Though the economy is in a troubled state…well, let’s face it, it sucks…marketers still need to promote their products or services, retailers still need to get coupons into the hands of shoppers, and restaurants still need to get warm, hungry bodies in the seats.  In fact, during these tough times, the urgency for communication of promotions, deals, and offerings are even is even more astute.  But, what’s a marketer to do when faced with a reduced marketing budget and a demand for increased effectiveness from the marketing dollars he or she does spend?

Well, when the market…your market as a business…is lean, it’s about time to lean on mobile marketing.

There are four primary flavors of mobile marketing:

1. SMS or text messaging
2. Mobile web site launch
3. Mobile web advertising
4. Installable branded applications, like on the iPhone

There is substantial data now that shows ALL four of the above methods of mobile marketing to be highly effective…and typically much more effective than comparable marketing efforts using traditional media. In fact, there’s now way too many case studies, research papers and stats to share in a brief blog post; but for instance…

- 90-95% of received text messages are read; more than half within 15 minutes of receipt
- Over 150 million Americans use text messaging on a regular basis…it’s not just a teen thing
- 35% of those receiving a marketing message by text will typically respond to it
- Roughly 40% of U.S. cell phone users now access the mobile web
- Average click-thru rates for mobile web ads range from 7%-15% depending on the ad type
- Mobile applications have been shown to result in a response rate 9 times that of PC based internet advertising, which itself solicits better response rates than traditional media
- 35% of mobile marketing campaigns cost less than $10,000 to execute…actually, the vast majority of them cost less than that with OTAir

Lean times necessitate more effective and more efficient investment of what marketing dollars remain. While mobile is not the perfect solution, nor the only solution, it has the sole, unique position of being personal, instantaneous, multimedia, inexpensive, highly effective, portable, and viral at the same time, while also operating solo or as an integrated medium alongside TV, radio, print, direct mail, outdoor, live event promotions, etc.

The most important requirement for an effective mobile marketing campaign though is appropriate execution, via managed solution, from an experienced mobile solutions provider, with an appropriate understand of both the marketer’s needs, as well as, the target audience preferences. You will find those traits in abundance at OTAir, so please give us a call or fill out our contact form.  We can get you quickly started with a sensible, guided crawl-walk-run approach.