Mobile marketing explained

Posted: Sep 02, 2010 |Comments: 0 |

Over the past decade or so, mobile marketing has gone form a fairly broad advertising term to a rather specific type of marketing. Once, the term traditionally was used to describe any form of marketing that made use of a moving ("mobile") medium; moving billboards, roadshows and other types of outdoor advertising.

Today the term generally refers to a medium that may move but has little in common with the traditional definition - the mobile phone or mobile computer device. Strictly speaking, the latest definition from the Mobile Marketing Association is "a set of practices that enables organisations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network."

The different types of mobile marketing on offer have expanded rapidly in a relatively short amount of time:

SMS marketing

Arguably the first method of marketing to mobile devices, this type of method only became possible when the Short Message Service (SMS) system became a standard capability for mobile phones and service providers. First launched in the early 2000s across western Europe and North America, it originally received a negative reception from many quarters as it was unregulated and businesses would often send unwanted advertising to users who had never opted to receive such messages.


Today, anti-spam laws in most developed nations require advertisers to receive permission from mobile phone users before sending SMS messages and must give an opt-out option within each text. This has probably helped it become the most popular branch of the mobile marketing industry, with several hundred million advertising SMS messages sent out every month in Europe alone. SMS marketing covers both direct advertising and open competitions, where users send in their answers to a brand in return for opting in to their marketing campaigns and a chance at winning a prize. Bluetooth content Bluetooth marketing is often very similar to SMS messaging but uses a different type of communication to send messages to mobile devices and is based around a "hotspot" system. Generally, this involves sending marketing messages to any user who walks within range of the bluetooth transmitter with their settings open.

MMS marketing

Essentially a rich media form of SMS marketing, this uses the Multimedia Message Service and therefore can only reach phones with a colour screen and MMS capability. Luckily, this accounts for the vast majority of users and effectively all modern phones. These messages can contain a timed slideshow of images, text, audio and/or video and are popular among brands for more closely targeted campaigns. Some MMS campaigns involve user participation, where the advertiser actually receives photos, videos or audio clips for use in a competition or to crowdsource content for the web.

Web marketing for mobiles

The latest addition is by and large, an extension of web marketing. Many mobile devices provide access to the internet either through the 3G network or even via wireless internet connections; the more advanced of these are known as 'smartphones' and are often capable of rendering a web page in the same fashion as a desktop PC.

Still, the different dimensions and interface of a mobile device mean that traditional HTML pages are often duplicated in an optimised mobile format at another address, where navigation is less dependent on a mouse and where processor intensive content is less likely to appear. This opens up display advertising for mobile devices as well as banner ads and text ads in search engine marketing. Advertisers can often use traditional PC advertising networks to target mobile devices specifically if they include certain lines of code, which is useful as the mobile format also allows for the new 'click to call' format for generating direct leads as well as dynamic location-based marketing using geolocation.

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