What is it?

"Mobile Marketing is the use of the mobile medium as a communications and entertainment channel between a brand and an end-user"
                                                                                                                                             - Mobile Marketing Association

Mobile marketing is more than a trendy new media channel; it is a powerful communication tool with considerable audience reach and awareness. A recent survey showed that the majority of European mobile users (84%) are willing to receive marketing and promotional offers on their handsets, yet the marketing community is failing to capitalize on this due to misperception of consumer views. There is significant opportunity for growth in this sector, however advertising and marketing agencies are failing to promote the value of mobile marketing to clients as they wrongly believe consumers will reject this tool. In fact more than half of mobile subscribers are willing to embrace mobile promotions, when carefully targeted and for appropriate services.

If you don’t offer mobile marketing as a channel, read what you are missing out on:

When asked what type of services they would like to receive via SMS, over half of those surveyed (53%) said they would welcome text messages alerting them to special offers, e.g. from local bars and restaurants, a further 19% would like to hear about product or service promotions; 23% would like to be kept up to date with loyalty programs via text.

	“While Coca-cola currently spends no more than 3% of its advertising budget on mobile marketing, it is expecting to spend up to 50% in 10 years time”                                                                                                                    - Marketing Week 08.12.05
	“…mobile advertising will eventually grab 25% to 30% of the approximately $100 billion spent on branding in the U.S. each year”                                                                  - John Stratton, Chief Marketing Officer, Verizon Wireless

What are the applications?
Mobile applications can take one of many forms as described below:
•	Interactive Polling Applications promotes audience participation through TV and radio media. For these networks, more viewers means better ratings translating to higher advertising premiums.
•	Mobile Couponing / Product Promotions generates far better responses at a fraction of the cost as compared to direct mail. Delivery is more immediate, making it more suitable for perishable items
•	Mobile Contests and Sweepstakes are particularly useful in building opt-in lists and generating awareness around new products and services.
•	Premium Content Delivery allows content owners to use mobile as an alternative channel to deliver content already developed. In other words, this provides incremental revenue.
•	Micropayments enables merchants to allow another payment option for customer customers to purchase goods and services.
•	Performance Improvement utilizes the mobile marketing campaigns to help improve business performance  through improvements in revenue enhancement, cost reduction, and asset efficiency.
•	Creative, compelling, and engaging messages using rich graphics, audio, and video can grab the attention of people through MMS marketing.
•	Advertising applications on the mobile internet, also known as WAP, results in response rates averaging around 4% and even higher.

How it works Mobile campaigns use the end-customer’s mobile phone handset to deliver marketing messages. These messages can be pushed to the end-customer or pulled by them through a number of different ways including SMS, MMS, mobile internet, and java applications. When combined with business intelligence insights, companies can greatly improve marketing ROI in addition to enterprise-wide performance. Note that our Business Intelligence engine can be used with existing suppliers of mobile marketing services.

Mobile Marketing Solution

How to do it To implement these models, the marketer must be able to manage an iterative marketing campaign with “structured dialogues” and promotional messages in which consumers are encouraged to become participants. As the figure below shows, the campaign process has four essential steps, Define Objectives, Design & Develop, Execute, and Analyze (post-campaign analysis and reporting) and involves an ongoing process, cycling among goals, marketing strategies and service modules (for example, “text-to-win” questions, polls, quizzes).

Mobile Marketing Value Chain