The Mobile & The Business Opportunites For Marketing!

(Via Pondering Primate)Helen Keegan, managing director,Beepmarketing highlights talking and texting, taking pictures and video clips with your phone is now an intrinsic part of modern life so much so that many people cannot even contemplate life without their mobile phone.With more active mobile phones in the UK than people and 85 million text messages sent person to person every day and more than 70 per cent of all customers using their phones for texting (Mobile Data Association) this thing is huge. More people have access to mobile technology than desktop or laptop computers. Mobile phones are with us wherever we are, whatever age we are and whatever state of mind we're in. This of course makes it a very powerful marketing tool. But what happens next? Most data collected from text and win competitions is binned and not even analysed fully (even though it contains extremely valuable data about customer likes/dislikes and their usage of mobile phones). Furthermore, it's still relatively rare to see this data form part of a CRM strategy. The ubiquity of camera phones (which means colour screens, java capability, picture messaging and video in some cases) now means we can go beyond simple text messaging for a prize draw or competition. We can offer pictures and ringtones as prizes, relatively easily, alongside the big prizes of cash and holidays.
What's more with the advent of mobile barcodes and tracking techniques, we can start to test different offers with different groups and begin to find out more about our customers and add to their experience of our brand. We can also initiate a two-way dialogue and respond to questions and requests (after all a telephone is a two-way thing). This mobile access, or Red Button Mobile as it's now called, links customers straight away to a WAP site for more information, to a piece of content (game, picture, piece of music) or even a mobile barcode. And it won't be long before this way of interacting becomes commonplace as data speeds improve on our phones and we move to a full 3G experience across all networks.This mobile stuff isn't going away any time soon. we need to learn about our mobile customers and mobile marketing will have to evolve as the technology evolves and customer expectations increase.