Mobile phone could decide the future of your website

For long, you’ve worried about traffic, pagerank, and all other stuff for your websites. You tried a thousand other things to drive traffic to your sites and unless you are Darren Rowse, you know it’s just damn difficult. But things are about to change just a little bit.

Guinness has an annual event, a very popular one, which takes place across the globe every year. It’s called Guinness Toast. It’s already a very popular one, but Guinness thought of trying mobile marketing to increase its popularity further. So, it told consumers all over the world that they can join the event through their mobile phone. On doing so, they will become a member of the program instantly and get a free Guinness ringtone. Needless to say, the news spread like wildfire. Most importantly, the traffic to the site thegreatguinnesstoast.com went up significantly.

Thanks to high-end mobile phones that offer good mobile browsing experience to people, the number of people who browse the internet through their mobile phone is increasing slowly and steadily. What this means to you is that if you have a mobile friendly version of your site, or, even better, a mobile site, your chances of connecting to your readers become significantly high.

In future, we might as well have blog gurus teaching us how to drive traffic to our mobile sites. Who knows? Even Google might come up with pagerank for mobile sites. Get ready.

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

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Get hollywood gossips in your mobile phone

Just think of the number of things we can access right from our mobile phone – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and the likes, weather updates, sports news, maps, breaking news, and YouTube videos. Now, you can add one more thing to that list. Hollywood gossip.

The famous Hollywood gossip site TMZ has gone mobile. An ad-supported mobile site, to be precise. The site is built by Quattro Wireless and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is the first sponsor while AT&T is the first wireless carrier partner.

Britney collapses again, Lindsay back to the rehab, or another pathetic performance by Paris Hilton in a movie – you can get it all right in your mobile. The site is packed with pictures, news, and videos.

Considering the fact that TMZ focuses on its core 18-34 demo, this mobile version could find a lot of takers.

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

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Blyk to offer free mobile browsing?

Blyk is one of the few well known names in the world of mobile advertising. Especially, the way it has targeted the 16-24 age group for mobile ads is considered very good by a lot of people. In a recent insight discussion group with members, Blyk discussed a lot of issues. The most talked about issue, as you would have guessed from the title of this post, was free mobile browsing.

Blyk does this insight discussion group thing often enough to understand the needs of their core market and to adapt themselves to the evolving mobile advertising market.

In this recent discussion, one of the major gripes was the youth’s need for a shortcut to information. As of now, text messaging (SMS) and MMS are the most sought-after ways to reach out to teenagers. Young people are swift in responding to such ads and the success rate has been pretty good so far. But the catch is mobile internet / mobile browsing. If they click on a link which takes them to a mobile site, they have problems viewing it because of two reasons.

1) Mobile browsing costs are way too high and young people, at least most of them, don’t have a regular income, which makes them reluctant to click on the links sent by advertisers.

2) A lot of them don’t have high-end mobile phones which offer rich browsing experience. So, browsing in general becomes a little tougher.

Now, the second reason can somehow be overlooked. The reason being – if I got a link in a mobile ad which could take me to a site where I can download latest ringtones for free, I wouldn’t complain a lot about my poor browsing experience, as long as it is good enough to get the job done.

But the first point is very important. So, in the discussion group, one point which was often raised was about offering free browsing to customers. This, no doubt, would encourage a lot of people to click on the links and check out what the advertisers have on offer, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. The data charges for browsing are quite high and Blyk should think of a strategy to cover its costs if it were to provide its customers with free browsing. What could be the solution? We don’t know as of now. But, as I always say, stay tuned.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones, Blyk.

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Adidas and Nike’s mobile advertising campaigns get a staggering response

While some companies have still not taken mobile advertising seriously enough, some companies have gained a lot from mobile advertising. Two of the best examples would be Adidas and Nike.

Jackmyers.com, a B2B media website, posted a report on an Adidas mobile advertising campaign which features famous basketball stars who proclaim that ‘Basketball is a Brotherhood’. The ad campaign targeted teenage boys and girls and has become immensely popular among them. Upon clicking on the text ads they get, mobile users were taken to a mobile site where they can call the stars in the ad campaign, get tailor-made voicemail, special ringtones, and wallpapers. The response from teenagers was phenomenal. Take a look at the numbers.

Five million mobile impressions on the ads.

75,000 page views to the mobile site in the first week.

Over 8000 people opted in.

Thousands of people called their favorite stars, repeatedly.

Nike ran a similar campaign but it was run locally on Vodacam’s VLive! Portal. The portal offered free mobile content and had a great response from mobile users. Take a look at the numbers again.

84,000 downloads and 9200 survey responses.

The funny thing is, Nike only expected about 15,000 downloads and 4000 survey responses when it launched the campaign. But the results exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations.

A research conducted by Jackmyers.com also stated that mobile advertising is the one that’s most likely to get better results than any other form of advertising, at very little cost.

This is great news for mobile advertisers all over the world. Like I’ve always stated, targeted mobile advertising is a sure shot way to get better returns. And with time, things will only get better.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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Text messaging - the most preferred form of mobile advertising

There are different options for advertising in mobile phones. Ever wondered which is the most profitable and the most effective of them all? Well; the answer for that question would be SMS or text messaging.

The most important reason why text messaging is considered the best mobile advertising option is simple. It’s the only facility available on all the mobile phones. While a mobile video clip or a product placement ad in a mobile site might be more attractive, it’s not available in most of the mobile phones. So, you’ll end up targeting only a few mobile users who use Blackberries or iPhones. Whereas, text messaging is one facility which is available even in the low-end phones, thereby making it easier for the advertisers to reach out to the end-users. If you wanna know how effective text messaging could be, here’s some data for you.

For this New Year, mobile users around the world sent over 43 billion text messages among themselves. That’s a whopping 30% increase than last year. Rapidly growing markets like India and Philippines sent over a billion text messages each during the New Year period, which is astounding. Text messages are faster to type and easier to send and you don’t have to own an iPhone to do so. So, users mostly use text messaging as their mode of communication, only next to voice calls.

At this juncture, mobile advertisers should undoubtedly target text message advertising options. If high-end mobiles become affordable and mobile internet becomes a lot faster and cheaper than what it is right now, I think we will see a similar boom in the usage of premium services also.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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