How To Tap Into Mobile Marketing

Although ‘mobile marketing’ is very much in its infancy, and may seem way beyond the reach of most SMEs, it can be one of the most cost effective ways to engage with your customer-base and can even provide new revenue opportunities.

‘Mobile marketing’, as the name suggests, is simply using the outlet of the 50 million mobile phones in the UK to market your products or services.

The primary drivers behind mobile marketing are typically to build up a better profile of your customer base and establish tools to encourage regular communication on an ongoing base.

The first stage is always building up a database of contact details, and in this case means getting clients to give you their mobile phone numbers. Although people are famously protective about giving out contact information, they are much more likely to participate if they have a chance to win a prize, and people’s propensity to send text messages makes this the ideal medium.

Such promotions, typically referred to as ‘Text 2 Win’, are well within the marketing of most consumer-facing SMEs. Details of the competition are distributed together with usual print materials or packaging, and customers are requested to text in to win a prize.

The prize can be a product discount, tickets to a sports event, or free ringtones or wallpapers for their phones.

The key asset that you need to be able to bring to the party is regular communication with your customers through print media. If your primary business is through the web, then mobile marketing is not effective, as web-savvy customers tend not to sign up for mobile services.

Larger firms will normally engage a specialist agency to run their mobile marketing campaign, but for many SMEs, it’s likely to be more effective to run the competition in-house.

Companies can provide very low cost SMS services that can be operated over a website with little mobile expertise, and for a few hundred pounds will set-up a ‘shortcode’ and provide you with a simple web interface to process the messages.

Of course, if you are expecting millions of different entries, you may want to consider a slightly more automated system, but millions of entries would be a very good problem for most SMEs to have.

The usual format of the competition is for people to text in the answer to a multiple-choice question together with their name, house number, and postcode. In choosing a winner, you only need to pick someone who has the right answer, and you can process the SMSs to build a customer database that can be used for direct marketing.

The usual data protection issues apply with regard to opt-out for direct mailing, but you may want to be more careful with regard to sending unsolicited text messages.

ICSTIS, the UK regulator (www.icstis.org.uk) provides comprehensive advice for anyone looking to launch SMS services and you should be careful as unsolicited messages are treated as ‘spam’ by your customers and network operators.

In addition to building customer databases, mobile lends itself very well to viral marketing, and this can even present a revenue opportunity to many SMEs. If your business has strong appeal to young people, humorous ringtones, wallpapers, or text messages can fly around very quickly, and if sufficiently compelling, people will be willing to pay for them.

When effective, this type of campaign can contribute to significant brand awareness and loyalty to a young demographic and for many consumer-facing SMEs this could provide a significant amount of revenue for very little work, much in same way as white-label credit cards did in the 1990s.

For the more ambitious, a specialist ringtone or wallpaper associated with your firm’s brand can spread awareness as well as providing additional revenue. If it’s going to be effective it needs to either be funny or ‘cool’ to the youth audience and your ability to generate compelling creative will be critical to your success.