There are more people who own mobile telephone devices today than ever before. Many of these devices are smart phones that have access to the Internet, email, texting capabilities, and social media sites.
This is an ideal format for marketers who understand how to exploit this environment for the purposes of promoting products and services of local business establishments. Consider that many of these individuals carry their phones with them at all times; there is ample opportunity for communication about various products and services.
Assume that a person is looking for a place to have lunch, and they are looking for a specific type of restaurant. For example, let’s say they are looking for deli, so they enter into the search engine on their phone, “Tulsa Deli”. So if they are in midtown Tulsa, the search engine will return Deli’s that are in their area.
Some of the Deli restaurants may have optimized their location so that they will be among the first one’s on the list. Guess who will be getting the lion’s share of the business when that happens. People like the easy way to find things, so the first or second Deli restaurants will probably be the Deli of choice. The other 30 or so restaurants that did nothing to optimize their locations did not get that business, obviously.
This same principle comes into play with any product or service. People who are out shopping, traveling or working will use the same technique to find anything that they are looking for. The days of the yellow pages for looking up things have pretty much disappeared from view. The mobile smart phone is a pretty powerful device in the hands of a marketer who knows what he or she is doing.
The use of popup ads has had some significance, but that is balanced by the annoyance of the popup interrupting any activity in which the individual is already involved. One very effective means of advertising is the short 30 second video that appears just before a searched for item. If well done and designed in an engaging manner, it can be very effective, since the video is short in duration.
One powerful use for mobile marketing is the gathering of leads from surveys and contests. People will enter a contest, or a survey that is short and easy to do while waiting for lunch to arrive, for example. This can be a good way to gauge interest in a product or service and provide leads for later follow up.
There is an entire group of people who use their mobile phones for everything pertaining to their communication needs. They do not have a landline and they have no need for a desktop or laptop computer. If there were not a way to communicate with them on their mobile devices, they would never hear from you at all. Their entire world is built around the utilization of their smart phone. That dynamic is expected to continue to grow and there is an entire new market of people that did not exist 3 years ago.
