Hi, My name is Liz Maritz from The Net Impact and we’re going to be talking about Mobile Marketing. Mobile marketing is becoming increasingly more important as the size of our TV monitors and computer screens get bigger, and the size of our mobile devices get smaller. A couple of statistics that helped really illustrate this fact are that currently, there are 4 billion mobile phones in the world, and 3 billion of those mobile phones are actually SMS-enabled, which means they have text messaging capabilities. Next, Google has almost a 50% market share with their Android operating system out of all the operating systems that are currently available. What that means is, search is going to be really important for mobile, marketing is going to be really important for mobile, because let’s face it, Google is a huge marketing powerhouse and they’re probably going to continue to have a very strong foothold in search, marketing, and mobile in the future. Our final statistic is that by 2013, it’s projected that mobile search will outnumber the number of desktop searches.

So, you can see that mobile is going to become very, very important and it’s probably, whether you like it or not, going to become a very big part of the business that you’re conducting today and in the future. So, let’s talk a little bit about different ways that you can interact with mobile marketing strategy or campaign. First of all, you have the option to build a mobile application. You also have the option to build a mobile website and we’ll talk about the difference between those two things in just a minute. And then you have a more open-ended option, which is to just conduct a mobile marketing campaign and that’s a much more broad concept. So, what exactly is the difference between a mobile marketing application, a mobile… I’m sorry, a mobile application, a mobile website, and a mobile marketing campaign? Well, first of all, a mobile application is an application that is built for your phone’s operating system to integrate with that operating system.

So it has a lot of functionality that you can pull from your phone, and it integrates with your phone seamlessly. So what that gives you is a lot more functionality, and it allows your users to do a lot more of things like GPS and phone alerts. A mobile website is a little bit more simple of a concept. What a mobile website does is essentially renders a website that’s hosted online on your phone. So you actually have to access a mobile website through your phone’s browser. But, one of the advantages of modern website development is that you can actually make a website look a lot like a mobile application. And a lot of smart companies are doing this so that users will interact with their websites a lot more, and they are getting a lot of value out of these mobile websites. The downside is that you don’t have that seamless integration with your phone’s operating system.

But, the cost of development is also a little bit lower for mobile websites as well. Finally, you have this broad concept of mobile marketing campaigns, and I wish I could define what a mobile marketing campaign is, but really, that’s up to you. There are lots of different things you can do with a mobile marketing campaign. You can have a QR code integrated with a print campaign. You can actually develop a mobile app or a mobile marketing website to integrate with your marketing campaign.

There are so many different options, but just because you don’t have a mobile application or you don’t have a mobile website doesn’t mean that you cannot conduct a really effective mobile marketing campaign. Just to revisit those statistics, 3 billion users in the United States have SMS-enabled phones, so text messaging could be a huge campaign for you in the future. The next question we’ll answer is “How mobile?” How exactly does mobile work and how does it integrate with your application or website? So this is a little higher tech, but what you have is you have a satellite system especially, when you have GPS enabled with your mobile application. You have a satellite system that connects into your GPS if you have that, if that’s a component of your application, and then that will communicate back and forth with your mobile device. That mobile device then sends information back and forth to the cloud, and the cloud will call upon a web service to store information there. The web service is talking back and forth with your database that has all the information that you want to render on your phone.

So I know that’s a really high tech explanation, and you’re probably wondering how your information gets to your phone through this system. A database can be connected to a website, it can be connected to a server that you have, and that will send information eventually up to your mobile device to render on your mobile device. Now, if you’re looking to do something like a mobile marketing campaign, there are tons of different ways that this system could work for you, tons of different executions, and that’s really up to you.

And one of the things that we love to do at the Net Impact is we love developing mobile marketing campaigns, we love developing mobile apps. So we’re happy to answer any questions that you have about mobile marketing or mobile development, and we actually have a mobile development partner, Unidev, that can develop for any mobile operating system or any website computer program that you’d like. We’d be happy to talk to you and that is mobile marketing and development..

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