The State of Mobile Marketing in 2007

A month ago, Apple shipped the iPhone, and it’s already clear the device is going to change what “mobile marketing” means, even though almost nothing in most marketers’ toolkits has caught up yet. Here’s where things stand right now.

SMS is still the workhorse

For the vast majority of businesses running mobile campaigns today, mobile marketing means text messages. A retailer collects phone numbers at checkout or through a print ad, then sends short-code promotions and alerts. Open rates on SMS are dramatically higher than email, and the format forces genuine brevity, but the channel is opt-in only and carriers police unsolicited messages aggressively, which keeps volume campaigns in check.

Carriers still control the front door

Most phones on the market are feature phones running carrier-controlled software, and the mobile web experience on them is a cramped WAP browser pointed at a handful of carrier-approved “on-deck” sites. Getting a mobile site featured in a carrier’s deck used to be one of the only ways to reach mobile browsers at scale, and that gatekeeping still shapes a lot of mobile strategy today.

The iPhone just moved the goalposts

What makes this month different is that the iPhone runs a real version of Safari, capable of rendering an actual website rather than a stripped-down WAP page. Early adopters browsing the full web on a phone screen are running into sites that were never designed for anything narrower than a desktop monitor. Businesses that get ahead of this and build a mobile-friendly version of their main site now, rather than waiting, will look considerably more credible to this new class of user than competitors still assuming everyone’s on a flip phone.

Location and mobile ads are still early

Mobile advertising networks exist but are immature compared to web display or search advertising, and location-based marketing is mostly a concept discussed at conferences rather than something most businesses can execute today. What does work now is location baked into SMS campaigns, a coupon tied to a specific store visit, rather than anything automated.

What this means for a business right now

If you’re not already running SMS campaigns and you have a customer base that would opt in, that’s still the highest-leverage mobile move available today. Beyond that, the practical step worth taking this year is checking how your website looks on a phone browser, because for the first time that’s a real question rather than a hypothetical one. The rest, real mobile advertising platforms, richer app-based marketing, will follow as more of these devices reach the market, but that’s still ahead of where things stand today.

Mobile marketing in 2007 is a channel in transition: mature enough on the SMS side to be a genuine tool, and just now cracking open on the mobile web side because of a single device launched a month ago. Businesses paying attention to that shift now will have a real head start once the rest of the market catches up.