Forward Thinking Online Marketing

Advertising by creating a promotional app was hot in 2011 and will likely continue into 2012 as app development becomes more sophisticated. Looking forward .....

Advertising by creating a promotional app was hot in 2011 and will likely continue into 2012 as app development becomes more sophisticated. Looking forward through 2012 and perhaps into 2013 (presuming we live through the Mayan apocalypse), what new advertising methods are showing promise and can we expect to see in mobile marketing?

Norman Rockwell documented American life through his Saturday Evening Post paintings from home scenes, to racial tension, to women war workers. Those images remind us of a bygone era, though you can probably imagine an updated version of the once-modern family consuming advertisements through television commercial, magazine display or newspaper ad. Smart phones and tablet computing have turned the quaint notion of a static customer into a Norman Rockwell scene.

The statistics confirming our rising use of everything mobile are staggering and leading industry experts concur: We ain’t seen nothing yet.

The rise of mobile has given way to new distribution models for advertising. Mobile ads now encompass SMS marketing, QR codes, and mobile apps.

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Your carefully crafted email advertising is increasingly received — and deleted, unopened — on a smart phone. Yet, according to Mashable.com, 98 percent of cell phones sold in the US are SMS-capable and 90 percent of the population own cell phones. More importantly, the recipients read 99 percent of text messages with 90 percent read within three minutes of their receipt. SMS Marketing has a huge potential to reach customers immediately and with almost total coverage. There are caveats to this potential goldmine. The FCC prohibits mass text messages and Melinda Krueger of MobileMarketer.com warns that misuse or overuse of text message marketing could result in a “do not text” list.

Smart phones have not yet taken over the market, but they are paced to do so. The growth of mobile Internet and phones with sound and video capabilities tends to be the focus of most industry experts’ predictions. Reportedly, 60 percent of mobile web users reported difficulties in loading or accessing websites, with slow loading the most common complaint. In many cases, mobile versions of online sites still remain in development or provide less than a stellar experience for the user. Once these kinks are ironed out, however, projections appear to call for changes akin to Dorothy and Toto going from black-and-white to color.

There do remain differences in opinion as to which direction — apps or online sites — will be the predominant focus of mobile marketing. Apple is said to be betting on the apps use and has beefed up iTunes as more than music source to handle the volume. For the huge population that web developers often overlook, those that don’t live in a Wi-Fi tower or 4G wonderland, the choice will be simple: pick whatever loads fastest.

QR codes seem to remain at the periphery of the action. First, the majority of cell phones are still not smart phones capable of reading and processing these images and secondly, they’ve arrived without any identifying fad to push them along. Their potential to “attack tag” smart phones and their data when designed with evil intent hasn’t helped matters. Finally, the continued “local” focus via GPS will continue to offer users site-specific information whether used with apps or Internet access.

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