Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of online marketing. Over the last two to three years, the number of people who access the internet on mobile devices has skyrocketed. This is due to the popularity of smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry, as well as tablets like the iPad.

This not only changes how many people are using the internet, it also changes how you need to market your business online. People who are accessing the internet through these devices are doing some fairly specific things, and they’re doing them through devices with much smaller screens and keyboards than the typical computer. This means you need to change your strategy for marketing to those people, or risk losing them to your competition.

Mobile Websites

As we’ve already mentioned, one of the biggest differences for people surfing on a mobile device is the size of the screen and what it can display. The latest devices, like the iPhone for example, have very capable browsers that can display pretty much everything you would see on a desktop computer screen. But just because they can display it doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective for your website visitors. The text will often be so small it’s completely unreadable and links are also too small for people to click (or tap, really).

SMS Marketing

SMS, or text messaging has been around for nearly 20 years, but its use has really taken off over the last few years. This is mainly due to the widespread use of smartphones that have built-in keyboards. In the past you had to use the number pad on your cell phone to tap out text messages, and it wasn’t very easy to do. This increase in acceptance of text messaging has a big benefit for business owners and marketers – text messages can be used to stay in touch with your customers and promote your business.

Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are also popular with mobile internet users. Take Facebook, for example. They currently have over 800 million active users, 350 million of whom access the site through a mobile device of some sort. That’s almost half of their active users who connect through mobile. If you have a large following this can “go viral” and take on a life of its own, generating new customers on an ongoing basis with little or no input on your part.

Mobile Apps

Another side effect of the rapid growth in mobile internet devices is the growth of the mobile “App” market. Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPad is the largest of these marketplaces, but a number of other companies offer them as well.

For example, Amazon has their own app on the iPhone that lets you browse their entire catalog, read reviews, get product information and even buy right from the app. It even has a bar code scanner built in so you can scan a product in a local retailer and compare the price on Amazon.

QR Codes

QR Codes are the final mobile marketing strategy we’re going to cover in this guide. You’ve probably seen these codes popping up all over the place recently. These codes have been around for well over a decade, but up until recently they were mainly used in factories and other industrial applications for tracking inventory. The growth of the smartphone market changes that, however, because so many of these smartphones have built-in cameras. This means that people can scan these codes themselves, and take whatever action has been programmed into them.

Conclusion

Mobile internet usage continues to grow incredibly fast, and is probably going to accelerate even faster over the next few years. Now is the time to start changing your online marketing strategy to meet the needs of those people. You’ll have an edge over many of your competitors who aren’t as quick to adopt new strategies, and as the market evolved you’ll be in a position to stay on the leading edge. The five strategies we’ve discussed in this report will put you on a path to success, and before you know it your mobile reach might even eclipse your traditional marketing efforts.

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