Hi, this is Josh Stailey from the Pursuit Group. Today I want to talk about mobile marketing and the mobile revolution. It’s coincidental, we had an interesting article come out just this week about the mobile marketing revolution in the B-to-B area, but I think it’s going to be at least as important, if not more so, for many in the business to consumer field as well.

If you own a business, this is something you need to be thinking about. It’s not urgent yet, but it could be soon. Mobile marketing is simply the fact that you can now bring the web and all the digital world to an individual this way instead of through a computer, which means that they are no longer tethered to a desk, that they can get and receive and do things on the internet on the fly.

This is a Smart Phone and there are more and more of these that are happening all the time. I can browse the web on this and do a lot of other things. And for many people, mostly younger, far younger than me, those… this may be the only way they interact with the internet, the digital world at large.

So that you need to be prepared in the future to address that marketplace if it’s a significant portion of your market through this, instead of this. That means a lot of different challenges for a business, including being able to shrink what’s largely a lot of information which you see on a webpage into a smaller amount of information, the most important things on to this could be able to take advantage of location services. For example, there are capabilities today that if I’m driving around and I’m a customer of say, a sandwich shop, they could literally send me a message to this phone only when I am within two miles of their facility and only between 11:30 and 1:00. That’s serious target marketing. And it could be powerfully effective using location and timing to enhance the opportunity for someone to interact with you based on a promotion or an offer that you make this way.

There are a ton of other ways that mobile marketing is going to work in the future. There are now location-based services and time-based services and there’s codes that enable you to move between the digital world and the real world. Let’s take a look at one of them.

This is what’s called a QR code, this little square with all the little dots and boxes and so forth in it. Now this QR code is a way that you can reach out to people from the physical world and move into the digital world with offers and information. This thing can link to a landing page with a coupon, it can link to your phone and produce a coupon that you can take to a store and redeem, there’s a whole lot of things that you can do with a QR code.

Some QR codes show up on your phone. Other QR codes, literally you find on billboards. For example, this sandwich shop that I was talking about earlier as an example could have a billboard near their location with a great big QR code on it. You hold your camera up, you take a picture of it, you send it to them and they send you the offer of the day for the meal.

There are a ton of different ways that this is going to happen. Many of them you’re not ready for yet, many of them the world isn’t necessarily ready for it yet. But when it does, it’ll happen at a startling speed and those enterprises that aren’t prepared to take of advantage of it, that take a long time to figure out and then a long time to execute are going to be behind the curve and perhaps fatally so.

So my advice to you is know that it’s coming, that the mobile revolution is on its way. Keep track of what’s going on, don’t necessarily be the first to do it, but by all means, don’t ever be the last.

About Josh

Our friend and contributor Josh Stailey passed away unexpectedly on September 10, 2011. We have valued his expertise and willingness to share his insights with us. We discussed the appropriateness of sharing content he provided before his death with his business partners at The Pursuit Group and they agreed sharing his expertise was a fitting tribute to Josh.

Josh Stailey was a 40-year veteran of the marketing and sales wars, a journalism-trained professional who understood the role of information and technology in today’s business world. A consultant and writer, he was a founding partner of The Pursuit Group, which specializes in designing and implementing demand-generation systems for small- and medium-sized businesses. He has also consulted with Fortune 500 companies on customer experience management and content system design.