I came across an interesting Ad-age article today talking about Apple and their move into the Mobile advertising space with the purchase of mobile ad network Quattro.  The battle for mobile advertising is underway and the players are starting to move!  Mobile as an advertising medium is still in its infancy but moving quickly.  Yes, SMS ads have been around for a while, but that is just the beginning.  (see more in a previous post about mobile advertising options).
 
In the past, the relatively low market share for smart phones has been the limiting factor in massive resource deployment in this field, however the signs of change are present.  For example according to a study by Gartner in Q4 2009, almost 19% of mobile users in the US have smart phones and 50% of people plan to purchase a smart phone in the next two years.  What's more the US is actually not the leader around the world.  (Italy actually leads the world right now in smart phone penetration.)   What's interesting though is that while smart phones are currently a category/subset of the mobile market I suspect that in the not to distant future we will be able to drop the word 'smart' as all mobile handsets will be smart as defined today.

So the market has a bright future, and Balihoo predicts that 2010 will be a transitional year for mobile marketing and more specifically its use in local store marketing to create more diverse and personalized options for these business owners.  

However making these new mobile advertising technologies work can be challenging for a local business in the following ways:

• finding easy and cost effective ways to create localized content for these mediums
• getting support from experts to know how to deploy these strategies based on their target customer base
• simplifying the process of executing these strategies under a self service model. 
• tracking the results of these campaigns in concert with other marketing investments and how they collectively translate into sales, new customers etc 

That is where local marketing automation comes in!    We are continually advancing our software and supporting services to create a cost effective and easy way to market across all mediums - both traditional and new. 

For instance we just recently launched social media integration into our platform, that actually combines that actually combines social network messaging, with web based landing pages and mobile together!  So far it has received great reviews, and I can tell you that this is just scratching the surface on what we have planned for the platform in 2010.  Advanced mobile marketing is coming, and we will be ready as the battle beings to play out!