Small Business Mobile Marketing – The Time is Now!

Smartphones are everywhere. One might say the spotting of a non-Smartphone is a rare event, similar to the spotting of a hand held CD player; it just doesn’t happen often. As of December 2011, there were over 140,000,000 Smartphones actively in use in the United States. In true marketing fashion, new techniques have emerged to reach Smartphone users. We’re talking Apps, text message campaigns, mobile websites, and location-based marketing. What we’ve seen emerge is now known as “The Mobile Internet.”

The mobile internet is the formatting of the internet reserved for Smartphones and other devices like tablets, PDAs, etc. Equipped with a Google Search App or something similar, Smartphone users are able to simply speak a question into the Google search and be supplied with the same answers you’d find on your laptop. Whether the search is intended to settle a bet as to when the movie “Titanic” came out, or to frantically look up the location of your doctor’s office for an appointment for which you are very tardy, the mobile internet is a new necessity.

The Mobile Internet

Similar to the internet you can reach via your desktop or laptop computer, the mobile internet is able to pull information from all around the world and deliver it directly to your fingertips. Dis-similarly, the mobile internet is a more condensed version of the internet. You’ll likely have noticed the difference between surfing the web on your computer versus your phone – you’ve probably noticed it’s often pretty slow to load on your phone. Well, web developers have come up with a simple answer for that, mobile enabled websites.

Mobile Websites

Mobile sites are specifically designed to fit on the much smaller screen of a mobile device as well as drastically de-clutter the screen. These sites are much more quick to load than a conventional webpage because they contain far less superfluous content and in doing so, they are far easier to navigate. Typically the information is just about the equivalent to the conventional website only organized differently so that graphics, texts and links are easier to navigate.

Mobile sites have been on the radar of big retailers and other large web-present sites for some time. The WP Mobile Detector is a premium WordPress plugin that will mobilize your blog in minutes giving your users a mobile friendly website. For sites like Target or Amazon, a Smartphone user loading one of these sites will automatically be redirected to the mobile versions of their websites seamlessly. The necessities of the sites are broken down to locations, special promotions and of course shopping!

Smaller businesses are asking their customers or fans to sign up for text message alerts. Through this service, a company is able to push a mass text message to those signed up, frequently containing a special offer or a link to a landing page with an offer or announcement.

The latest way to reach a mobile site is by the use of a QR Code. You’ve likely seen these small, square, multi-directional bar-code boxes on different types of advertisements. With a Smartphone, this QR Code can be scanned with the phone’s camera and will redirect the user to a mobile site. This allows shoppers or passers-by to obtain immediate information about your product or service directly on their phone. It’s a pretty cool feature.

This is undoubtedly the age of technology, and the rate of technological progress is moving along quickly, which is pretty much as fast as consumers like their information. The use of the mobile internet and the enabling of mobile website services will make any company that much more web-relevant and thereby more valuable to consumers. Mobile enabling a website is typically available for a small fee, and it’s definitely worth the price to keep customers navigating your page.