Tips for Getting Started With Mobile Marketing

As more and more consumers access the Web through smartphones and tablets, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to make mobile part of their marketing plan — or risk losing customers to their more mobile-friendly competitors. But how do you get started with mobile marketing?In her article 6 Tips to Start Your Mobile Marketing Jichél Stewart predicts that by 2014, people will be accessing the Internet via mobile devices more often than from their desktop computers. And with the most active mobile demographic firmly in the 25-to-45 age group, marketers can no longer assume that mobile marketing efforts should be restricted to your younger consumers.

So once you've decided to market your business to the growing mobile crowd, where do you begin? As always, it depends on the type of business you are promoting and the needs of your customers. With this in mind, Stewart has outlined a few useful tactics to help you plan your approach to mobile in her article:

• Write a use-based mobile marketing strategy based on market research and surveys
• Optimize your website for mobile with consistent branding, SEO and testing on multiple platforms
• Establish which mobile channels best suit your goals
• Evaluate your success through testing and web analytics

You can the full article at digistreammedia.com.

When it comes to picking which channels you’ll use in mobile marketing, note that some of them are natural extensions of usual online behaviors. For instance, mobile email is important to keep in mind as messages will display differently in a smartphone’s email application than they do on a computer screen. Read our post 3 Tips for Mobile Email Marketing for some guidelines on optimizing email messages for mobile platforms.

Keep in mind that QR codes are a simple and valuable tool for kicking off any mobile marketing campaign. They allow you to transform printed materials you might already use (like postcards or fliers) into mobile marketing pieces. Take a look atQR Codes Marketing Campaign Basics for some tips on basic campaign planning.

How are you reaching out to your smartphone-carrying customers? Let us know in the comments.

What's next?

For more on mobile marketing, check out our three-part video blog series onSmall Business Marketing Trends for 2012.