
Mobile marketing is convenient, it’s immediate, and easy to implement, but like most types of marketing where there are pros there are also cons. Currently, since mobile marketing is still relatively new there are not as many standards as there could be. It will be up to you to maintain your own standards. Basically, it’s simple, do not market to people who have not asked or signed up on your specialized lists to receive the mobile marketing messages.
Screen size is not standard on mobile technology which can make it more difficult to implement a standard mobile friendly website, however, if you use responsive design you can ensure that just one website works for all screen sizes.
This may cut down on the amount of information you can put on any given page of your site, but it will be worth it in the end. Navigation can be difficult to determine since all mobile technology isn’t built the same. Some have QWERTY keypad, some are touch screen, and others have the standard numeric keypad. Researching your target audience so that you can at least please the majority of your audience is an imperative to ensure that your mobile campaigns are successful.
Next time we’ll talk about mobile marketing misconceptions and how to overcome the issues that can prevent a small business from embarking on using mobile marketing.
Leave A Comment