Current Trends

There is a paradigm shift in the way marketers communicate with the consumers. One-way messaging strategy is no longer effective. As the use of smart phones and tablets is increasing exponentially, marketers now have two-way communication media channels to effectively reach their personalized messages to the hand-held devices.

Marketers adopted SMS and MMS marketing, several years ago, to send out marketing messages to the consumers. However, SMS and MMS by themselves are not effective any longer.? ?Mobile Marketing? is a blend of several strategies, such as Mobile Websites, Location Based Marketing, Mobile Advertising, & Mobile Apps along with SMS and MMS strategies.

According to eMarketer, 7% of internet users use their mobile phones for browsing the internet. This number is expected to increase to 18% by 2012. The amount of internet traffic coming to the websites from mobile phones has significantly increased. This shift in trend highlights the importance of providing improved user experience in browsing on Mobile devices.

Is Mobile Marketing Right For You?

Before jumping into implementing Mobile Marketing Strategy for your business, it is important to know its relevance for your business and how it can help achieve your goals.

There are few obvious reasons why Mobile Marketing can be effective.

1. Communicating to your customers via their mobile devices makes your marketing message more personal and effective.
2. Via Mobile Campaigns you can reach your customers quickly and be sure that your message is read within minutes of it being received. Because, people carry their mobile device on them at all times.
3. It is very easy to share content. If your marketing message has some value to the consumer, they are likely to share that message with their circle.
4. Every activity on in a mobile marketing campaign can be tracked to a single phone numbers, and make it easy to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

Now, next step is to determine, how Mobile Marketing can help achieve your business goals. Some of the business goals for you to consider are:

1. If Mobile Marketing can help in retaining customers and build brand loyalty by closing the the gap between existing customers becoming repeat customers. One way to achieve this is by keeping existing customers engaged with product promotional offers, & discounts
2. If you are already leveraging Social Media Marketing to build your brand online, integrating Mobile Marketing strategy such as Location Based marketing (Four Square, Bright Kite, Gowalla, etc.) with Social Media Marketing can boost online engagement with customers significantly.
3. If your site traffic measurement shows considerable amount of traffic coming from mobile phones, creating a mobile friendly website might be a great way to enhance users? browsing experience on their mobile phones and keep them engaged on your mobile website
4. If you are in a industry where information is update frequently, Mobile Apps might be a great way to keep your customers up-to-date with most current information about what?s going on in your business
5. If you are already running SMS and MMS campaigns, these are still effective if you integrate with rest of the strategies in your Mobile Marketing Campaign.

Conclusion

Now that we have established the fact that there is enough potential to grow your business with mobile marketing campaign(s), it is time for you put a program in place. Do not attempt into dive into Mobile Marketing without doing research. Invest in research on the industry and competitors. Make sure you find out where your target market is, before choosing a platform to run your campaign. Once you have all the data you need, choose the right tools to run & measure a successful campaign.

If you have questions regarding Mobile Marketing Strategies for your business, send us your questions via our Digital Marketing Web site.

About the Author

Kalpana Murthy, President/CEO at WSI Plano, DBA Kriti Web Solutions, LLC. is a Digital Strategist, Consultant, Speaker/Trainer, & Software Engineer who is passionate about bringing affordable technology solutions to businesses to build online presence. Kalpana Murthy is a certified partner with Google, HubSpot, Sharp Spring, SEMRush and other digital solution providers.