Mobile marketing Walking the Extra Mile

During the initial days, mobile marketing was all about ‘push marketing’. It was something like this, as a consumer is taking a lazy walk by a retail stores and it was the time when an advertisement arrives on the handset. It is true that they, who are frequent buyers often, look for certain privileges and offering it to them almost instantly is really a great idea. It was far advanced of time and at that time even the handsets never had the technology to get hold of the particular location. Even if we journey back to a time about 5 years ago, we won’t be able to find all these selected range of service on the cell phone. Today it might be the routine but back those times it was nothing but an imagination difficult to see the light of the day.

Years passed by and as we reached the threshold of 2006, things started turning easy. Both the technology and the mindset of the consumer have reached maturity. This is the time when mobile marketing started getting the proper shape. Companies came forward and made it easy to link the information on the product with the consumers using the mobile directly. The consumers also got the facility to get the access to dial-up information directly to the mobile device and were prompted for a ‘call to action’. It somehow acted as ‘pull marketing’.

Let’s take an instance, suppose, you are the consumer and you are walking past a retain store dealing on electronic gadgets. There you come across an advertisement on the latest range of I-pod. Getting information on it will be very easy for you and you are just required to dial the required no followed by (**) in your handset. Instantly you will get information on the product. At the same time certain information is also provided to the marketer by using protocols such as SS7. It points out the type of the cell phone used, the carrier, the location of the consumer. The dialing sequence in (**) also enables the demographic characteristics of the key and it gets transmitted to the marketer.

It is also during the early years of mobile marketing, it seemed necessary to the marketer to include the URL of their website in every mode of advertisement, such as, print and media. There are three elements that act as the intelligence machines behind the activity of the protocol. They are,

The handset should be discovered: As the user dials the code from the cell phone, it becomes easy for the marketer in determining the type of the phone. Thus, it becomes easy to understand the ability of the phone and then the graphics and texts could be transmitted to the cell phone.

The text should get displayed: The text been sent must get visible in the screen and thus the information of the user will be known.

The location-based services should be enabled: It is not possible to determine the location by using the WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) and SMS (Short Messaging Service). Therefore, the star-star messages and the sequence of the number help in rendering the associated information about the call to the carrier or the marketer. In this case, the physical location is never revealed and the consumer can access the information, which are relevant.