How To Get Started With Mobile Marketing

Hi Everybody,
Mobile marketing is now considered the 7th mass media channel after print, recordings, cinema, radio, TV, and the internet. So with this new mass media channel, the question is what’s the best way to approach marketing to users of mobile devices?

A brief history of mobile marketing

Marketing to mobile devices is widely believed to have started in the year 2000 with text message/SMS news services that were free but sponsored by advertising. This evolved into mass promotion of events and alerts with even recent claims of “more than 100% response rate” by Marc Hyatt of Txtlocal, thanks to the viral effects of users forwarding messages to others.

SMS advertising, like forms of email marketing, can often be obtrusive and annoying, with the added inconvenience of costing users money based on their mobile service’s inbound SMS rates. As such, it remains more effective as a “pull” medium rather than a “push” one, such as a means for polling or voting for programs like American Idol or Dancing with the Stars.

Mobile applications also began appearing in 2000 from Handmark. But apps didn’t really become mainstream for in-application advertising until Apple’s App Store for the iPhone arrived in 2008.

Android, Blackberry, Symbian, along with the iPhone and iPad have advanced mobile web browsing to near mainstream use as the February Nielsen Mobile Report affirmed there are now over 72 million mobile web users in the United States.