Tips for Philadelphia Internet Marketing (Search Engine Marketing & More)
You may have been approached by now or at least heard of ‘Mobile Search’ by reading about it in the newspaper. Basically this is about Ads served up to your cell phone, after you sign up for the service, on various topics. It’s a huge buzz term in the internet marketing community that has to be taken with a grain of salt.
The successful companies are providing daily weather reports, bible passages, traffic updates and stock alerts to your phone laden with a businesses name, website and contact information.
The unsuccessful companies go out of business rather quickly when the realize that people will never sign up for their cell phones to be receivers of car stereo ads, home improvement seminars and your personal blog entry.
As this technology progresses I’ve been monitoring how well Mobile Search integrates into cell phone culture. A large scale push by Yellowpages.com (an AT&T subsidiary) is being rolled out to get advertisers to offer this service to their customers. Since they have money to throw in the garbage, they can do this without worrying about whether the demand will meet the supply (see unsuccessful companies, above). What you as a business should be aware of is that Yellowpages.com is charging you to have the mobile ad service. So it doesn’t matter to them how well those ads perform or whether the very model will be considered as vile spam by your trusted customers (who you just gave their cell phone numbers away to a Megacorp).
Problems With Mobile Search:
1) It will be a cold day in hell before I sign up to have my local plumber spam my cell phone.
2) Ad formats are not standardized across all cell phones, so your ads won’t display at all or won’t display properly.
3) Ads on phones that aren’t Iphone look terrible and are about as eye catching as a cinder block.
Future Benefits of Mobile Search:
1) You can provide nominal information that people will actually want, like weather or traffic alerts and have your name emblazoned next to each ad “Brought to you by (Insert Company Here).”
2) As cell phone technology improves people will begin to use this service more widely, making Mobile Search a cost effective advertising medium. Iphone users are the prime beneficiaries of Mobile Advertising because their phone acts like a browser on your computer, allowing for more detailed and ‘pretty’ information.
In summary, this technology is ‘not quite there yet’ but keep it in mind a few years down the road.
If you have questions or want to contact us about our Philadelphia Internet Marketing (search engine marketing and more) contact Alex Seigfried at 215-825-6992 or seigfried.designs@gmail.com
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