Mobile marketing gives businesses new and exciting ways to get their messages across to more abd more people, whether new, potential or long standing customers. The ROI can range between gaining new leads, increasing sales, upselling to existing customers or decreasing the duration between sales to the same customers. But how do you decide if mobile is for you?

Goals

All companies should have clear goals of what they are looking to achieve, evaluate whether the benefits of using mobile marketing could help you to achieve those goals. So as an example if one of your aims is to increase the number of sales of a particular product then mobile marketing may be one way of educating potential buyers about that product and help them to make that buying decision.

Integration

Does mobile marketing fit in with what you are already doing? We always advocate a consistent approach across all of your marketing activities and so it is important to decide whether adopting mobile will fit in with what you are currently doing and/or how it can compliment your overall campaign. For example, creating a mobile website might be a way to enhance the use of your current website whilst people are using a mobile device as they may be more likely to revisit your main site if they feel they have had a good experience.

Look at the Competition

If you are still unsure about what to do, look at what others are doing. A good first step is to check out the competition and see what they are doing by way of mobile marketing or look at similar industries for inspiration.

According to eMarketer:

• 42% of media and entertainment companies
• 23% of retail companies
• 35% of the automotive industry
• 30% of the travel industry

are adopting mobile marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. There are many many others.

If your competitors or companies in a similar industry are already doing it then you should seriously think about doing it too as this means that your potential customers are using mobile to connect with these businesses.

In our third post in the mobile marketing series we talk about why companies use mobile marketing, hopefully this will help you to decide if mobile marketing is right for your business.

Mobile devices are personal

Even if you are given a mobile phone or tablet for your work it is very likely that you use it to store personal information, whether that be your contacts, photos, video, appointment information or personal notes. They are also personal in the sense that they tend to have a single owner i.e. you are unlikely to share your phone with someone else. This gives businesses the opportunity of personalising their marketing message to some extent although of course privacy and permission based marketing is all we are advocating here.

They are always on

Most people keep their mobile devices switched on and on or around their person, particularly their phones. It is very rare that someone doesn’t have their mobile on them or switched on. Even when in meetings people tend to turn their mobile device onto silent or vibrate rather than turn it off all together. This means that any marketing messages sent will be most likely read within a couple of minutes of it being sent, but of course this makes the timing of those messages incredibly important. No one wants to be woken up in the middle of the night to receive your marketing information.

They can be used to make payments

The SIM card is a built in payment system it’s just that we have only recently been using them to pay for anything other than phone calls, with apps becoming more and more popular you can use your phone to purchase anything from music, apps to your groceries. People have gotten used to paying for content through their mobile devices too and so things like e-books are a potential way for you to monetise the content that exists within your business.

It’s easy to share

Mobile content is easy to share and therefore can encourage ‘viral’ potential if the content/message/offer is interesting or compelling enough. It is easy and quick to share via mobile and we have gotten so used to doing this via social networking sites that doing this via mobile is almost second nature now.

Easy to Track

Like any campaign, you need to be able to track your marketing activity and the beauty of mobile marketing is that this is very easy to do. Every action can be tracked to a single phone number so it can be easy to measure user engagement. Although there are stringent privacy laws about peoples data and you cannot gain personal information about someone, you can see individuals activity which is vital in measuring success of any campaign.

Mobile marketing encompasses all mobile devices, so smartphones and tablets of all types. Statistics show us that use of these devices in increasing rapidly and the way they are used is changing too, more and more people are relying on their mobile devices to do those things that they would have done previously on their desktop or laptop. We live in a world of fast moving technology where there is a requirement to access information quickly and from any location, this is the main thrust of why mobile devices are so popular.

The amount of internet traffic that comes from mobile devices is ever increasing, in fact according to eMarketer, as of June 2011, 5.02% of all Internet traffic worldwide came from a mobile device. Because so many are wanting to use mobile for so many day to day tasks, companies are working hard to accommodate this, so things like being able to do your grocery shopping or check your bank account will be as easy to do on your mobile device as they are on a desktop or laptop.

Because of this change marketers are looking at how they can harness this opportunity to communicate with potential customers and their existing customer base via mobile devices. Let’s start with the website, most have one now but try and view it on a smartphone and you might get a nasty shock. We are seeing a clear move towards companies having mobile websites that are aimed purely at mobile use so that users can quickly and easily get to the information they want.

According to a recent study*, worldwide advertisers stated the following key reasons why they use mobile marketing:

• 78% said they use mobile because more consumers have access to smartphones
• 61% said they like the ability to target certain demographics based on devices
• 42% said they like the attractive ad formats

* Data is from the June 2011 Google and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) report titled “Global Perspectives: The

Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer” conducted by Ipsos and TNS Infratest.

In our next blog in the mobile marketing series we will be looking at whether mobile is right for your business.

Marketing activity has seen a massive shift in focus over the last 10 years or so, starting with the advent of internet marketing we have seen a continually evolving digital world. Starting with the website being the main focus for all online marketing we saw this complimented by offline activity, this then changed to incorporate things like paid advertising, SEO, email marketing and video marketing. More recently we have seen the explosion in social media basically transform the was companies market themselves with sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and LinkedIn taking the world by storm, bloggers becoming celebrities and companies having to listen to consumers in a completely different way. A business can have its whole reputation demolished by giving bad customers service as people can communicate so much more quickly and to a much larger audience than ever before.

So what’s next? The name mobile marketing has been linked to the idea of sending marketing messages to someone’s phone, but this is just a small part of it. There are many different techniques that can be used with mobile devices all of which have the potential to help companies both increase their customer base and engage with existing customers to make sure they stay that way.

So our job in this blog is to help educate you on the importance of mobile marketing and how you as a business can make the most of the opportunity that it brings. Over the coming weeks we will be issuing a number of blog posts dedicated to this subject so please stay turned to find out more and if you want to know how we can specifically help your business then find out more about our mobile marketing starter packages.