According to a recent eMarketer forecast, mobile marketing will reach more than $19 billion globally by 2012. With that said, I think it is clear for all to see the effect mobile marketing is going to play over the next couple of years and it is time for South Africa to start to make a significant contribution into this lucrative and emerging market.

There is already a lot of mobile marketing happening in South Africa. One just has to look at the efforts the cellular providers such as Vodacom are putting into mobile marketing. I am sure you have seen every time you send a ‘please call me’ message you will see some form of advertising on your confirmation message. That in itself is already marketing and Vodacom are making a lot of money from that.

It is not only the cellular operators that can make money from mobile marketing, one just has to Google the term ‘SMS marketing’ and you will see how many companies in South Africa will be displayed in your search results which offer an SMS marketing service. What most of these companies do is offer their clients the ability for them to SMS their customers with promotional SMS’s. SMS marketing is very effective if used correctly as it has the ability to go directly to the recipient and chances are very high that the recipient will read the message. But SMS marketing has its pitfalls in that the recipient of the SMS may not have requested to receive the SMS. This is similar to SPAM i.e. when you receive dozens of emails that you are not interested in and you never requested to receive them. It is thus highly important for a business embarking on an SMS marketing campaign to make sure that the recipients of the SMS have requested to receive the SMS prior to receiving it. It is very easy to dent the businesses image by the business sending out SMS’s to recipients who never requested to receive them.

Businesses can really benefit a great deal by implementing an effective SMS marketing campaign. As is evident with the way SMS marketing is being used in other countries it surely is only a matter of time until the majority of businesses in South Africa start using this mode of marketing. Mobile and technology businesses should also start looking at ways to make SMS and mobile marketing a multi billion Rand industry as the opportunities are there. The foundations are in place and it just requires some innovative ideas to differentiate your business from the others and stand out above the rest. For now it seems that businesses just compile a database of their customers mobile numbers, higher an SMS marketing company to start sending out SMS’s to members in their database and that is it. A lot more can be done to add value to the business. MMS (Multimedia messages) are now starting to replace SMS’s in the Mobile marketing sector and those that are quickly to tap into the MMS marketing niche could benefit greatly as more and more cellphones being sold today are MMS compliant.

With the advances in technology occurring on a daily basis a lot more is set for the horizon and those who are at the forefront will benefit greatly from the opportunities presented by SMS and mobile marketing.

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