Mobile marketing is a huge potential source of traffic, customers, and profit for your business, but as yet fairly untapped. Yet, over the next three years, it is predicted that more than half of current internet users will be accessing the web via mobiles and other handheld devices.
Mobile marketing offers a very personal kind of interactivity for relationship-building with your prospects. It’s not just about bombarding folk with text SMS marketing messages. Mobile-friendly websites and mobile applications mean marketers can reach a much greater target audience.
The statistics are pretty convincing, and competition in the mobile direct marketing arena is still comparatively low.
Growth in mobile customers
Worldwide, there are 4 billion people with mobile phones. There are almost five times more cell phone owners than laptops and computer owners, especially home internet-ready.
Gartner, the IT research company, predicts that over half of current internet users will access the web via mobiles and other handheld devices over the next three years.
“There are clear opportunities for mobile transactions to grow as users, in this and previous surveys, indicate that they want to be able to use their mobiles to buy more goods, such as books, music, travel services, household utilities, and electronic appliances,” says BuzzCity CEO, KF Lai.
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It’s a very global trend. BuzzCity’s recent survey questioned 1,798 mobile users across the Americas, Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the Middle East, showing that 90% had directly purchased products or services via their mobile.
The trend towards mobile marketing
Unsurprisingly, the fastest-growing marketing technologies and emerging channels are mobile, rich media, and social media. You only have to search some of the popular keywords for the internet marketing and online home business industry to see how these methods are all being adopted with marketers’ enthusiasm.
With some astounding findings, Unica just released its “The State of Marketing 2010” results from the latest Global Survey of Marketers.
The survey reported, “Nearly half of marketers surveyed have already embraced social media marketing, and adoption is healthy across most social media outlets, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. However, marketers must consider integrating social media with other marketing tactics.”
Despite the rapid increases in the potential audience, “mobile marketing” is a relatively new practice. The term describes marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a cell phone, using WAP or text messaging to communicate between the business and the customer.
Mobile marketing is increasing insignificance. Over 30% of marketers surveyed already use some form of other mobile marketing and many sources of information (magazines and services available to support them.
Nevertheless, mobile advertising has grown over the past 1-2 years (almost 100% in the UK) despite the economic recession. The total is pretty small compared to advertising on the internet, which was higher than that spent on TV last year.
However, the Mobile Marketing Association suggests that mobile marketing growth will accelerate as handsets with new technology, including mobile broadband, become ubiquitous and consumer behavior changes.
The response from marketing vendors isn’t far behind. For instance, 84444.com recently launched its Do-it-Yourself mobile marketing campaigns that can be run from a desktop computer’s convenience. YouTube is making huge changes to its mobile web presence and has begun incorporating adverts throughout its mobile site.
How to tap into the mobile market
Anyone in business should always look for new ways to reach out, touch their customers, and build attention from new prospects. And mobile marketing may be the golden ticket.
Your mobile user is permanently switched on, impulsive, and ready to interact at the drop of a hat. Who wouldn’t want to tap into mobile marketing? It’s the ultimate direct response tool.
Mobile marketing, you could argue, is perhaps a rather more captive audience. When someone has their phone in their hand and downloads a page, they are much more engaged than on a desktop-based website. It’s a much more powerful direct response tool than the internet.
Mobile conversations are five times higher compared to web or email marketing, And competition is much lower because nobody knows about this yet.
So, what changes do you need to make in your business to attract mobile clients?
First, you should ensure your website is mobile-friendly, especially if you send text SMS messages with active web links to your mobile contacts. There are many reasons why this is important, but mostly because mobile is an instant and impulsive kind of medium, so you want the recipient to follow the link and get to a useful page quickly.
Consider that subscriber on your email list may well be reading their messages on their phone. So you want to keep your main message and link ‘above the fold’ to use a newspaper term. To clarify: when you’re accessing emails from a mobile, sometimes the longer ones will get truncated, so put your link early on and remember the rules of compelling headlines.
But also, as with the SMS, your mobile user should be able to click your call to action link in the email and bring up the page right there and then from their phone’s web browser. The chances they will visit your website when they return to their PC are far lower.
Google is actively hunting for decent mobile-enabled sites to feature in its search results since this is a huge revenue source if its users are happy. There are not enough mobile sites out there. To learn how to create a Google-friendly mobile version of your site, you could rank higher than your regular desktop site.
There’s a whole spectrum of solutions for making your webpage mobile-friendly. These range from simple and cheap, like adding a bit of code you add to your WordPress blog, to a more complex and expensive decision to create a complete and total mobile website.
Getting your site indexed by Google on the mobile search engine?
Google has mobile sitemaps distinct from the usual sitemaps. Check out their webmaster tools for help on that. And get yourself listed in the Google local business listings. Google has a way you can build a mobile landing page within that tool. It works best for brick-and-mortar businesses, but it’s all a good web presence.
Google knows that people search differently on their mobiles than on their desktops. They have a specific mobile keyword research tool. It is not a bad idea to clue up the different algorithms search engines use for mobile searching.
Another thing to remember is to keep your mobile text ads short, mirroring the style of social networking conversations. Opera (one of the mobile browsers) statistics show that 41% of people accessing the mobile web are going to social network sites, so MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. These are intertwined and meshed together as a tool, so these ads need to work together.
Automating the SMS text marketing process
If you currently capture your visitors’ names and email addresses, you want to add a mobile phone field to your web page capture form. You can unleash your portable direct marketing power with a list of numbers by sending automated, scheduled SMS or text messages to your subscribers.
Internet marketers have known for years that money is in the relationship with your email list. As mobile marketing gets unleashed, your phone list will likely become the gold standard.
SMS has an astounding 97% open rate, usually within the first 5 minutes of receiving the message. That’s powerful to marketers! If the “auto tester” replaces the autoresponder, do you have a business strategy for that dramatic change?
Early adopters ALWAYS make the most money. So go check out mobile marketing and see what a difference it can make in your business.
