6. Mobile Promotions and Location-Based Marketing

One of the best opportunities in mobile marketing is the capability to build brand awareness and goodwill with your target market. Mobile promotions help customers feel appreciated and, thus, feel more loyal to your brand. With the appropriate customer-tracking systems, loyalty programs can be layered in to create an even closer connection between your customers and your brand. This kind of deep connection can help drive sales, but it will also help create brand evangelists who will endorse your brand to all their friends, which is quite powerful. Mobile promotion is also an ingenious way for companies to reach out to their customers and create a mobile presence without creating and maintaining a mobile website.

The most common mobile promotions begin with SMS, MMS, and proximity marketing messages. These can be followed by coupons, discounts, or promotions that are sent directly to the customers’ mobile phones. The coupons or discounts can then be redeemed in a variety of ways. After customers have opted in to your mobile communication, loyalty programs can be developed to optimize your customer interaction at the most granular and personal level. This chapter focuses on using SMS, MMS, and location-based marketing to build a list of potential customers who are interested in receiving marketing messages from you. It then details how to drive sales with mobile coupons and promotions, and finally, how to leverage loyalty programs to create a custom communication strategy to reach your most loyal customers.