What is Mobile Marketing?

With more and more people getting on their smartphones and tablets, Mobile Marketing is on a rise! Statistics show that soon India will lead the world in app market. In the past few years, communication through mobile has increased by over 500%, further leading to more frequent online searches. Mobile Marketing simply means any kind of marketing done through mobiles. For instance, even sending a simple text message to your customers reminding them of the latest offer on your products is a form of Mobile Marketing.

 

Benefits of Mobile Marketing:

What makes mobile marketing so popular? There are several factors, some of which are mentioned below: 1. Mobile marketing is quick and instant: One of the biggest advantages of mobile marketing is that it is instant and provide real time benefits. Communication becomes very fast by sending an SMS or sharing an image through mobiles. As people usually have the habit of carrying their mobiles with them, they can immediately read your offers, incentives, campaigns or see your ads while they browse the internet and even revert in no time. This leads to quick lead generation, conversions, sales and revenue. And most importantly, it leads to 'Brand Awareness'. 2. Helps in reaching wider audience: What is the best way of sending personalized, quick messages to a large set of audience, where immediate response is a crucial factor? It is indeed -- Mobile Marketing! Even in today’s digital era, many people may not be able to afford a desktop or a laptop, but surely a mobile connects everyone at a global level. Mobile goes viral - if people find any news which is exciting, they have the habit of sharing it with their friends, leading to wide spread of information. 3. Helps in reaching the target audience: Mobile marketing is a very powerful form of digital marketing to send the right message to the right people. This is because, mobile marketing helps you segment the customers easily based on demography, location, age group, income groups, etc. Technologies like GPS and Bluetooth help in doing location based segmentation very easily. You needn't send all your messages to all the mobile users registered with you. Just send the right message to right person for result-oriented mobile marketing. 4. Economical: Just make an estimate of a television/radio ad or a newspaper classified or even a banner on the roadside, mobile marketing is a far cheaper way to spread your products, services and creating a strong brand image among your customers and potential customers. In fact, you can easily integrate your mobile campaigns with other marketing channels (online and traditional) for effective results. 5. Strong and trustworthy relationships: The nature of mobile marketing is that it leads to developing strong bonds among businesses and their customers. Quick two-way communication helps in sharing company's profile, their range of products, their festive offerings and so on. On the other side, customers and other readers also love getting good offers in their mobile phones itself to which they can respond instantly. This leads to more trustworthy relationships and strong bonding among companies and their customers. 6. Receiving and maintaining feedback is quite easy: It is not difficult to extract and maintain user feedback through mobile marketing. Through text, images, videos, one can easily find out how customers are responding to your ads, products and new offers and how to engage them further.  In fact, through mobile marketing, it is easy to draw real-time user response, instantaneously. This further facilitates marketers to judge user preferences, behavior and their probably next course of action.

Forms of Mobile Marketing:

1. SMS: Short Message Service is the one of the quickest and commonest ways of sending company updates, products, services, offers to leads and customers. SMS is also one of the most traditional forms of Mobile Marketing, which is still used widespread. 2. MMS: Multimedia Message Service facilitates a slideshow of content in the form of text, images, audio or even video. Technology like MMS A2P allows companies to send as well as receive such MMS. 3. Push Notifications: Push Notifications allow the companies to interact directly with the users. As it involves downloading the applications, it is costly in short run but very economical in long run. 4. App Based Marketing: There are countless mobile apps available today in the market, whether Android-based or iOS-based. Smart mobile marketers are nowadays concentrating on app based marketing by using services like Google ADMob. 5. In-Game Mobile Marketing: Who doesn't love playing games on mobiles irrespective of the age group your customers and leads belong to? Adding banner ads or pop-up menus or even video ads in mobile games can help boost your sales and revenue. 6. Mobile Web Marketing: Some marketers also promote their products/services on their web pages which are particularly meant for mobiles such as using mobile properties and web forms. Generally the objective is to remind the users of your latest products or offerings. 7. QR Codes: QR codes are another form of Mobile Marketing that helps the users to access a web link by scanning a 2D image with their mobile camera. This leads to easy navigation of the website without typing the web link manually in mobiles. 8. Bluetooth: Benefits like permission-based technology, impressive transfer speed, being a radio-oriented technology and free of cost make Bluetooth a widely used form of mobile marketing.

Jobs in Mobile Marketing:

http://www.simplyhired.co.in/a/jobs/list/q-mobile+marketing http://www.timesjobs.com/jobskill/Mobile-Marketing-Jobs http://www.indeed.co.in/Manager-Mobile-Marketing-jobs http://jobsearch.naukri.com/mobile-marketing-jobs

Salaries in Mobile Marketing:

https://econsultancy.com/blog/9618-mobile-marketers-are-most-in-demand-staff-in-digital-industry http://www.wantedanalytics.com/insight/2011/10/09/demand-continues-to-grow-for-mobile-marketing-experience/ http://www.slideshare.net/CommPRObiz/10-leading-cities-for-marketing-salaries Though more and more people are searching for products and services on their mobiles, surprisingly very few websites are mobile friendly. Equipped with so many benefits, Mobile Marketing should be taken seriously by organizations if they really wish to create a strong brand image and want to scale their businesses fast.