Mobile marketing is the new way to go?

March 26th, 2009 by callister

While you are walking on the street or while you are waiting for the bus nowadays, what will you see most of the people are doing? If you ask me, my answer will be most of the people are busy talking on the cell phone or they’re busy texting on the cell phone. Only God knows what they’re really doing. Cell phone now has become a ‘must have thing’ in our life. You don’t have to be a genius to see that almost every kid who are literate nowadays will definitely have one cell phone provided by their parents. How lucky!

If you are an opportunist, you will see how you can use mobile phone in helping you to advertise your products or your services. It is called mobile marketing. Mobile marketing has become a very popular and a very effective way to advertise or to promote products since the rise of SMS in the recent years

Why did i say mobile marketing is a very effective way to help you to advertise? Don’t you realize that cell phone is the only device that you will bring along with you where ever you go unless you forget it? Don’t you realize that every SMS will be read upon arrival? From my quick observation, seems like everyone loves SMS than phone call itself unless it’s urgent.

In my recent post, I talked about email marketing. It’s an effective way of marketing but it has it’s flaws. If you looking for something free or really cheap, you can go for email marketing but remember, most people don’t have internet access everywhere they go and this makes it hard to reach the people. Furthermore, sometimes not all people work with emails everyday. This leaves your emails go left unnoticed for some time before the recipient realized the email and by that time, it’s already too late for them.

Maybe some of you are comparing voice marketing using phone with text messaging. I have a lot of points that I can elaborate but let me just them out.

Cost wise.

Calls usually costs more than text messages. As simple as that.

Audience.

With SMS, mobile advertising company can send bulk deliveries to thousands of customers at a time, you need just as much people to talk to the same amount of people at the same time. That should increase the cost of operation too since you need to hire a lot of people.

Delivery

If I receive a phone call from an unidentified number, I don’t usually answer that because I know it might be a call from telemarketeers. What about SMS? I don’t really have the power to stop SMS from coming in right. If a SMS came in, I read and I delete it if that doesn’t interest me, else I will keep it in my phone.

Time targeted.

If you call someone, you might interrupt him doing something and this will annoy him. SMS messages are short and not time consuming. If you want to target a certain audience, at certain time or date, SMS advertsing is the best way to go.

As an example, imagine you run a fast food restaurant and want to give out mobile coupons for discount during lunch time. With SMS, you can just send out the promo codes just before lunch time and effectively attract them to your place because the timing is perfect.

If I have the funds to do mobile advertising, I will have everyone that subscribe to my blog updates get a text message whenever I post a new update or whenever I have freebies to give away. Oh, how I wish !