Mobile Marketing: The Emerging Platform

The future of marketing has come and it’s mobile. Mobile marketing has been around for quite some time but now it is becoming more and more mainstream thanks to companies like Facebook and Google. It is marketing that appears on apps that are specifically for a mobile device, like a smart phone. Marketing professor Andreas Kapla defines it as “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device.”  It can provide customers time and location sensitive information, and personalized info that promotes services, goods, and ideas that relate to information received from the customers phone. It works by using various apps that have ads exclusively tailored for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. The ads are formatted, and customized with the sole intention of creating a responsive marketing campaign that is mobile.

Try to count how much time you spend on your phone. If you’re like us you use it while you’re waiting in line at the coffee shop, while you wait for a doctors appointment and while you’re bored at work. You could be playing games, on your favorite social networking site or reading the news on your news app. The chances are you have seen countless ads for various products. Companies are becoming more aggressive with their mobile marketing precisely because of how much time people spend on their phones. Facebook alone has over 470 million monthly active mobile app users. An additional 134 million users simply use the mobile web to get their Facebook fix. These numbers are from 2013 and they don’t even include other social networking apps like Twitter and Instagram. A study conducted in the US during December 2013 by The Nielsen Company showed that people use their mobile devices about 34 hours a month. That is about 7 hours more than the 27 hours per month spent on the Internet. These numbers show that more and more people are spending more and more time on their mobile devices. Being able to market to such a huge audience on a continually growing marketing platform is the reason why your company should start thinking about mobile marketing.