What is mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing is marketing methods targeted towards uses of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. It can utilize advertising on mobile based websites, through ads embedded in mobile applications, and SMS text messages.
Why mobile marketing?
Mobile use has become one of the most common ways of accessing the internet. Mobile usage has expanded in recent years, and thus so has the usage of mobile devices for advertising.
Potential Audience
Due to the high use of mobile devices for internet access, the potential audience reach is quite large. And it can also target the users at many times of the day, when before it would be limited to when the user was at home watching TV, or in other select places. Both the young and middle aged generation use mobile devices enough that a large chunk of the population can be covered. However, services aimed at the older generation may not be good for mobile marketing.
Affordability
Mobile marketing is usually of a similar cost to internet marketing, and often works in the same way when based on the internet, but it can also take the form of text messages, (when using a platform like WhatsApp, this can be done for little cost), or have ads for your services embedded into applications, you often pay the application maker per time your ad is clicked, or for how many views it has. The cost of sending SMS text messages to potential customers in bulk is cheap.
For the end users, most users in the developed world can afford mobile phones, and the internet that goes with them, and they are slowly penetrating second world countries and even third world countries.
Ease of access
Mobile services are easily accessible in all major cities and towns and in most villages in the western world. In the east most cities and towns have mobile phone access. As the young and middle aged generation are familiar with these devices the ease of using them for marketing services and to purchase goods and services is obvious to most businesses.
Location based advertising services can use the location information from the device if enabled to advertise local services.
Mobile Rewards
Mobile rewards can be rewards for taking a service offered through mobile advertising. These can include free ringtones, incentives for switching mobile providers, and other perks or mobile applications for free. These can also be the form of prize draws which you can enter via sending an SMS to the provided number.
Self Service Options
Mobile device self-service options include the ability to help manage finances using their mobile phone, a request for products or services / enter competitions via SMS. It often involves sending a short SMS to a provided number which is billed to the mobile user per SMS sent which can be a source of revenue for the advertiser. Wherever the person has their mobile phone they can make payments, manage their finances and enter competitions.
Conclusion
Overall, mobile marketing is going to become one of the main ways to reach the modern generation, because of the penetration rates. There is the problem of ad blocking services, but these are not yet endemic to mobile devices as of 2016. In the modern age it is almost essential to add a mobile marketing campaign to your business.