Are You Underestimating Your Mobile Marketing Potential?

Mobile apps and ads only scratch the surface of the future of mobile marketing. For businesses that are ready to exploit that potential, Mobile Marketing: How Mobile Technology is Revolutionizing Marketing, Communications and Advertising, written by expert Daniel Rowles, provides an interesting sneak peak. Along with that sneak peak, “Mobile Marketing” offers strategies for businesses to capitalize on the trends changing the way we interact with screens of every type.

What is Mobile Marketing About?

“Mobile is not a channel like social media, outdoor advertising or search; it is something that impacts all of the other marketing channels, both online and offline.”
– Mobile Marketing

The primary purpose of Mobile Marketing is to break mobile marketing out of its current narrow scope. Rowles’ vision is to help business owners and marketers think bigger. As explored in the book, smart mobile marketing is more than creating a mobile version of your website, an app, getting users signed up to receive a text message, or creating a mobile ad. It includes strategies and tools such as beacons, IM chatbots, virtual reality, mobile search, near-field communications (NFC), and more. Many businesses still hold a narrow view of mobile marketing.

This change in technology will only be useful if marketers can work in a multi-screen and multi-device world. Right now, businesses focus their attention on one screen at a time, the phone (and related devices like the tablet) or the computer. This world view will need to change as the world continues to develop more devices that can access the internet (“smart appliances”, WiFi enabled TV, personal data assistants and more. Businesses will also need to know how to integrate more “off the internet” activities into their marketing efforts. As Rowles points out, consumers don’t often pass neatly through the marketing funnel one stage at a time. Before those customers visit your site on their smartphones, they might check out your website on their laptops, ask friends, write down some information, lose the information and then decide to order your product only after forgetting to buy a holiday gift. Marketers currently don’t have a way to seamlessly combine these experiences yet, although progress is steadily being made.

Marketers don’t, however, need to wait until the right technology comes along. They can get started today with strategies that integrate as much of the marketing funnel as possible. Mobile Marketing shares this information in its “Digital Toolkit” and checklists in the second and third parts of the book. This toolkit and the accompanying checklists help readers test their current mobile marketing practices and refine them so they can develop processes that profit, instead of run from, the unpredictable future of marketing in a multi-screen and multi-device world.

Rowles is a digital marketing trainer, lecturer, author, Course Director of the Chartered Institute of Management, host of the Digital Marketing Podcast, and the CEO of Target Internet. A previous edition of the book Mobile Marketing was selected as a winner of the 2014 Small Business Trends Book Awards in the “Social Media” category.

What Was Best About Mobile Marketing?

Mobile Marketing provides an excellent overview of the technology and psychology of the mobile marketing field. The book provides detailed insight into key areas of the mobile marketing process including Google Analytics, technology, advertising and SMS marketing. These areas are rarely combined in the same book which already makes this source more comprehensive. Rowles takes it a step further by offering strategies and recommendations on how business can leverage options from the future of marketing.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

Mobile Marketing offers incredible insight into the mobile marketing industry. This insight requires some familiarity with mobile marketing. This book won’t take you from a newbie to a marketing guru. Mobile Marketing assumes readers are familiar with tools and strategies like Google Analytics dashboards and email list segmentation. It also assumes readers are more interested in the overall picture of mobile marketing a opposed to looking for a quick “create an app and get rich” scheme.

Why Read Mobile Marketing?

Mobile Marketing offers a much-needed integrated perspective of the field of mobile marketing. Many marketing books remain focused on one device or strategy. While this can be helpful for in-depth knowledge, it doesn’t provide the kind of comprehensive knowledge that marketers will need to thrive in the complex marketing world of the future. It focuses on the future of mobile marketing where every screen (not just phones) offers opportunities for marketers to build and grow their businesses. If you are looking for a book that can demonstrate what this future-oriented perspective might look like, this book is definitely something you should consider reading.

This article, "Are You Underestimating Your Mobile Marketing Potential?" was first published on Small Business Trends