That was the heading on a US mobile vendor website. It seems text-messaging, or SMS usage is on the rise while legitimate email usage is falling. Far more mobile phones than personal computers are sold around the world and these devices are getting smarter, gradually taking over tasks once done on a PC, and it seems, reducing our reliance upon email…

Certainly mobile marketing represents immense opportunities. It is not as saturated, wasteful or as inefficient as email with all it’s spam and delivery issues.  It’s growing really fast too, especially with the younger consumer market. They are clearly glued to their mobiles and use it ahead of everything else, including their laptop, which is simply a device to help them with their studies or homework. It’s only us older (30+) people who are still glued to the larger screens and constantly checking our email.

It’s only us older folks who still spend time viewing the larger screen and checking our email.

Where to Start?

For eager marketers, the key issue is how to use mobile effectively to communicate your message? You can’t just go out and buy a mobile phone list like you can a direct mail list. And even if you do get a decent list, you can’t actually do a bulk communication without incurring a huge amount of planning, effort and expense. Working with a traditional advertising agency and mobile provider to set up an approved mobile marketing campaign or promotion can cost thousands.

But this is thinking about it from an old-fashioned agency and communications provider perspective. i.e. thinking about campaigns, design, branding, offers, delivery etc. It suddenly gets very complicated. Why is this? Well, traditionalists see mobile simply as another media ‘channel’ that needs to be tamed and molded. They have a mass market, interruption-based mindset. But these old fashioned ‘push’ marketing strategies don’t work as well with the young or on mobile.

Because of this, it’s not this creative sector that are really succeeding with mobile marketing overseas, but small entrepreneurial companies with a clearer understanding and vision of this new world order. And they’re making simple, quick and cheap too…

In part 2 we’ll see how it’s being done by these new industry leaders…