The era of mobile marketing is here

Every mortal on this planet (I think even immortals) possesses a mobile phone. It’s something that comes complementary with the birth of a human now! Soon there would be babies born with phones in their hands. But what I want to majorly focus on is: Mobile marketing. Now you would ask what mobile marketing is? Well it’s self-explanatory but I will elaborate it for you. Marketing through mobile is what you framed in your mind. It is marketing through mobile using various services provided by the device. SMS, MMS, App based marketing, in game marketing, mobile web, QR codes are various ways marketing is facilitated through mobiles.

Put in simply by Andreas Kaplan, Professor of Marketing at the ESCP Europe Business School “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device”.

Marketing through…

• SMS: Short message service is a traditional way to market via mobile. You often receive offers and messages on your mobiles from different companies to buy their products or to review them. That is one way companies use mobiles to target their customers and market their products and services.

• MMS: Multimedia messaging service, this took over once coloured screen phones came into use. These are a series of moving images or graphics that display the conveyed offer by the companies. You would receive such messages on your phone either promoting a product or advertising it. Very similar to video marketing, but it is done via SMS.

• App based marketing: With the pandemic use of smart phones and applications, app based marketing also came into action really fast. Marketing via existing apps or creating new apps to make way for marketing are ways to use mobiles to market their products and services more efficiently. You would have seen that while using a particular app, there would be ads that would come at the sides or at the end advertising another app or brand. That is one way apps are used to market their products and services. Another one is that they build apps. For e.g. Flipkart has come up with an app so that users can directly use the app to shop online rather than actually logging onto their website. This has not only increased their sales but also helped their customers to buy faster and in a much more efficient manner.

• In-game marketing: Don’t you just hate it when your game is just about to start a message pops up, or you have to watch a video before you can start playing your favourite game? That is what we call in-game marketing, another mobile marketing technique used to market one’s products. Some brands even fund entire mobile games so as to attract users to their products and services. This is also known as mobile advergaming or Ad-funded mobile game

• Mobile web : There is a 90% chance that when you visit a website through your phone you would be directed to a page that is similar to the one you see while using a desktop (laptop), but not the same. This is because popular websites usually create mobile friendly websites. The sites that are not mobile friendly would appear dismantled and haphazardly on your phone, but the ones that are would look as perfect as the original ones. To save time and allow a user to access everything on their phone, cell phones provide their users with the facility to access the web. Now, if the websites do not come out fine, this would obviously serve useless, thus companies have taken this into consideration and built up mobile friendly websites which not only give the user a comfortable display, but also advertise their brand ubiquitously. Google recently updated its algorithm and added mobile friendliness as a ranking factor for organic search results. Bing is also following up with something similar. That’s what you need to have a mobile friendly website. Not only does it improve the user experience but also helps you in ranking better on the SERPs.

• QR code: You are often exposed to those black boxes which probably have things that you never understand. Well, those are called the QR codes (quick response codes). You often have to use your phones to scan these codes to get discounts or entry to some place. These codes are another way that companies market their products. They attract customers through irresistible offers and then give them barcodes which they can scan through their phones to avail those offers.

Advantages of mobile marketing:

With the changes taking in the world, it is necessary for you to adapt and accept these changes well in time. If you don’t, you will be at a loss. Mobile marketing has great advantages and its time you know about it too:

• It helps you capture more targets and more accurately so. It exposes you to a higher number of prospective audiences which eventually implies more customers.

• It helps build up customer relationship as it a two way communication module which makes it easy for the consumer and the seller to interact coherently. It is friendlier and familiar.

• Promotion of products and services is at a low cost and is more effective than the physical promotions. Advertisements are smoothly distributed along all channels and lure more customers.

• It generates a high response rate as every individual is in some way or the other connected to their phones. It is five times more effective than email marketing campaigns.

• Mobile is the future of marketing as one doesn’t have time to log onto zillion devices for different chores. It will help the company gain a competitive advantage.

• It can be accessed anywhere and at any time according to the user’s preference allowing the user to have a higher standard of access.

Follow this infographic by Microsoft Tag to get some really impressive statistics: