Does Mobile Development Influence Your Marketing Strategy?

Well if you ask me, I don’t have any doubt about it. Development in mobile technology has drastically changed the way marketers would typically plan their strategy. While till the last decade we have seen the web playing a key role in marketing plans and companies allocating a fair share of the traditional media budget to the web, I think we will soon see another shift in this trend when businesses would find it necessary to invest mobile applications and mobile based marketing strategies, just the way a website has become a necessity today for every business.

Now why do I say so?

The reason marketers showed an inclination for the web media were pretty simple – its cheaper, global reach, interactivity and the accountability. Yes while you can never know how many people saw your banner on the highway and how many actually visited your store, with a web based advertising campaign you can track every bit of it.

Now if we look at mobile as a medium, we have all the features that web offers. In addition, mobile is a much more “personal” medium, it is also something that we are always connected to. A person might not be in front of a computer always but he carries his mobile almost 24/7. The engagement level is much higher.

While these are just some of the basic advantages of mobile marketing, let’s look at what other advantages have we gained out of mobile technology development.

Marketers have already been leveraging SMS as a means to communicate with their target audience but mobile marketing has now moved much ahead of that.

With advent of smart phones there are tons of mobile apps that are available for almost all the leading platforms like iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc and they have simply revolutionized the way people use mobile. For example, there are GPS based apps that can actually serve an ad for your shop right when he is in front of it!

Think of the innumerous games that are available on all leading mobile platforms and considering the level of engagement that users have for this application any marketer would love to seize the opportunity to use some in-game advertising.

Think about companies that develop apps through which users can not only get info about the company, latest products etc but also can interact amongst themselves. How easy it is to build a community around your brand!

Not to forget mobile coupons that can be a big bait for users to step into your store or if you are actually keen on leveraging mobile technology in all aspects you won’t even need a store – build up a mobile version of the store and your customers can complete the entire transaction from their mobile itself. There are already businesses using all these technology and mobile commerce is definitely going to be big.

If you have not yet started to use mobile technology as a part of your marketing plan it’s high time you get on board and the best part is that with the increasing development in mobile technology it is becoming more and more affordable, offering the smaller businesses a fair play ground with their bigger counterparts.

So are you going to get your mobile app soon?