The next wave: mobile marketing

Although I’ve downscaled my business dramatically in the last year, I’ve kept a few favorite clients. For years, I increasingly steered them away from print and into electronic marketing. A phrase I used a lot  is “pixels are cheap.” I was pushing web sites, email marketing, and the last few years, social media. All great tools, and I still do recommend them. But now I’m adding mobile marketing to the mix. In 2007, Jupiter Research noted that most consumers do not use mobile coupons – that is, a coupon on your cell phone that the clerk punches in the code on the register or scans. Two years later, they’re really taking off – and they’re now being used by Payless Shoes, Sears, Hollywood Video, Jiffylube and JC Penney. Since I’m budgeting my time carefully, I found a mobile marketing solution that my clients can use in-house without my direct involvement as long as they’re at least minimally web savvy. (True story: I had a client who dictated his email to his secretary. This is not a solution for him, although she’d have no problem using it.)  Trumpia has some economical plans that will manage Mom-and-Pop type businesses well (under 1,000 contacts) , but easily scales up into the tens of thousands.  And as a consumer, I’m actually pretty excited about this new coupon method: no scraps of paper to cut and carry, just the cell phone I’m never without anyway.