Clamor for mobile marketing begins - from Mobile Marketer

Six weeks into 2011 and it is very clear that the high-stakes sprint to do all things mobile is off and running in an immense way.

If 2010 was a marathon, a long endurance race with only a few winners making it to the finish line, this year’s starting block includes marketers of every size and liquidity – aggregators, developers, networks, agencies, location-services and chancers – all clamoring to get to the front of the line.

My question is this: What took you all so long?

The short answer is a combination of marketers’ aversion to risk and a bit of follow-the-herd mentality thrown in.

While the traders over on Wall Street took risks aplenty with our money, marketers, it seems, were waiting for others to take the first few giant steps.

The long answer, below, is, well, long.

Adding new dimensions to mobile
Last year clearly demonstrated that mobile marketing was no longer a one-horse or single-dimensional player. It began to, and now is, playing a significant role in many multichannel campaigns, fundamentally reshaping the dynamics of interactive marketing in the process.

Here are some recent numbers if you do not believe me:

- Mobile marketing spend will top $1 billion in 2011, according to Forrester Research

- Nearly half of smartphone users say they have already, or soon will, use their phones to do mobile shopping. Fifty-three percent also use, or intend to use, their smartphones for mobile banking, per ABI Research

- There will be an estimated 1.8 billion Internet-enabled mobile phones in use around the world by 2013, and 91 percent of all U.S. consumers already own and use a mobile device, according to Modus Associates

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Location-based marketing is poised for growth

Executive summaries of industry research reports are not necessarily documents one expects to mine for great writing.

But I came across the following sentence good enough to “borrow” in a recent report by market researcher Borrell Associates:

“Mobile marketing is where Web marketing was in about 1996: plenty of excitement, lots of experiments, general agreement that it will be Really Big, but not much data to provide visibility into how it will all unfold.”

OK, maybe it is not Hemingway, but I thought it was spot-on.

Locating potential
I also thought this sentiment was particularly apt for location-based mobile marketing and advertising, which this publication and others has been touting as the next big thing in the mobile landscape for some time.

Now, with the news awash in reports of Starbucks and L’Oreal entering into a six-month trial with O2’s location-based mobile advertising service, it seems like location-based marketing is finally starting to unfold.

Starbucks and L’Oreal: that is big. But is it the Really Big that we are talking about? And if not, what will it take to get there?

The fact that these brands are gearing up to participate in location-based marketing is indicative of the strategy’s potential.

Certainly, this potential has driven interest in location-based marketing since technology first enabled the prospect of it.

Reaching consumers where they are most likely to commit to a purchase, at the precise time they are in the proximity? And circumventing the time and distance inherent to most traditional marketing and advertising which targets consumers mostly in the home?

Why would marketers not jump at that opportunity?

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