Mobile phones and applications for marketing 
Almost half of the world’s population today use mobile phones and a lot of people are moving to smartphones, especially for business purposes. A smartphone is a mobile handset with more advanced features than just an ordinary mobile phone, it normally has 3G and Wifi capabilities with a QWERTY keyboard. Smartphones also allow users to install applications on their phones, I will discuss some handy applications used by marketers.
There are a couple of ways how marketers can reach customers by using mobile devices, SMS and MMS is the simplest examples of this. An SMS will only allow for text advertising, where as a MMS will be able to use video, images and sound. The nice thing about a smartphone is you can install applications, why not use these applications as an advertising medium?
One way is by using in-game mobile marketing, where you deliver promotional messages within a mobile game. Certain brands also sponsor complete games to encourage interactivity with them. These types of games or applications should be easy to use. If the learning curve is to big it might not be as effective as a form of marketing.
Another application used for marketing is MXit. MXit is a free instant messaging application developed in South Africa and can run on most phones that have access to the internet and you can also run it from a pc.
MXit has a user database of over 18 million, at times the amount of messages that pass through it is enormous, reaching 35 000 messages per second in peak times. A lot of companies make use of MXit as a marketing tool. Each time MXit starts up it shows a splash screen for a couple of seconds, companies place their advertising on this splash screen. MXit receives about 20 million user logons per day, allowing advertisers to receive considerable exposure for their ads.
There are more people using mobile phones to access the internet than those accessing the internet via their computer. I want to encourage you to start looking at ways to advertise on mobile devices as part of your overall marketing strategy.
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