Happy New Year! For us marketeers this is the year of Mobile not the Rabbit. In the fourth quarter of 2010 major brands ramped up their mobile efforts to unprecedented levels. By most estimates, U.S. mobile advertising will be more than a billion dollars business in 2011.
For those involved in social media marketing, mobile marketing is another set of tools to add to your marketing toolkit. Why? Because an online community of Twitter or Facebook users can make or break your business with their Smartphones. Your company or service may be getting hundreds or thousands of good or bad reviews on mobile sites like Gowalla or Foursquare, either building up your reputation or tearing it down without you even knowing it. Also cell phones are the most popular electronic gadget among American adults, according to a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, with 85% of all adults owning mobile handsets.
Your marketing strategy should take into consideration how people are connecting to your social media platforms. You will likely find that the majority of your traffic is coming from iPhones, Blackberries and other smartphones.
If that is enough to get you thinking about adding mobile marketing to your campaign then you should know about QR Codes. QR is short for Quick Response (they can be read quickly by a cell phone). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. QR Codes are already appearing in magazine ads, on billboards, web pages and even t-shirts.
Once the QR code is read by your cell phone, the QR code may give you details about that business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or details about the person wearing
the t-shirt, show you a URL which you can click to see a trailer for a movie, or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local outlet. The reason why they are more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store (and digitally present) much more data, including url links, geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them.
How should you use QR codes?
Adding QR codes to your existing marketing materials allow anyone with a QR cod reader on their cellphone to retrieve additional information about your business and the recipient can retrieve all of your content information right into their phone making it easier for them to contact you. You could add one to your business card containing your contact details so its easy for someone to add you to their contacts on their cell phone.
Add them to any print advertising, flyers, posters, invites, TV ads etc containing:
- Product details
- Contact details
- Offer details
- Event details
- Competition details
- A coupon
- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace IDs
- A link to your YouTube video
Adding QR codes to the regular staple of mobile advertising SMS messaging and you can develop a powerful one-two marketing punch.
Have a happy and productive Year of the Mobile.