- Understanding Mobile Marketing
- What Makes Mobile Marketing a Big Deal
- How Mobile Marketing Differs from Traditional Web Marketing
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What Makes Mobile Marketing a Big Deal
Why is mobile marketing important? Like just about everything marketing related, it’s a numbers thing.
Basic stats first. At the beginning of 2010, there were more than 4.7 billion subscribers to cellular telephone services worldwide, with 285 million of these people in the U.S.[1] Put another way, fully 91% of all Americans had a cellphone subscription (as of year-end 2008). You can’t ignore those numbers.
It gets even more interesting when you drill down to look at mobile Internet usage, which is a large driver of mobile marketing today. Research finds that 35% of all mobile phone users have used their phones to access the Internet[2]; that’s more than a billion people worldwide, and more than a hundred million in the U.S alone.
And these mobile users are spending money. In 2009, $1.6 billion in purchases were made from mobile devices[3]. That’s big money, folks, and reason enough for most companies to embrace the mobile web.
It should come as no surprise, then, that mobile marketing is projected to become one of the fastest-growing areas of web marketing, second only to social media marketing[4]. You can’t dismiss hundreds of millions of potential customers; indeed, you want to reach Internet users no matter how they connect to the web. A mobile phone is just another gateway to your web content.
It’s more than just the numbers, however. Unlike connecting to the web via computer, which can only be done while a customer is setting in front of his or her PC, a customer can connect to the web via mobile phone anytime and anywhere. People always have their phones with them; this gives you non-stop connectivity to your customers.
That connectivity is a two-way street; the mobile web also lets you access location-based information about your customers. That’s a nice demographic touch, being able to target customers based on location. It lets you provide more contextual information to your customers—information about the latest fashions if they’re in a clothing store, for example, or promotions for beauty aids if they’re in a drugstore. It’s narrowcasting, as opposed to mass marketing, which should generate more effective results.
All this adds up to a channel that you can’t ignore, and that has some distinct advantages to savvy marketers.
Footnotes
[1] Plunkett Research, Ltd.
[2] “Internet, Broadband, and Cell Phone Statistics,” Pew Research Center, 2009
[3] “Mobile Money Services and Contactless Payment Forecasts,” ABI Research, 2009
[4] “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014,” Forester Research, July 2009