Mobile marketing is not the same thing as a mobile website. Mobile advertising is advertising on or with a mobile device (or what Wikipedia haughtily calls “horizontal telecommunication convergence”), while mobi sites supply advertising to mobiles and other portable devices. The .mobi domain is customised for viewing advertising via cell phones, but like a .co.za or .com domain, it’s accessible via your PC. Contact Purple Cow to find out more about mobile marketing and marketing via mobi sites, where information is quick and salient.
Mobile marketing – leap the divide
Mobile marketing comes in various forms, including banners, text and multimedia messages, ring tones, wallpapers and mobile search. Because the cell phone is personal, highly accessible and dynamic, it’s an excellent marketing carrier.
But mobile users don’t want to be crushed under a load of advertising, especially if it hasn’t successfully leapt the technological divide. Thus mobile marketing should be summarised information that’s easy to download.
Mobile users generally seek contact and account details, tracking for their packages purchase or quotation forms. In other words, mobile advertising offers consumers the ability to make decisions. And this extended reach gives businesses the chance to get to know their customers.
.mobi – stay in touch
Not to be confused with WAP (which is a version of HTML adapted for phones), .mobi is a domain that is used for mobile sites. The advantages are numerous:
- you can extend your customer base to include over 50 million SA connections (as of 2008 – according to World Wide Worx’s research);
- you can expose your customers to one-click navigation with clear, punchy messages; you can reach a younger generation – the kind that shares YouTube videos and Twitters on the move – exposing your brand to new possibilities;
- your site is easily guessable as “yourbusiness.mobi”;
- and you will benefit from South Africa’s .mobi-savvy population, which in part has been created as a result of high Internet rates.
Matthew Buckland, GM of publishing and social media at 24.com, comments on his blog: “There is every indication that the gap [between mobile and PC] will grow bigger, given the reach and penetration rates of mobile phones, and the paradoxical situation whereby mobile Internet access is amongst the world’s cheapest here, yet traditional desktop Internet access is among the world’s most expensive.”
Mobile search – the next level
The Kelsey Group, a market research firm, has suggested that mobile search will take mobile marketing to the next level, snatching 73 percent of the market share by 2013, and crowding out SMS and display advertising. If you think about it, searching for advertising that is related to targeted keywords is convenient, and searchers are more likely to interact with it than with advertising that is unrelated to their interests.
Arthur Goldstuck picks up the subject in his Mobility 2009 report, saying that “it is not only the number of cellular connections that is growing, but also the applications for which subscribers are using their smartphones. Mobility is changing people’s personal and business lives by allowing them to stay in touch with information, applications and other people, wherever they are.”
Not only are people searching for a wide range of topics and interests, but they’re getting better at it. And so should you. Contact Purple Cow today for more information about .mobi domains, mobile marketing or mobile search.