Mobile Marketing – Giving Legs to Traditional Marketing Channels

As Mobile Marketer’s Outlook 2009 proves, marketers understand the need to integrate mobile into their multichannel branding, customer acquisition and customer retention plans.

Several trends are emerging as mobile matures into a medium that, while not without flaws, is a more palatable option than other marketing channels in use. The emphasis, however, should be on mobile’s complementary nature – it gives legs to other channels, including retail, online, television, print, coupons, radio, outdoor, direct mail and insert media.

Top of the trends list is the consumer’s growing comfort with consuming news and content on mobile phones, along with exchanging SMS text messages, shopping for products and services, checking email, playing games, conducting mobile banking transactions and searching for retail locations or driving directions.

Indeed, the mobile channel’s use as a location-enabling tool is quickly becoming evident to brands, ad agencies, retailers and, most importantly, consumers.

Marketing mobile
Marketers must remember that mobile cannot, and must not, be treated like other mass mediums out there.

Mobile is a highly personal channel, with attendant sensitivities and double opt-in permission requirements.

So it’s not the quantity that should matter for marketers looking to incorporate mobile into their multichannel marketing plans. It’s the quality – and that’s where mobile excels.

While the economy could be better, that hasn’t stopped consumers from quickly shifting to mobile many tasks that previously were conducted on computers.

The choice for marketers and ad agencies then is not to deliberate whether to have an SMS program or mobile banner ads or a mobile Web site or a mobile coupon program or a .mobi domain or an iPhone/BlackBerry/Android application.

Instead, the decision to be made is which one of these options – or a combination – is relevant for the brand in its efforts to reach consumers through multiple, relevant touch points.

Smart marketers and agencies will think like smart fishermen: fish where the fish are. Consumers have already moved to mobile, and are staying there for a long time.

Marketers should focus this year and next on using mobile – especially SMS and applications – to build databases of consumers who have opted in not once but twice to receive targeted offers, alerts and information from marketers.

A marketer without a mobile loyalty program in 2009 or 2010 will risk losing customers to competitors who have such efforts in place.

Please click here to download a PDF copy of Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Outlook 2009.

Who Says SMS is for Teenagers only?

The chart below shows the distribution of SMS users by age. It turns out that 50 percent of SMS users are aged 35 or over, and 75 percent are aged 25 or over. Marketers should avoid pigeonholing mobile as exclusively for youth.

However, marketers should take age-targeting into consideration when running campaigns.

Download the entire article and learn: “More than 50 percent of WAP users are above age 34,and one in 17 WAP users is over 65.”

2.9 million people received Barack Obama’s vice-presidential pick text message…

This trend, text messaging via SMS (short message service) in recent politics and in business, is a trend that carries major significance: “All of these instances of text messaging as a marketing medium prove that there are, in fact, a number of SMS programs for which a subscriber will provide their cell phone number.” R.J. Talyor, product marketing manager of Indianapolis-based ExactTarget, advises against using SMS for each and every marketing message, but under certain conditions, you might find a highly receptive audience:

Subscriber-centric communications. Even your best customers will hesitate to give you their cell phone numbers. Promising infrequent updates on topics that matter to them, however, will make them more likely to assent.

Early adopter advantage. With an SMS campaign, you’ll get extra points for being on the cutting edge. It would have seemed unimaginative if Obama’s VP pick came by email; even with some of the glitches, the text message garnered lots of interest.

You might not need SMS, Talyor admits. “But with recent, prominent uses of text messaging,” he says, “… every marketer should do their homework in reviewing text messaging as a legitimate messaging medium to add to their marketing strategy.”

No matter a marketer’s current stance on SMS, the message has arrived: SMS should be on the shortlist.  Be an early adopter. Here is an example how a meeting planner can use it for his VERY CAPTIVE audience.

Read the full article: Two Reasons Why SMS Should Be on Your Shortlist.