Marketing Management
Unit 6
Mobile Marketing
This is the year of mobile marketing. While still in its infancy, it is an essential marketing piece of most company’s future marketing plans. With mobile advertising, branded mobile apps and mobile marketing apps, businesses will be expected to have a mobile presence in the future.
According to comScore, 65.8 million people in the U.S. now own smart phones. This number will only continue to grow as their popularity and acceptance is rapidly rising. The smart phone is becoming as mainstream and widely accepted as the PC. Companies can no longer afford to ignore this new technology and its great appeal as an additional marketing resource.
We have become a hyper-connected society, bound to our mobile devices and constantly craving fast, up to the minute data. A recent Washington Post article highlights just how rapidly the smart phone market is growing. “Morgan Stanley Internet analyst said she expects smart phone sales will surpass PC and laptop sales in 2012, with more than 450 million units sold. By 2013, smart phone sales will approach 650 million unit sales, Mary Meeker said during a presentation Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In her "State of the Internet" report, Meeker spoke about growth in the smart phone market and its link to social networking sites, as well as about Internet video and advertising. Watch out for mobile growth in China, she said. Its population of smart phone users is relatively nascent, with 14.5 million 3G users, or two percent of the population. That compares with 37 million in the United States. But that population grew by 941 percent in the third quarter compared with one year ago.” The growth rate for mobile devices is 2.5 times that of PC’s.
So with all this mobile smart phone growth comes new opportunity for cost efficient marketing. According to massmailsoftware.com, “The Mobile Marketing Association predicts the global growth of mobile
References: 1. Comscore.com 2. Washingtonpost.com 3. Foursquare