What should marketers be wary of?
Personnel: If advertisers decide to use mobile messaging, they should contemplate having staff members dedicated to answer users' text message inquires. Some users might try to reply to marketers using this platform. For a successful campaign, advertisers need to coordinate with other sales teams to make sure there is adequate support to handle inbound calls. Since mobile advertisements are very personal, consumers might want to follow-up with a one-on-one conversation. It would also be advantageous to train this staff to be able to convert callers. Additionally, as with other advertising media, it is important to monitor the origin of a sale; capitalizing on a follow-up phone call is a great outlet to do this and further gauge the success of a mobile campaign.
Tracking: When mobile marketing is widely adopted, advertisers are going to have access to consumer segments like never before. As with all marketing initiatives, uniform metrics are necessary to analyze campaigns and allow for continual optimization. Dabbling with mobile marketing will be entertaining for interactive marketers regardless, but clients want ROI, and without proper tracking techniques, this advertising platform might not ever get off the ground.
SPAM comparisons: Mobile marketers need to be careful not to enter the SPAM arena. I think it is a safe assumption that users will equate mobile advertising with the likes of SPAM emails because they are distributed to the masses, they can clog inboxes and run the risk of being irrelevant. Calming consumers' privacy issues is going to be a large hurdle that marketers are going to have to overcome before mobile messaging will be widespread. That said, mobile advertising does have inherent targeting capabilities that can be far superior to other advertising media. Marketers need to be proactive and prove to users that the messages are pertinent and serve a purpose.
Unsubscribing procedures: It is extremely important for marketers to earn a consumer's trust and provide a clearly defined approach around distribution and unsubscribing procedures. As we have seen with other new marketing platforms, users do not take kindly to being automatically enrolled to receive advertisements especially when there is no easy way to opt out. With the inherent privacy issues with mobile marketing, it will be even more important for advertisers to give users a straightforward process to unsubscribe.
