The Growth Of Mobile Marketing

If you are out and about, whether it is shopping or perhaps you are taking some time for lunch and are eating out, it is very evident that we have all become dependent on our mobile phones. While it is true that there are still those who use a flip phone, the abundance of smart phones of some kind is evident.

A smart phone could be classified as a phone that is capable of having Internet capability, and also had the ability to send and receive email. Because of these capabilities a field of marketing has opened up that is unprecedented. Just watch people when their phone rings, beeps or belches. They drop everything that they are doing at the moment, and pay attention to the phone above everything else, at least for a moment.

It is this attention that marketers want. It is just enough to get a pair of eyeballs on an ad, a message, a referral, or on an email. At sometime a person may come back to it and give it some consideration. This is the concept called mobile marketing, that is marketing to people that have mobile phones.

I remember an old cartoon strip called Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy was a cartoon detective that was a sort of comic book hero and had all kinds of adventures saving society from the bad guys. Dick Tracy and his cohorts used a two-way wrist radio, located on his wristwatch. I thought then that the two-way radio would really make sense because it would be a great way for people to communicate.

We are there now. Not only can we just communicate, but we can text, send email messages, send videos, take a picture and send it, and log into the Internet. All of these tasks can take place in the space of about 5 to 10 minutes. This is how mobile marketing is capitalizing on modern technology.

Imagine that you are shopping and you would like to find a place to eat lunch. The type of restaurant you would like to visit for your lunch is a sub shop. So, you take out your smart phone and log onto the Internet. You punch into the search engine and type in the words, “Sub sandwiches Toledo”, or whatever town you happen to be in. The search engine finds a list of restaurants near to you, with phone numbers and a map of how to get there.

The restaurants that have taken the time to optimize their local listings will be the ones that you will consider when you want to go have lunch. People are using this method to shop and find the stores who have the goods and services where they happen to be at the moment. They can inquire about the store, and then plug in the built in GPS from their smart phone and it will take them there.

Companies who have not programmed their location to be picked up by the mobile marketing concept are losing business to those who have. This is not the wave of the future; this is the wave of now.