The Impact of Mobile Marketing in 2012

We’ve been hearing it for a while now but it seems that 2012 might finally be the year that mobile marketing finally comes into the forefront and starts to play with the big boys.

Over the past year, growth in the mobile market has risen dramatically on all fronts. With apps, mobile search advertising, game advertising and now retailers, the mobile market place is starting to deliver the numbers!

It seems that everywhere you look you can start to notice the overwhelming power mobile marketing is gaining with 4 billion phones in the world and internet usage on mobile devices set to overtake usage on desktops by 2014 you can see why people are starting to sit up and take notice.

Until now you may not have considered mobile marketing but are wondering how it relates to you or how you can incorporate it into your marketing mix. Well there are many different options and some will relate better to your business than others.

The first step is to look at the advantages to your business of Mobile advertising. Mobile Advertising broke US$3.3billion by the end of 2011 and is expected to rise to US$20.6 by 2015. The main gainers here are in the mobile paid search advertising and local mobile ads. In the US over half of all mobile ad spending is on local search ads. Of course Google are at the forefront of all of this and even recently announced that mobile websites are equally important to page rank as regular web pages. They have even set up with own ‘go mobile’ site (hotogomo.com) explaining how to optimise your websites and adverts. (infact, how many of you are reading this on your phone right now?)

The next step is to look at your Mobile SEO. 50% of all local business searches are done using a mobile device, are your keywords optimised for local mobile searches?

Another way to expand your mobile marketing is to have a go at creating your own app. With over 300,000 developed in the last three years and a predicted 29 billion app downloads this year now is the best time to be looking at the world of apps for your business. Brands have started realising the potential power of being able to push their content to mobile users with many well known retail companies, utilities and restaurant chains releasing their own branded apps across multiple platforms.

You could also try SMS marketing. Although there is nothing new about SMS marketing it is highly effective and is seen as one of the more personal advertising mediums. With nearly 8 trillion SMS messages sent this year and nearly all 4 billion mobile handsets able to receive them, it is no wonder that SMS is becoming a more popular choice.

SMS marketing is most effectively used as a way to engage customers by offering a level of service via reminders, notices and most commonly voucher codes. The other reason that SMS marketing is so effective is because it is usually opt in, which mean that people are a lot more responsive to it and therefore reactions are more positive and therefore more profitable.

So when was the last time you looked at Mobile marketing? Is it time you re thought your marketing strategy to maybe incorporate some aspects of this stable and rapidly growing marketing medium? Just something to think about for the new year ahead!