Visibility

70% of the world’s population now own a mobile phone. More than 45% of new mobile phone sales are smartphones. By 2014, mobile Internet usage is expected to surpass desktop Internet usage. The time for mobile marketing is now.

Mobile marketing offers a direct sales channel for businesses of all sizes. In this article you’ll learn how to start driving sales using mobile marketing.

1. Develop A Mobile Website
How many times have you visited a website on your smartphone only to get frustrated with the continual zooming required to browse the website? How much more satisfying is it to visit a website made for a smartphone? The first step in your mobile marketing strategy is to develop a mobile-optimised website designed to give an optimum user-experience.

The most important component of your mobile website is to have a clickable phone number at the top of each page so that visitors can call you immediately - our tests have shown that phone calls are the main call-to-action on mobile phones, which makes sense when you think about it. You also need to design your website to give users the minimum amount of information required for them to make a decision about your products or services.

2. Auto-Redirect Mobile Traffic
Once you have developed a mobile website for your business you will need to add a script to your main website that auto-redirects mobile phone users to your mobile website. This is a critical component of your mobile marketing strategy as the majority of people who visit your mobile website are those that click through on one of your online ads or SEO rankings and then get redirected.

You can see how many smartphone users are visiting your website with the following Google Analytics report: VISITORS -> TECHNOLOGY -> MOBILE (in the new Google Analytics interface).

3. Use Google Adwords for Mobile
Google Adwords allows you to target your advertising to mobile phones, within the Campaign Settings. This means that you can target your ads to smartphone users that are searching for your product or service on Google. You can go as far as targeting the type of smartphone and the network it is on, which means you can choose to only advertise to people who own an iPhone or Android. Plus with mobile ad extensions you can include a clickable phone number within the ad, allowing searchers to call you directly from your ad.

For optimum results you need to identify the keywords that your prospects are typing into Google on their smartphone when they have an urgent problem they need to solve. This ensures that when they land on your website they will click on the phone number and call you right away.

4. Develop iPhone Apps
If you have the resources available, developing an iPhone app is a great way to build a relationship with your prospects. Think about iPhone apps as the email marketing of mobile - give away high quality information on a frequent basis to stay front-of-mind with your prospects until they are ready to buy.

One of the easiest iPhone apps you can develop is a ‘tip of the day’ app, where you deliver a free tip every single day. The iPhone app is free to download and includes in-application advertising to your own website. It’s also important to include a daily push notification so users remember to open up your app. For an example of a ‘tip of the day’ app, you can download our free SEO Tip of the Day iPhone app at http://budurl.com/2udn or use the QR code on this page.

5. Use In-Application Advertising
With the massive growth of iPhone Apps and Android Apps, mobile advertising provides a real opportunity for businesses to advertise their products or services within smartphone applications. The major player in this space is Google’s Admob which allows you to setup an ad in minutes. Admob’s main competitor is Apple’s iAd, but iAd doesn’t have a self-service model yet placing it out of reach for most businesses.

The key to running a successful in-application advertisement is to give away something for free such as a free report, an iPhone app or anything else of high perceived value, and to drive users to a mobile landing page within your mobile website.

6. Leverage SMS Marketing
According to Frost & Sullivan (2010) the open rates for SMS messages is over 98%. Think about it, when was the last time you received an SMS that you did NOT open? The key to running a successful SMS marketing campaign is to send prospects a teaser SMS message that links to a landing page on your mobile website designed to get them to take action on an offer. The only thing you want to sell within the SMS message is the ‘click’ (ie the next action they need to take).

SMS marketing can work really well for your business, if implemented correctly, but it can also be an annoying disturbance to your prospects if done incorrectly. Make sure you gain permission from your database before SMS marketing to them and ensure you follow the applicable laws in your region as SMS marketing is usually highly regulated.

7. Utilize QR Codes
QR codes can be used in offline advertising, such as magazines, to allow mobile phone users to visit a website by taking a photo of the QR code and then clicking through on the link. QR codes can and should be used to drive action on your marketing goals, such as building up your mobile subscriber list or driving people to download your iPhone app.

More creative ways to use QR codes include adding them to your business card, including them in your shop window or adding them to your loyalty card. You can also get creative on where you send people to... for example, you can send them to your Facebook page, a landing page, a download page or even to call a phone number. To see QR codes in action take a photo of the QR code (on this page) with Google Goggles to download our free SEO Tip of the Day app.

Mobile marketing is evolving at rapid rate and, like any new marketing channel, there exists significant opportunity for businesses to get in early and gain a real advantage against their competition. The question is... how long will it take you to get started?