Mobile marketing is a multi-channel online marketing technique focused at reaching a specific audience on their smartphones, feature phones, tablets, or any other related devices through websites, e-mail, SMS and MMS, social media, or mobile applications.^[1] Mobile marketing can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes goods, services, appointment reminders and ideas.^[2] In a more theoretical manner, academic Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing as "any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device".^[3]

SMS marketing

Marketing through cellphones' SMS (Short Message Service) became increasingly popular in the early 2000s in Europe and some parts of Asia when businesses started to collect mobile phone numbers and send off wanted (or unwanted) content. On average, SMS messages have a 98% open rate and are read within 3 minutes, making them highly effective at reaching recipients quickly.^[4]

Over the past few years, SMS marketing has become a legitimate advertising channel in some parts of the world. This is because unlike email over the public internet, the carriers who police their own networks have set guidelines and best practices for the mobile media industry (including mobile advertising). The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), as well, have established guidelines and are evangelizing the use of the mobile channel for marketers. While this has been fruitful in developed regions such as North America, Western Europe and some other countries, mobile SPAM messages (SMS sent to mobile subscribers without a legitimate and explicit opt-in by the subscriber) remain an issue in many other parts of the world, partly due to the carriers selling their member databases to third parties. In India, however, the government's efforts to create the National Do Not Call Registry have helped cellphone users to stop SMS advertisements by sending a simple SMS or calling 1909.^[5]

Mobile marketing approaches through SMS have expanded rapidly in Europe and Asia as a new channel to reach the consumer. SMS initially received negative media coverage in many parts of Europe for being a new form of spam as some advertisers purchased lists and sent unsolicited content to consumer's phones; however, as guidelines are put in place by the mobile operators, SMS has become the most popular branch of the Mobile Marketing industry with several 100 million advertising SMS sent out every month in Europe alone. This is thanks in part to SMS messages being hardware agnostic—they can be delivered to practically any mobile phone, smartphone or feature phone and accessed without a Wi-Fi or mobile data connection. This is important to note since there were over 5 billion unique mobile phone subscribers worldwide in 2017, which is about 66% of the world population.^[6]

However, nowadays, the mobile phone has become a focal device in people’s lives, and manly people cannot live without it. These advanced mobile technologies bring people more business opportunities that connect business people and consumers at any time and place. Because of this, digital marketing has become more essential, and mobile marketing is one of the newest digital marketing channels that people are considering; it can get information about the features of goods that people like without the need for buyers to go to the actual store.^[7]

SMS marketing has both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing focuses on lead generation, and outbound marketing focuses on sending messages for sales, promotions, contests, donations, television program voting, appointment and event reminders.

There are 5 key components to SMS marketing: sender ID, message size, content structure, spam compliance, and message delivery.

MMS

MMS mobile marketing can contain a timed slideshow of images, text, audio and video. This mobile content is delivered via MMS (Multimedia Message Service). Nearly all new phones produced with a color screen are capable of sending and receiving standard MMS message. Brands are able to both send (mobile terminated) and receive (mobile originated) rich content through MMS A2P (application-to-person) mobile networks to mobile subscribers. In some networks, brands are also able to sponsor messages that are sent P2P (person-to-person).

A typical MMS message based on the GSM encoding can have up to 1500 characters, whereas one based on Unicode can have up to 500 characters.^[19] Messages that are longer than the limit are truncated and not concatenated like an SMS.

Good examples of mobile-originated MMS marketing campaigns are Motorola's ongoing campaigns at House of Blues venues, where the brand allows the consumer to send their mobile photos to the LED board in real-time as well as blog their images online.

Push notifications

Push notifications were first introduced to smartphones by Apple with the Push Notification Service in 2009.^[20] For Android devices, Google developed Android Cloud to Messaging or C2DM in 2010. Google replaced this service with Google Cloud Messaging in 2013.^[21] Commonly referred to as GCM, Google Cloud Messaging served as C2DM's successor, making improvements to authentication and delivery, new API endpoints and messaging parameters, and the removal of limitations on API send-rates and message sizes. It is a message that pops up on a mobile device. It is the delivery of information from a software application to a computing device without any request from the client or the user. They look like SMS notifications but they reach only the users who installed the app. The specifications vary for iOS and Android users. SMS and push notifications can be part of a well-developed inbound mobile marketing strategy.

According to mobile marketing company Leanplum, Android sees open rates nearly twice as high as those on iOS. Android sees open rates of 3.48 percent for push notification, versus iOS which has open rates of 1.77 percent.^[22]

App-based marketing

With the strong growth in the use of smartphones, app usage has also greatly increased. The annual number of mobile app downloads over the last few years has exponentially grown, with hundreds of billions of downloads in 2018, and the number of downloads expecting to climb by 2022.^[23] Therefore, mobile marketers have increasingly taken advantage of smartphone apps as a marketing resource. Marketers aim to optimize the visibility of an app in a store, which will maximize the number of downloads. This practice is called App Store Optimization (ASO).

There is a lot of competition^[24] in this field as well. However, just like other services, it is not easy anymore to rule the mobile application market. Most companies have acknowledged the potential of Mobile Apps to increase the interaction between a company and its target customers. With the fast progress and growth of the smartphone market, high-quality Mobile app development is essential to obtain a strong position in a mobile app store.

The term app marketing has not yet been defined in a unified scientific definition and is also used in various ways in practice. The term refers on the one hand to those activities that serve to generate app downloads and thus attract new users for a mobile app. In some cases, the term is also used to describe the promotional sending of push notifications and in-app messages.^[25]

Here are several models for App marketing.

1. Content embedded mode For the most part at present, the downloading APP from APP store is free, for APP development enterprise, need a way to flow to liquidate, implantable advertising and APP combines content marketing and game characters to seamlessly integrating user experience, so as to improve advertising hits.^[26] With these free downloading apps, developers use in-app purchases or subscription to profit.^[27]

2. Advertising model advertisement implantation mode is a common marketing mode in most APP applications. Through Banner ads, consumer announcements, or in-screen advertising, users will jump to the specified page and display the advertising content when users click. This model is more intuitive, and can attract users' attention quickly.

3. User participation mode is mainly applied to website transplantation and brand APP. The company publishes its own brand APP to the APP store for users to download, so that users can intuitively understand the enterprise or product information better. As a practical tool, this APP brings great convenience to users' life. User reference mode enables users to have a more intimate experience, so that users can understand the product, enhance the brand image of the enterprise, and seize the user's heart.

4. The shopping website embedded mode is the traditional Internet electric business offering platforms in the mobile APP, which is convenient for users to browse commodity information anytime and anywhere, order to purchase and order tracking. This model has promoted the transformation of traditional e-commerce enterprises from shopping to mobile Internet channels, which is a necessary way to use mobile APP for online and offline interactive development, such as Amazon, eBay and so on. The above several patterns for the more popular marketing methods, as for the details while are not mentioned too much, but the hope can help you to APP marketing have a preliminary understanding, and on the road more walk more far in the marketing.^[26]

In-game mobile marketing

There are essentially three major trends in mobile gaming right now: interactive real-time 3D games, massive multi-player games and social networking games. This means a trend towards more complex and more sophisticated, richer game play. On the other side, there are the so-called casual games, i.e. games that are very simple and very easy to play. Most mobile games today are such casual games and this will probably stay so for quite a while to come.

Brands are now delivering promotional messages within mobile games or sponsoring entire games to drive consumer engagement. This is known as mobile advergaming or ad-funded mobile game.

In in-game mobile marketing, advertisers pay to have their name or products featured in the mobile games. For instance, racing games can feature real cars made by Ford or Chevy. Advertisers have been both creative and aggressive in their attempts to integrate ads organically in the mobile games.

Although investment in mobile marketing strategies like advergaming is slightly more expensive than what is intended for a mobile app, a good strategy can make the brand derive a substantial revenue. Games that use advergaming make the users remember better the brand involved. This memorization increases virality of the content so that the users tend to recommend them to their friends and acquaintances, and share them via social networks.^[28]

One form of in-game mobile advertising is what allows players to actually play. As a new and effective form of advertising, it allows consumers to try out the content before they actually install it. This type of marketing can also really attract the attention of users like casual players. These advertising blur the lines between game and advertising, and provide players with a richer experience that allows them to spend their precious time interacting with advertising.

This kind of advertisement is not only interesting, but also brings some benefits to marketers. As this kind of in-gaming mobile marketing can create more effective conversion rates because they are interactive and have faster conversion speeds than general advertising. Moreover, games can also offer a stronger lifetime value. They measure the quality of the consumer in advance to provide some more in-depth experience. So this type of advertising can be more effective in improving user stickiness than advertising channels such as stories and video.^[29]

Bluetooth

Bluetooth technology is a wireless short range digital communication that allows devices to communicate without the now superseded RS-232 cables.^[30]

Proximity systems

Mobile marketing via proximity systems, or proximity marketing, relies on GSM 03.41 which defines the Short Message Service - Cell Broadcast.^[31] SMS-CB allows messages (such as advertising or public information) to be broadcast to all mobile users in a specified geographical area. In the Philippines, GSM-based proximity broadcast systems are used by select Government Agencies for information dissemination on Government-run community-based programs to take advantage of its reach and popularity (Philippines has the world's highest traffic of SMS). It is also used for commercial service known as Proxima SMS. Bluewater, a super-regional shopping center in the UK, has a GSM based system supplied by NTL to help its GSM coverage for calls, it also allows each customer with a mobile phone to be tracked though the center which shops they go into and for how long. The system enables special offer texts to be sent to the phone. For example, a retailer could send a mobile text message to those customers in their database who have opted-in, who happen to be walking in a mall. That message could say "Save 50% in the next 5 minutes only when you purchase from our store." Snacks company, Mondelez International, makers of Cadbury and Oreo products has committed to exploring proximity-based messaging citing significant gains in point-of-purchase influence.^[32]

Location-based services

Location-based services (LBS) are offered by some cell phone networks as a way to send custom advertising and other information to cell-phone subscribers based on their current location. The cell-phone service provider gets the location from a GPS chip built into the phone, or using radiolocation and trilateration based on the signal-strength of the closest cell-phone towers (for phones without GPS features). In the United Kingdom, which launched location-based services in 2003, networks do not use trilateration; LBS uses a single base station, with a "radius" of inaccuracy, to determine a phone's location.

Some location-based services work without GPS tracking technique, instead transmitting content between devices peer-to-peer.

There are various methods for companies to utilize a device's location.^[33]

1.Store locators.

Utilizing the location-based feedback, the nearest store location can be found rapidly by retail clients.

2.Proximity-based marketing.

Companies can deliver advertisements merely to individuals in the same geographical location.

Location-based services send advertisements prospective customers of the area who may truly take action on the information.

3.Travel information.

Location-based services can provide actual time information for the smartphones, such as traffic condition and weather forecast, then the customers can make the plan.

4.Roadside assistance.

In the event of sudden traffic accidents, the roadside assistance company can develop an app to track the customer's real-time location without navigation.

Ringless voicemail

The advancement of mobile technologies has allowed the ability to leave a voice mail message on a mobile phone without ringing the line. The technology was pioneered by VoAPP, which used the technology in conjunction with live operators as a debt collection service. The FCC has ruled that the technology is compliant with all regulations.^[34] CPL expanded on the existing technology to allow for a completely automated process including the replacement of live operators with pre recorded messages.

User-controlled media

Mobile marketing differs from most other forms of marketing communication in that it is often user (consumer) initiated (mobile originated, or MO) message, and requires the express consent of the consumer to receive future communications. A call delivered from a server (business) to a user (consumer) is called a mobile terminated (MT) message. This infrastructure points to a trend set by mobile marketing of consumer controlled marketing communications.^[35]

Due to the demands for more user controlled media, mobile messaging infrastructure providers have responded by developing architectures that offer applications to operators with more freedom for the users, as opposed to the network-controlled media. Along with these advances to user-controlled Mobile Messaging 2.0, blog events throughout the world have been implemented in order to launch popularity in the latest advances in mobile technology. In June 2007, Airwide Solutions became the official sponsor for the Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog that provides the opinions of many through the discussion of mobility with freedom.^[36]

GPS plays an important role in location-based marketing.^[37]

Privacy concerns

Mobile advertising has become more and more popular. However, some mobile advertising is sent without a required permission from the consumer causing privacy violations. It should be understood that irrespective of how well advertising messages are designed and how many additional possibilities they provide, if consumers do not have confidence that their privacy will be protected, this will hinder their widespread deployment.^[38] But if the messages originate from a source where the user is enrolled in a relationship/loyalty program, privacy is not considered violated and even interruptions can generate goodwill.^[39]

The privacy issue became even more salient as it was before with the arrival of mobile data networks. A number of important new concerns emerged mainly stemming from the fact that mobile devices are intimately personal^[40] and are always with the user, and four major concerns can be identified: mobile spam, personal identification, location information and wireless security.^[41] Aggregate presence of mobile phone users could be tracked in a privacy-preserving fashion.^[42]

Classification

Kaplan categorizes mobile marketing along the degree of consumer knowledge and the trigger of communication into four groups: strangers, groupies, victims, and patrons. Consumer knowledge can be high or low and according to its degree organizations can customize their messages to each individual user, similar to the idea of one-to-one marketing. Regarding the trigger of communication, Kaplan differentiates between push communication, initiated by the organization, and pull communication, initiated by the consumer. Within the first group (low knowledge/push), organizations broadcast a general message to a large number of mobile users. Given that the organization cannot know which customers have ultimately been reached by the message, this group is referred to as "strangers". Within the second group (low knowledge/pull), customers opt to receive information but do not identify themselves when doing so. The organizations therefore does not know which specific clients it is dealing with exactly, which is why this cohort is called "groupies". In the third group (high knowledge/push) referred to as "victims", organizations know their customers and can send them messages and information without first asking permission. The last group (high knowledge/pull), the "patrons" covers situations where customers actively give permission to be contacted and provide personal information about themselves, which allows for one-to-one communication without running the risk of annoying them.^[43]

References