Mobile Marketing Basics

Mobile marketing is one of the newest ways to promote your business, but by no means is it ineffective. As mobile devices become more and more a part of daily life, this will become on of the primary ways that your business can reach out to potential customers.

Text messaging is the oldest form of mobile marketing. In this case your ad will consist of a short text message. You won’t have the benefit of pictures, sound, or video to help convey your message. Keep your statement clear and to the point. The best text marketing campaigns either direct your customers to your website or offer them a short term coupon code to help draw them in. Make sure to do a little research on the company you choose to market with- many companies have gained a bad reputation for sending out spam.

The next tier up from text messaging is multimedia messaging. These messages contain text, pictures, and video. While still not as rich as full web experience, these messages allow you to d the same things that a traditional text message would do, only with the ability to make things a bit more interesting. Remember that phones will only display certain kinds of images, so take the time to make sure your ad is compatible with as many devices as possible. You also need to make extra sure that your customers a opt in as many carriers charge extra for multimedia texts.

Mobile web is where you can start to truly get creative with your advertising. These mini web pages allow you to do essentially anything you could do in a traditional page. The main difference is that these pages will be displayed on a much smaller screen with a lower bandwidth than home computers. That means that, while you have quite a bit of creative freedom, you need to keep your page simple and  to the point. Great mobile sites are simply stripped down versions of your main web page. As mobile tech improves you will want to allow customers to choose between the mobile site and the full version. Tablets especially will often register as a mobile user, but because of their larger size and power, will probably do just fine on a full website.

Apps have just recently gained attention as the way we will be interacting with our mobile world in the future. There are two ways to work with potential customers within apps. You can have your own app for your business, which will be an extremely expensive and time consuming process, or you can purchase advertising within another app, usually a tiny banner within a game. Both of these are valid ways to reach customers, and the numbers of potential customers that see your ad is only limited by your budget.

Each type of mobile marketing has its own unique challenges. What type you choose depends mostly on what your needs are. Some are only good for reaching out to established customers, while others are great for finding new ones.