By John Giles
New mobile marketing tools are giving businesses innovative ways to immediately interact with their customers and gain a competitive edge. By integrating mobile marketing with traditional print and broadcast vehicles, companies can make their marketing message more effective. Now businesses have access to the tools that can put text and video directly into the customers’ hands instantaneously.
Mobile marketing is growing because of the growth in smartphone use. Smartphones, with their built-in applications and Internet access, are changing the way consumers search the Internet for information about products and services. As of July 2011, 40 percent of adult U.S. mobile phone owners will use a smartphone, and that number is expected to climb above 50 percent in 2012. The majority of smartphone users frequently browse the Internet and almost all are using smartphones to quickly search for local information.
These statistics are causing businesses to rethink their Internet marketing strategy when reaching out to customers. If a smartphone search takes a user to a Web site designed for a desktop computer, it will be too small and cumbersome on the smartphone screen to be of any value. Smartphone users want instant access to an interactive site that will give them the information they want immediately. Businesses will have to develop these Web sites specifically to interface with smartphone users.
The goal of a mobile site is to cut through the Internet clutter and get consumers the right information fast. The mobile sites make input as simple as possible by using buttons or selection methods. Businesses are using mobile sites to provide product and ordering information, easy telephone and e-mail connections, videos, coupons and discounts, direction information and instant access to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Mobile sites rely more on interactivity than a traditional Web site.
QR codes are one way to drive customers to a smartphone site. A two-dimensional bar code, QR codes send users to specific mobile or desktop online landing pages when scanned by a smartphone. Businesses are integrating QR codes with their print collateral to push viewers toward their mobile sites. You see QR codes in department stores to direct users toward discount coupons or additional product information and in magazine and newspaper ads to send viewers to additional information. Some businesses use QR codes to direct viewers from a static printed page to an online video. The printed page is no longer static when linked by a QR code to the Internet.
Another marketing application quickly being adopted on smartphones is Augmented Reality (AR) codes. Augmented reality use smartphone cameras to provide a view of the physical, real-world environment whose elements have been augmented by computer-generated input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Computerized elements such as graphics or text are overlaid on top of a real-time video or other real-world display to provide additional information to the viewer. Hallmark now offers webcam greeting cards that use AR technology to make animation come alive on the computer screen.
Smartphones are already adding AR applications. A user can aim the smartphone’s camera at a city street and an overlay of additional information explodes on the screen similar to the information that pops up on a jet fighter’s cockpit. The iPhone has a free AR app to use when visiting the Statue of Liberty in New York. With the right AR app, you can aim the smartphone camera at a business card and images will appear and speak on the screen in 3-D much like the hologram of Princess Leia in “Star Wars.” The marketing possibilities are endless.
Smartphones, with their QR codes and AR technology, have created a new, fast growing vehicle for businesses to broadcast their message and interact with their customers. Businesses need to begin today to take advantage of the unique opportunity that smartphones provide to promote their products and services.
