The Potential of Mobile Marketing
Analysts have been saying that it was "the year for mobile" for a long time, and this has created a false expectation. Mobile marketing will evolve just like traditional online marketing did—over time. It will see small surges as technology improves or key demographics change, but overall, we can expect the growth and acceptance of mobile marketing to follow a normal or slightly accelerated acceptance curve, similar to the growth of traditional Internet marketing.
Mobile marketing describes any attempt to appeal to potential customers with some sort of marketing message. Describing it in more concrete terms is difficult, because the term mobile marketing encompasses such a wide variety of activities, including
• Mobile advertising, in which brands pay to display visual ads embedded within the content of another website
. SMS and MMS
• Location-based mobile marketing
• Mobile applications
• Mobile search marketing
• Offline marketing in TV, radio and print
• Online marketing on websites, in searches, and with email
We are building on what we have learned from traditional Web marketing, but the technology will still have to work its way into society, as with every other marketing-laden technology before it. When other technologies were new, many people thought they could live without things such as TV, radio, and Internet. Not until the technologies sufficiently proved their value did they became tightly integrated into our society. There may not be a "year of mobile," but it is definitely the next new marketing opportunity. You must understand it or risk being left behind, because mobile marketing promises to be the most personal, targeted, and actionable marketing available in our time.
The following sections detail what makes mobile marketing something you can't afford not to master.
