Wednesday, May 20, 2009

More households are cellular only: landlines fade

I just read an interesting article confirming that now more households in the U.S. use cell phones exclusively and that landlines are on the way out. Part of the reason is the recession, but even if people were suddenly making seven figure incomes, they would not go back to landlines.

What does this suggest in terms of a mobile marketing opportunity? It means that if you are not taking advantage of mobile marketing to reach this growing customer base, you are missing a golden opportunity. The message is to start using mobile marketing now. Get a jump on the competition.

Forget about all the other media. Mobile marketing is the future, and it is here now.

To read the article referenced in full go here: http://tinyurl.com/okfhqz

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Mobile Marketing Tips and Tricks for Recruiters

I first thought of roadside billboards when I first heard the term mobile marketing. But I've since come to understand that mobile marketing refers not to the mobility of the person seeing the ad but instead to the device on which the ad is displayed. In other words, marketing messages delivered to or even from your cellular telephone are mobile marketing. So what has this got to do with recruiters? Everything.

Over the past decade, email marketing has grown from a curiosity with scum selling hundreds of thousands of email addresses on CD's for $199 to a fast growing, efficient, and economical direct marketing technique. Rather than display your job ad to everyone like you do in a newspaper or even through a job posting ad, email and other forms of direct marketing allow you to target your audience so that your message is only delivered to those of interest to you. Want to hire engineers in Atlanta? Send your ad via email only to engineers in Atlanta rather than running it on a general job board where retail sales reps in Seattle will apply to it or on a niche job board where engineers in Atlanta will apply to it but so will engineers in Seattle.

I'm a big fan of email marketing when it is done ethically with double opt-in lists and skillfully with well constructed messages delivered to properly targeted recipients. But the reality is that email marketing is not the only way to reach job seekers, and perhaps already isn't the best way to reach a large number of highly targeted college students and recent graduates. What has come of age over the past few years is mobile marketing.

Virtually everyone in the U.S. has at least one email address and many have multiple. In just a decade we've gone from being pleasantly surprised when friends, family, and colleagues have email addresses to be shocked when people tell us that they don't. But the experience we have with email in the U.S. is not typical when compared to what is happening elsewhere in the world and, as a result, we can look to those countries for insight as to what we will likely experience here in the not too distant future. Did you know that globally twice as many people use text messaging as those who use email? Did you know there are now 258 million wireless lines in the U.S. and that by 2013 virtually 100 percent of American teens and adults will have their own wireless phone? And did you know that just two years ago in 2007 mobile marketing spending was a mere blip at $1.8 billion but that's expected to grow to $24 billion by 2013? Mobile marketing is booming and the lessons learned from email marketing are keeping mobile marketing cleaner and therefore more productive for those of us who are legitimate marketers.

Over the coming days, I will do my best to define key mobile marketing terms, describe the benefits of mobile marketing programs, walk you through how to start a mobile marketing program, discuss how to integrate your mobile marketing program with your other marketing programs, look at ways to track the effectiveness of your mobile marketing program, and conclude with some tricks and tips. Some of the information that I'll present will be from experiences we've had at CollegeRecruiter.com with delivering cell phone text messaging (sms) and keyword campaigns while some will be from such third party sources as Lyris. But all of it will be written with the needs of the recruiter and hiring manager in mind for their needs are in some ways quite different from the needs of their colleagues in marketing yet in most ways surprisingly similar.