Saturday, February 18, 2012

Utilizing Smart Phones For Business Marketing

Ever experienced going back home just because you left your mobile phone?

Life has never been easier since the advent of mobile phones. This is not only true for handling personal matters but also for business transactions. Executives can receive calls even though they are not at their office; marketing professionals can contact prospects; and procurement can conveniently communicate with suppliers. These were just some of the convenience brought by mobile phones.

As time goes by, technology advances. This just means more and more features that can be utilized to boost marketing efforts for your UK business.

As of Q1 2011, 48% of mobile phones in the UK are smartphones and sales are increasing too at an insane pace. It is not long before the smartphones will not only dominate traditional mobile phones but even make them obsolete.

What does this trend mean to businesses in UK?

It is very clear that marketing directed towards smartphones would definitely reach and penetrate our target market. The next question would be, "How can this be done?"

Here are some of current features of mobile phones and corresponding advantages for business marketing.

Traditional Call and Text

Since almost everyone if not all brings their mobile phones wherever they go, then the best way to reach someone is through his / her mobile phone. Telemarketing and SMS marketing would definitely be useful to reach mobile phones.

You can pro-actively market your business by either cold calling prospects or calling sales leads from marketing companies specializing in lead generation. If you opt for cold calling, you would need a marketing list or marketing database for your target market. There are marketing companies which also offer these databases at low prices.

On the other hand, you might prefer calling leads that are already pre-qualified, interested to know more about your product or service, or interested to avail your products right away. Lead generation companies can help you with sales leads that would suit your ideal target market.

SMS marketing is one cost effective option that can be utilized even by small businesses. At a very minimal cost you can let your market know about the existence of your business, promotional offers that you have, and have continued trade from existing customers. You can either do this in-house or have it outsourced to a marketing company. Doing this in-house would still require you to have marketing lists, SMS marketing system, and a set of personnels that would pull everything together. Another option is to have it outsourced and just sit back while the hot leads roll in from the SMS marketing campaign.

Internet Connectivity

This is one significant revolution in mobile phones. Your target market can now access your site anywhere they are. Features that used to be confined on computers are now literally available at the fingertip. It's just a click away from any smartphone. This just means that investing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Email blast would now yield higher return of investment for the business.

In the a generation where almost everything could be found through search engines like Google, it is very important to have your business listed online and see to it that your website appears on top of your competitors'. This is where SEO comes in. With SEO, you could increase traffic to your website and therefore, making your presence known to those who are looking for your products or services.

On the other hand, why just wait for customers to look for you if you can initiate customer relation by regularly sending something through their email? With features nowadays which integrate email to smartphones, your emails would reach your target market faster and more effectively.

Generally speaking, one of the marketing strategies mentioned above can make a lot of difference for the growth and prosperity of your business but implementing them side-by-side would yield better results because their results reinforce each other.

There's also two (2) ways on how you can implement them. You may choose to gather all necessary resources and implement them on your own or have them done by businesses specializing in marketing. There is no clear answer to which would be a better choice. This would depend on the expertise of your personnel (both on marketing and management), financial limitations, and available resources.

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