Expert from MMA Discusses the Future of Mobile Marketing

Chasing The Storm has a good interview of Rohit Dadwal from MMA (Mobile Marketing Association). To my surprise, most of the things Rohit mentioned in the interview are things that I am already familiar with. In fact, anyone who has been following the mobile marketing industry closely could easily relate to what Rohit says in his interview. Some of the most important points he made include

1. SMS (short messaging service) marketing or text message marketing will continue to grow steadily in 2009.

2. Bad economy will make businesses and brands think twice before spending their money on traditional advertising. So, they are more likely to spend their advertising dollars only in mediums like mobile phone marketing that guarantee quantifiable returns and successes.

3. Mobile social networking will continue to grow steadily.

4. Mobile search marketing will become big.

5. Location based services will be a huge success and it will continue to play a major role in mobile marketing.

6. Mobile coupons and mobile alerts will become a lot more popular with people.

7. In the next five years, a lot of brands around the world will have a strong mobile presence. In fact, it will become so common that it will be unusual for a big brand to not have a strong mobile presence.

8. Mobile marketing is meant for businesses of all sizes. No matter how small or how big a business empire you have, all you need is the ability to reach the end users. So, businesses can benefit from mobile marketing irrespective of their size and popularity.

As you can see, none of the points made above is new. If you have been following the industry closely, you can see that it is growing steadily and moving in a direction exactly as predicted by experts a few years back. If it continues to grow the same way, it will be a multibillion dollar industry just as predicted. Don’t you think?

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones, Mobile Marketing Association.

6 comments.

Thanks to Bad Economy, Companies Turn Toward Mobile Advertising En Masse

The current economic crisis has taken its toll on a lot of companies around the world. Traditional advertising campaigns are not as successful as they used to be and this has made everyone think really hard to come up with a new strategy. The new strategy, apparently, is something that has been in the news for quite some time now. It is called mobile advertising.

Here are a few examples.

Pop group New Kids on the Block decided to start their own mobile fan club for their ‘The Block’ tour this year. While they were touring, they added at least a 1000 fans to their club each night. Over a span of just over 60 days, the band has over 30,000 loyal fans in their mobile fan club. All these fans get regular updates on tour schedules, merchandise info, ticket sales, and venue details.

It took around one and a half years for Echo Management to build an email list of 17,000 members for country pop singer LeAnn Rimes. Later, they decided to give mobile phone advertising a try. The result – over 24,000 members added to the list with just 16 shows.

In the month of June, UMRG (Universal Motown Republic Group) promoted Lil Wayne’s album ‘Tha Carter III’ by organizing a mobile advertising campaign. The result – 124,000 phone calls in the first week and a mobile fan list consisting of 90,000 members in a surprisingly short period of time. The label has now made this mobile list into a premier mobile fan club.

A famous retailer sent both mobile alerts and email alerts to customers offering discounts and promotional offers. The mobile alert campaign was 16% more effective than the email campaign. Also, people who received mobile alerts spent, on an average, $13 more than people who received email alerts.

The name behind these mobile advertising campaigns is Mozes – a very famous mobile marketing company. The web based platform from Mozes helps mobile advertisers create and manage simple yet effective mobile ad campaigns. The company has had a lot of success of late. The numbers are staggering. Take a look at some of the milestones reached by the company.

1. A whopping 3.5 mobile connections in a single month.

2. 130,000 mobile connections in a single day.

3. On an average, the company gets at least 7000 voice calls from fans.

4. Over 500 well known artists have a Mozes widget on their website or social networking profile.

A lot of experts believe that mobile marketing will be the key format of marketing in 2009. A mobile marketing campaign is very easy to create, even easier to manage, can easily reach the target customer base, and most importantly, gives amazing results. So, the future, like I’ve always said, is mobile.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

17 comments.