All aboard the Successful Mobile Marketing Train! April 20, 2012 - 10:59 am CST Today people are doing more than you would have dreamed possible with their cell phones. Smart phones keep getting more and more popular, and their capabilities are growing, almost as fast. If you are running a business, you owe it to yourself to investigate how you can make these, ever more common phones, work for you. Use proper grammar and spelling when working with mobile marketing. It is ok for a 13 year old to use abbreviations in her texts with her friends; it is not ok for a professional business to use expressions like OMG or L8ER. Also try to limit the use of caps unless it is really called for as in a call to action for immediate response. Make unsubscribing to your text messages or e-mails an easy and painless process. Remember that just because a customer is unsubscribing to your messages does not mean they no longer wish to be your customer. If you make unsubscribing a difficult or impossible task, your customers will lose respect for your company or brand. Approach your text-based mobile advertising as you would billboard advertising, short and simple. Remember, you are reaching people that are not only using mobile devices, but are more than likely mobile themselves! They are on the move and their focus for any marketing message is fleeting at best. Think of it like you have two seconds to persuade your reader, much like trying to reach a driver passing by a billboard at sixty miles per hour. Get the point across quickly and avoid long copy. As an internet marketer in general, you need to understand one point about the business: Mobile marketing isn't just an option, it's actually a necessity. Mobile aps have experienced over 200% growth in recent years, making this industry one of the fastest-growing on the planet in the past few decades. You need to consider going mobile if you haven't gone already. If you are making use of mobile marketing - send an occasional reminder message! If you have some sort of event coming up, you should remind your customers a few days ahead of time, as well as the day of the event itself. Customers are busy people, and may forget what they had wanted to do without a reminder from you. Be sure to let the recipient know who you are and what you offer right up front. If they question who you are and what it is that you are offering to them, you are going to have a difficult time trying to get them to invest any of their money into what it is that you are offering. Work on your message composition. You can only use 160 characters, so be concise, but clear. Short cuts or "text speak" is acceptable when text messaging. Your opt-out message can include that kind of message, too. You can save characters this way. You can get some good ideas from some translators. Decide now whether you're going to use QR or 2D codes in your mobile campaign. Your audience may not understand how to leverage certain technology out there, so you need to ensure that you're going with something current, popular and people-friendly. You're marketing to basic folks; not everyone will be tech-savvy. When sending messages, do not at any costs use text abbreviations or all capital letters when making an emphasis. Doing so will make you have an unprofessional appearance in the eyes of your customers, which is the last thing you want to do when you are selling goods and services. Only add telephone numbers from customers choosing to receive messages to build your mobile marketing database carefully. If you add telephone numbers of customers who have not elected to receive mobile marketing messages, you are likely to see a high volume of complaints and requests to be removed from your list. These are just a few of the ways that you can turn the omnipresence of smart phones to your advantage as a business owner. Having a phone-friendly marketing strategy is the same today as an internet marketing strategy was ten years ago. Mobile marketing is a burgeoning field. If you get into it now, you can start reaping the rewards that much faster.