Benefits of Mobile Marketing for Your Business

Global Messaging

Think about it: how many people do you know who don’t have a mobile phone? It’s believed that there are almost 7 billion phones spread across the planet as of 2014, almost one per person, and no matter what their make, model or size their prime use is communication. That is a two way digital street – and one which marketers should be only to happy to seize upon. 

Mobile messaging has the capability to deliver where communication with the desktop fails. A video, picture, message or song can be sent to multiple people or just one, to be carried with them. Why would a company pay to post a letter to a target which could get lost or forgotten, when a simple message is always ready on their phone and ready to retrieve? 

Mobile messaging is cheap, easy to customize, and engages a customer as they’re on-the-go, as a very personalized way of communicating. Messages are easy to distribute whether a company is aiming to pick out an MD in Trafalgar Square in London or a sheep farmer in a remote field in Africa – as long as they both have their phone. 

Messages sent via SMS from companies such as Global Messaging and via microblogging apps such as Twitter and Facebook are both relevant and engaging to the receiver, but also the first part of an instant, interactive, two-way process. 

Take the restaurateur who has no bookings for Tuesday night as the clock hits 6pm. He could just sit and hope, or he could take action. He votes for the latter, and a message is sent out to diners who have opted in to receive them. Perhaps it’s a free bottle of wine with tonight’s meal. It could be ‘10% off starters’. Or maybe he just wants to shout about the chef’s new beef wellington.

Hungry customers make their way through your door and gobble down the new meaty treat with their free glasses of red. A day later another message is sent, asking their opinion on the previous night’s food in the form of a simple survey. If success is tangible in takings and feedback, then the restaurant owner might use the tactic again; if not, try another promotion next time.

Where will the exciting world of mobile marketing go next? It is still in its infancy, and it’s a prolonged infancy as mobile phones, apps, bandwidths, and wearable technology continue to develop. Our expectations as consumers also continue to evolve; we no longer want catch-all, undiluted messages, and now demand laser-guided information relevant to our own lives and desires.

Perhaps quick private messaging via apps such as Snapchat and Whatsapp will prove to be a key tool in snaring the younger market, as this article at Venturebeat suggests.

Proximity marketing will almost certainly experience a boom, targeting smartphone users via the use of ‘beacons’ or GPS technology to send relevant messages to consumers who are shopping, drinking in a bar or strolling through a street such as the restaurant customers above. The discipline is still in the experimental stage, and while the appeal is obvious to the marketer it will live or die on its popularity with privacy-conscious consumers and its consistency across different platforms, as eMarketer describes HYPERLINK “http://www.emarketer.com/Article/What-Future-of-Proximity-Marketing/1010770” t “_blank” here.

The exciting technique that is mobile marketing is here. It is finding the right people at the right time and being used by technologically-savvy SMEs – now. 

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