The Rise Of Mobile Marketing If you run a luncheon sandwich shop, and the bulk of your trade is over the lunch hour, of course, what would it be worth to your to be able to draw quite a few people within a 10 mile radius who have smart phones to your location for lunch.
The possibility of a person picking up his smart phone and searching for “sandwich shop” on a search engine is good. If you are ranked on Google places, or Manta, chances are you are going to suddenly gain some new customers.
If your business is a computer game store, why wouldn’t you want to rank highly in that category in your neck of the woods. Surely there are a few thousand kids that don’t even know about you yet, yet when they search for their favorite game, it should be the name of your business that shows up.
There are just a lot of people who have their smart phone with them at all times. They would probably be happy if it could somehow be surgically attached to their hand so the would have it ready at all times. These people live their lives by their phones and if anything comes up on their phones, they notice it.
The concept of mobile marketing is nowhere near the volume of online marketing or print marketing, but it is growing fast. The push techniques, such as SMS marketing are really more annoying to most users, in that it interrupts their current activities and creates a negative image.
At the current level of the genre, a more passive form of focused marketing is the most effective. When the person with the mobile phone is looking for a specific product or service, it is your business that they find. That is really focused marketing.
The future of mobile marketing will probably continue to promote spots and ads, but that is really a shotgun approach to the problem of landing in front of enough eyes to become effective. The rifle approach will become more sophisticated in that it will be able to target users geographically based on the GPS of the phone with pre-selected tastes and likes derived form a social media source, for instance.
For example, say a person “likes” barbequed chicken on Facebook, and he happens to be shopping where a barbeque chicken restaurant is located nearby, an ad will flash onto his smart phone screen when he is a certain distance away from the restaurant. The same thing could occur when a pre-selected “like” from a social site directs a customer to a bookstore, or a clothing item. It could be an endless application to a person’s desires to help the customer find an outlet for his personal tastes.
As technological skills increase and more people have smart phones, the mobile advertising industry could blossom far beyond anyone’s current ability to visualize the extent of the market. The size of the industry will only be limited by the scope of the dreams of marketers and their methods of advertising.
