With mobile commerce becoming a staple makerting channel in Japan, it pays to know the different mediums you can use to engage Japanese consumers through their mobile phones.

Last week, we touched on the massive surge in Japan's mobile commerce in 2007 and the marketing opportunities arising from the growth.

Quick breakdown of devices and technologies
The three major mobile carriers in Japan are NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank. DocCoMo is by far the largest carrier with 53+ million subscribers, followed by KDDI at 29.5+ million and rounded up with SoftBank at 17.6+ million, according to December 2007 figures by Wireless Watch Japan. Recently, SoftBank has been on the rise with an average of 210,000 monthly subscriptions compared to KDDI at 138,000 and DoCoMo at 121,000. Of the major technologies driven from mobile, the following are the most prevalent: mobile-enabled search first with Google, mobile music with itunes and others, mobile social networking, mobile gaming and, of course, mobile TV.

Marketing opportunities abound
Having looked at a basic overview of the channel size, audience skew and sales volume, it is easy to define how relevant mobile might be as a channel. The high penetration of web mobile also goes to show that the channel is a viable one in the Japanese market. In the same breath though, it is also important to briefly touch on some of the mobile-specific options available to a marketer looking to engage mobile users in Japan.

Mobile paid search
Mobile search advertising in 2007 only accounted for 14.3 percent of all mobile advertising expenditures; however, by 2011, this ratio is expected to increase to 42.6 percent. Clickthrough rates are generally higher in mobile due to smaller screen sizes, competition and search depth, so it can be an important differentiator.

The following table, extracted from a eMarketer report shows a breakdown of the worldwide mobile search advertising spending by region.

Mobile SEO
Just as the popularity and effectiveness of traditional internet-based SEO exists, it is becoming even more critical in the mobile space with smaller screens driving the need for higher result rankings amongst an ever growing site universe and search volume.

Mobile display advertising
Similar to web, though more static and not "ad-served", one in seven Japanese companies bought a mobile advertisement in 2007, according to a recent eMarketer report. Mobile ads also saw a 35.4 percent growth in spending in 2006 compared to 19.7 percent for internet ads. This will continue to grow and innovate.

Mobile social media
Recently, mobile version SNSs have really taken off here and released free entertainment content such as Flash games, avatars and fortune-telling services. According to a survey released by Rakuten Research/Mitsubishi Research Institute, the awareness rate for mobile SNS among mobile users is 48.5 percent, and offers a range of opportunities for a marketer to engage with users.

Personalised start pages
Carriers have now offered users with a free personalised start page service that allows users to customise content, subscribe to news feeds and updates among shopping, music and video services as well. This offers very interesting targeting, profiling opportunities for marketers.

As we have seen, the Japanese marketplace is much more than just web, and mobile is becoming more and more a staple marketing channel for many marketers and the key medium to reach some audience segments. Above are just a few of the marketing-specific targeting tactics that exist and as such, are really just starting to scratch the surface of the mobile marketing opportunity that exists here in Japan.
 
Andy Radovic is senior online markting and SEO consultant of Sozon. Read full bio.