Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Trends in Mobile Marketing for 2012
Monday, January 02, 2012 by Michael Lewis
John Arnold, writing for Entrepreneur.com, has a great round
summary of what he believes will be the ten biggest
marketing trends of 2012. The main focus of many of these
trends is mobile, something we have talked about a lot this past
year on the Future of IT. Here are our thoughts on two of the
strategies he discusses.
Mobile Push and Pull Marketing
With mobile push and pull marketing, small businesses use mobile
phone-centric communications to bring customers in the door. Mobile
Pull Marketing incentivizes you to use your mobile phone to
interact with advertising. Mobile Push Marketing focuses on sending
bulk messages to prospective clients' mobile phones, either via
email or text message. Both of these strategies use well developed
tactics, but focus on using mobile phones as being the primary
medium of delivery.
While we have argued that mobile facing marketing needs to be a
part of a small businesses marketing strategy, it is important to
not overwhelm your audience. People are still weary of mobile
advertising. Formatting email newsletters so they can be read
easily on a mobile screen is a great improvement, but keep bulk
text messages to a minimum. As with email newsletters, sending too
many bulk text messages could be seen as spammy. I believe this
goes double for text messages since this form of channel tends to
be used primarily for private personal communication.
Proximity Marketing
FourSquare and other check-in apps can be a really fun way to
interact and play with friends. They also can give small businesses
a way to bring people in the door. Using GPS enabled smartphones,
people out and about can find deals nearby. Once in the store, they
will have to broadcast their location to their friends.
Using check-in apps like FourSquare or Yelp give small
businesses the flexibility to scale their efforts over time. Deals
are created on demand and can be set at multiple levels. For
example, start out by offering deals to the "mayor." This will
limit a deal to a single person at a time. You can also set deals
for multiple check ins. Yelp has a service that allows
you to create Groupon-style deals on demand.
Both FourSquare and Yelp let you connect with people who are
actively seeking something to do. These services let you
incentivize drop in clients that may have walked past your
store.
Until next time -
Mike Lewis
Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Support &
Consulting
DC IT Support &
Consulting
Outsourced Marketing Services
Leave comment: