Catch Up Or Lose Out

Your customers are fast catching up with technology and when you take a look at the kind of pace mobile marketing is picking up, you’ve got to admit that it sometimes scares you. The options. The pace. The crazy, frantic speed that people are moving and connecting with each other. As a business, can you imagine what business will be like if we did not try to keep up with the ways our customers are walking….running?

Thankfully, there seems to be a quick pick-up in pace right here in North America as more people are moving out of mainstream media and into the online and mobile media marketing. It’s really, in short, steaming ahead and we’re excited to be a part of this whole new world of marketing and communication.

Mobile websites is the brand new thing hitting North America but in other parts of the world, it’s almost as old as time. They’ve been using mobile websites for close to a decade and let’s just say that the growth is attributable to the QR Code technology. Some time back, before advertisers in Japan started using QR Code as one of their advertising methods, people had to type in a whole long line of URL to get to a web page.

With the introduction of QR Code technology, all they have to do now is to click, scan and access. Mobile websites, therefore, can be said to the new easiest entry point for advertisers right now. Most conventional (the big ones) have revamped their websites to be mobile-friendly….which means that the website will appear alright on BOTH a computer AND a mobile phone.

It’s fantastic too to see that companies are coming up with applications whereby advertisers and companies can create their own ‘clone’ mobile web ready websites. One of them is Quicksites, an Australian-based company. With simple clicks and taps, a whole mobile website can be created for promotional purposes. The number of mobile websites under this new system is not yet impressive but there are already more than eight-hundred (and counting) mobile websites using their system tools today.

Australia is fast catching on with QR Codes because I see a lot of Australian media companies running advertisements with QR codes printed on them. Some of them are print advertisements and some are placed on YouTube. Three million web-enabled phones in Australia and growing….

One interesting fact that may have prompted the wide use of QR Code is this – advertisements can be so targeted that advertisers will or may know your location. If you’re in Paris out shopping and an advertiser thinks that you might be interested in something that they have to offer, they can track your mobile phone using the technology to see if you’d like to take up on their offer.

Ericsson, a popular mobile phone manufacturer based in Sweden, has already started in on developing phones and applications with QR Codes in mind. And this is just one of the companies. Accordingly, many of their trial applications and products have been sent out for BETA testing, so to speak.

They need to make it a very smooth-sailing, almost-glitchless move on this front because they know their consumers are waiting and they want value.