Mobile Marketing: The Opportunity

Mobile marketing provides organizations the opportunity to engage their prospects and customers unlike any medium before, and it will continue to grow in importance. Today, we will explore the trends, key applications and best practices to capitalize on this new medium.

Mobile Marketing Trends

>Mobile phones have now reached a household penetration rate of over 90%, and at the end of 2008, over 77% of mobile phones had text message services. Today, that number is significantly higher. In fact, in 2009 U.S. consumers sent out more than 110 billion text messages each month. And the growth of “smart phones” is providing a new opportunity for marketers to move beyond Short Message Services (SMS) text messaging and into Multi-media Message Services (MMS) or web-based advertising.

>Mobile advertising spending is growing rapidly from $300 million in 2008 to a projected $1.5 billion by 2013. This growth is fueled not only by the nearly universal adoption of this medium, but because the medium is very intimate (people carry their phone in their pockets or purses) and mobile phone advertisements on the average have a higher response rate (15% - 30%) compared to email (5% average response rate) or direct mail (2% average response rate).

>Mobile marketing provides marketers an opportunity to measure each unique media tactic unlike anything in history. For example, previously it was difficult to assess the impact (or ROI) of outdoor advertising, such as billboards. Today, with the use of Mobile marketing, it is possible to measure the impact of each outdoor advertising site and calculate an ROI.

Mobile Marketing Applications

Currently, there are basically two ways to engage prospects and customers with mobile marketing: Inbound and outbound.

>For inbound activities, marketers promote a Common Short Code (CSC), which is an abbreviated phone number, along with a SMS text message in their traditional advertisements. People send the text in response to an offer in the promotion. This is being adopted rapidly by retailers to promote special offers (like sales, discounts or free items). Once someone has responded, the cell phone number has been captured and the respondents have “opted-in” for future communications.

>For those who have voluntarily opted-in, marketers can now send outbound SMS or MMS communications to maintain contact and create an on-going dialogue with these key customers. Often, marketers will directly link the respondent to a web site to complete additional information about themselves, which can enhance other marketing opportunities, such as email, social media or direct mail communication tactics.

Mobile Marketing Best Practices

While mobile marketing is a growing medium, it is also a very new medium that will likely change with advancing technology. However, at this time, here are some of today’s recognized best practices:

>Plan how you will integrate CSC and SMS tactics into your other, traditional media plans in order to generate responses, collect data and measure results. We will cover this topic in more detail at the end of the month.

>Be sure your outbound initiatives are ONLY to those who have opted-in to receive your mobile messages. This means you need to plan an acquisition strategy within your global marketing plans.

>SMS is limited to about 160 characters, so you must work hard to send a very clear and succinct message / offer to generate results. This means it is important to keep the offers simple and straight forward, and to focus on “immediacy”. As the use of smart phones grows, the ability to use MMS will provide marketers with new and better promotional opportunities. We will cover this topic in more detail in the next few weeks.

>Manage frequency of messages. Since this is such an intimate medium, sending too many messages will result in people “opting-out” at fairly high rates.

>Plan which metrics to track and how this information will help you plan your other communications efforts.

As our society becomes increasingly mobile, this medium will only continue to evolve and grow in importance. Marketers today should seriously consider how to best leverage this technology into their marketing plans to advance their objectives.

For more information on mobile marketing, or other strategy-based advertising applications, contact DMC Advertising at (262) 523-2000. We are specialists at targeted and measurable marketing programs.