With the rapid growth of smartphones and other mobile devices, businesses contemplating mobile marketing initiatives must be proactive in finding the most effective mobile marketing strategy. Effective mobile marketing begins with understanding how consumers use mobile devices that can deliver rich marketing experiences.
Research firm IDC (News - Alert) projects that by 2014 there will be seven billion Internet connected devices, only of which 2 billion will be PCs. With the advancing of mobile device capabilities, it's clear that smartphones and other mobile devices will evolve to be the primary way that purchasers of B2C and B2B offerings will conduct research, find vendors and make purchases.
Needless to say, CEOs, business owners, marketers and others who wants to make the most of this impending change must get moving. Gaebler.com provides some guidelines to follow when creating a mobile marketing strategy.
First, according to entrepreneur website says Gaebler.com, make sure your website looks good on mobile devices. Then, once you've enhanced your site to cater to mobile visitors, track your progress by benchmarking how much of your traffic comes from mobile devices. Your mobile site traffic will probably clock in at between four percent and 20 percent, depending on your business, according to Gaebler.com. The key thing to look at is whether you are getting the desired actions from mobile visitors, so track conversion rates on your desired goals and take steps to improve metrics.
Next, experiment with mobile advertising by starting with Google (News - Alert) Mobile Ads, for example. Allocate marketing budget for a pilot and see how it goes, and tweak your site to improve results and iterate your way to mobile advertising success.
Finally, firms that help others to get their mobile strategies in place are positioned to profit from the mobile boom. If you own a consulting firm or a marketing agency, you should be thinking about how to help clients take advantage of mobile. According to Gaebler.com, one firm that is fast-growing is Acquity Group, which has helped some of the country's largest brands to tailor their mobile strategies in order to better connect with diverse audiences.
A few months back at the 2012 Mobile Marketing Association (News - Alert) Annual Conferencing in New York, Locaid Technologies, a mobile Location-as-a-Service provider, unveiled the commercial availability of Locaid Geofence, a new API that allows developers to combine real-time customer location data with real-world geographic areas. Using Locaid’s Location-as-a-Service, developers can create a virtual location perimeter of any size around any location and create alerts whenever devices enter or leave certain areas.
Naomi Morita, head of development at Locaid, said in a statement, “The Locaid Geofence API is an enhancement for any mobile campaign platform for any mobile agency or brand. We see customers utilizing the best services for location, messaging and campaign management in high growth areas such as retail advertising, providing maps and videos at conferences and trade shows, and providing venue information at major sporting events and concerts.”
Locaid customers that utilize location and geofence technologies operate in industries beyond mobile marketing including financial services, mobile gaming, hospitality, fleet and workforce management, child location services, M2M and telematics. Additionally, Locaid provides location services to SMS providers, marketing agencies and mobile campaign platforms.
Locaid Geofence allows developers to draw any area on a map and create a “trigger” event when a mobile device enters or exits the virtual area. Locaid Geofence allows developers to build any fence for any trigger event for any mobile device, for any business need. Once a Locaid Geofence is created, a geographic rules-based application alert or notification can be triggered whenever a registered opt-in device location is fixed inside or outside a geographic area.
“‘Location, location, location’ has always been the real estate industry’s motto, but today, it’s especially important for brand marketers to connect with their customers whenever and wherever they are,” said Brittany Clotfelter, VP business development and strategic partnerships at Vibes, a Locaid customer.
At TMC’s Executive Editorial Open House in San Jose, Calif. in July, TMCnet sat down with Naomi Morita, VP, product development at Locaid, to discuss how its products are useful in evolving mobile marketing in the enterprise space.
“One of the trends we are seeing is the huge rise in connected devices in general. There are now phones, tablets, and almost all devices are now connected to a network,” Morita told TMCnet. “Once they get connected and start moving around, people want to know where they are. So, keeping track of all of these moving things is turning into a much larger business than we expected.”
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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo