In marketing, the here and now is usually not the major concern of the marketer, but rather the future presents itself as the most important frame of time to focus on. Everything that marketers are doing now is for results in the future. It is because of this that we always want to know what everyone has to say about days to come.
Mobile marketing is often referred to as the future of marketing. People say that it will eventually be the only way to see the highest results possible. Mobile has been growing recently, but is it at the level quite yet that we can say that without mobile, you are a goner?
Well, it just so happens that the New Year is upon us, and we are all flipping to January 2013 on our company calendars. With 2013, there are high hopes for mobile platforms in the marketing world. In fact, Mobile Marketing Watch, a marketing news site that exclusively covers mobile news, has posted an article recently, detailing what we might expect for mobile in our very near future.
In the article, an independent mobile marketing consultant who used to work with eCommerce Connections, named Ian Hayes, tells Mobile Marketing Watch the following bits of information in an interview with the news channel:
“Mobile marketing will see unprecedented growth next year. Many of the large and mid-sized brands that have stayed out of mobile for whatever reason will finally get off the fence and jump into the deep end. In particular, the expansion of location based mobile marketing might very well steal the show. All facets of mobile marketing are moving toward local – if not hyper-local. It’s going to be huge.”
The article also mentions a company called FunMobility, which has released a report telling marketers what they can expect of mobile in the coming year. In their report, a list of coming trends is provided. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, here are those trends.
- The Rise of HTML5 and Hybrid Apps
- Marketers Will Create Apps, Too!
- Mobile Coupons Will Go Mainstream
- Use of location based mobile marketing will increase
- Push Notifications will rival email
If anything can be considered very close to a sure thing after hearing predictions from both Ian Hayes and FunMobility, it is that location based mobile marketing will be used quite heavily in the coming year. It is easy to see how this prediction came to be, as the popularity of location marketing in mobile has already been growing rapidly. Mobile devices lend marketers more freedom in geotargeting capabilities than has ever been seen before.
Of course, even though these professional predictions often hold a lot of truth when the time comes, no one can really be sure how the year will turn out. One this is for sure, though, and that is mobile will be getting a lot stronger, and innovations will continue, if not speed up. Mobile’s growth is nowhere near finished, and we will see ample evidence of that in the coming year.
