1. Learn the basics of mobile marketing first. If you jump in without knowing some of the most basic requirements and regulations you could land yourself and your clients in hot water. I suggest reading the Mobile Marketing Association’s Best Practices document as your first step. A lot of it will be completely over your head the first time you read it. That’s OK. Do it anyway. Then come back to it later when you know more.

   You can also check out my Mobile Marketing QuickStart as a quick, easy, affordable way to get started in mobile marketing.

2. Read case studies and examples of mobile marketing in action. It will help to see what other businesses are doing in the mobile space. It will also get your ideas flowing about what you can do with your business. I read MobileMarketer.com every day for this very reason. You can also “Like”  the Mobile Marketing Profits Facebook page. I share case studies and mobile marketing examples there all the time.
3. Subscribe to as many text message campaigns as you can find. Use the mobile web frequently. You need to use this stuff in order to know how to sell it. If you don’t already have an unlimited data plan – get one now. Here’s your first chance:

   * * * * * * * * * *
   For a series of 10 weekly tips about mobile marketing from me:
   Text KIMD to 69302
   Message and Data Rates May Apply. You will receive one message per week for 10 weeks. You can stop receiving messages at any time.

   * * * * * * * * *

4. Start determining what you want to offer to your customers: text messaging, mobile website development, mobile coupons on demand, mobile advertising, mobile marketing strategy or a combination of some of these. You will find that your ideas will flow best around a certain type of service. Start with that.
5. Make a list of potential local business clients and brainstorm what you’d offer them. This will be so much easier if you are reading case studies and participating in mobile offers. Of course when you are ready to start acquiring clients you will not just walk in and tell them what you want to offer them, you will start first by seeing what their needs are and then show them how mobile can solve their problems.
6. Find a vendor (or most likely several) who provide the technological backbone to what you’ll sell. You’ll be looking for a text messaging company, a mobile website builder, etc. Check out my list of recommended mobile marketing vendors as a good starting point.
7. Get training. If your vendors have training – take it! If you would like step-by-step guidance in building your mobile marketing business, please check out my Mobile Marketing Business in a Box (my self-study program) or the Mobile Marketing Masters Group (a 6-week group class personally lead by Kim Dushinski).

Good luck with your mobile marketing business. Please let me know what you’re doing and how I can help.

My specific results for the challenge (which was to keep track of every mobile marketing encounter over the weekend) included only two text message coupons. One from Arby’s which arrived on my phone on the 4th of July. I was unable to redeem it that day since I was in a small mountain town that did not have an Arby’s. The other was my free movie coupon from Redbox which came to me on Monday morning before I left for home, so I am counting it.

So while I didn’t see tons of mobile marketing I did see lots of possibilities. Jeff Wells, a challenge participant summed it up nicely in his comment, “in my minds eye I saw a hundred missed opportunities.”

YES! That is exactly what happened to me. In this photo you see an empty Please Take One box. It was in front of a house for sale on a street with practically everyone in the town walking by during the course of the day. When I first walked by in the morning this box was filled with flyers. By mid afternoon it was empty.

Had the Realtor put up a text for info offer on the sign it would have allowed all the people who walked by in the afternoon to still get info on the house. The Please Take One box would be available continually.

The parade was another time I spotted lots of opportunities. Restaurants who had floats could have had mobile coupon offers, politicians could have been signing up volunteers via text message as they went down the street, the town itself could have been promoting foursquare checkins or getting Facebook fans for their official page.

The good news in all of this is that the opportunities are there for businesses to take advantage of mobile. And it is up to us mobile marketing entrepreneurs to get mobile into their marketing mix.

What mobile marketing did YOU see this weekend? What opportunities did you see for mobile?

My challenge is for you to pay attention to how many mobile marketing interactions you have during the holiday weekend.

Everything counts…

- Mobile coupons you receive and/or redeem
- Text in offers you can sign up for
- Mobile ads you see on apps or on the mobile web
- Foursquare ‘offers nearby’ when you check in

Not only will you get interesting insight into how prevalent mobile marketing is becoming, you could win a prize.

The Prize:
Everyone who comments on this blog post or writes on my Facebook page’s wall to let me know your tally will be entered in a random drawing to win a Strategic Thought Session with me or $250 off a Mobile Marketing Business in a Box.

To win you must post your tally by NOON Eastern Time on July 5th.

Worried you might forget to count?
Sign up to get two mobile message reminders
during the weekend. Simply text CHALLENGE to 67777.
Message and Data Rates Apply. US numbers only.

4th of JULY FREEDOM OFFER

I own my own business for the freedom it affords me. Freedom to set my own schedule; freedom to write my own paycheck; freedom to make my own decisions.

If you want this freedom for yourself and want to do it in the most exciting industry since the Internet, check out the Mobile Marketing Business in a Box Freedom offer today through July 5.

In addition to what you already get to help you start your mobile marketing business, you will also receive:

1)
30-minute individual consultation with me

2)
Invitation to the Founders meeting of the Mobile Profits Insider (more on this below)

3)
$50 Off Coupon to upgrade to the Masters Class in September

Plus, the first 15 people to sign up will also get a personally autographed copy of The Mobile Marketing Handbook.

Mobile Marketing Business in a Box Info

* * *
ABOUT THE MOBILE PROFITS INSIDER:

Mobile Profits Insider will be a regular webinar-based meeting for mobile marketing entrepreneurs like you to network, discuss marketing strategies and mobile marketing campaigns. I will personally facilitate the meeting and be available for questions and to suggest resources.

This first meeting is for the Founders of the group and is by INVITATION ONLY.

Together we will craft the framework of the group and hold our first session. Being on this session will utomatically grant you Founder status which will come with several benefits that we will determine together.

There is no charge for this first call. After that there will be a monthly fee, which we’ll decide together. Founders will get a substantial lifetime discount on the membership fee.

See the Freedom Offer here.

Then today I read a great article by Jeannette Kocsis, Harte-Hanks, Inc., about mobile coupons and how it is so important to consider these high redemption rates in your overall strategy. She says:

When you plan a mobile coupon campaign, think about high rates of redemption and how that may impact the profitability of the campaign.

After all, historically response rates from e-mail and direct mail, determined the value of coupons accordingly. Now, expectations may not be as certain.

All this got me to thinking about how many people use mobile coupons. Do you? Please take my poll. You can answer via text or do it online right here. This is not a scientific survey, but please just answer once using one polling mechanism.

TEXT POLL:
Text KIM CPOLL to 67777
(That is two words with a space between them.)
Your poll will come to you via text message. US phone numbers only.
Message and Data Rates May Apply.
Poll open June 18 – 25, 2010

ONLINE POLL:
Online poll does not expire.

By the way, my answer was YES! I have redeemed mobile coupons. I love mobile coupons and use them whenever possible. I find them so convenient because I never forget to bring them with me. Just this week my daughter and I went to the Bath and Body Works big Hello Yellow Sale and saved $10 off our $40 purchase. If you like BBW, sign up for their mobile alerts here.

The 30 second spot featured Matthew McConaughey talking about beef. If you’re a guy you may not appreciate how awesome his voice sounds, but trust me, it does.

[Listen to a commercial with Matthew's voice here Beef For Dinner Commercial. It's not the one with the mobile call to action, but you get the idea.]

So, he’s talking about how beef would be great for dinner and I’m starting to think that it might be – after all if it’s good enough for Matthew, it’s good enough for me and my family.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better – you know, a hotty voice helping me figure out one of my biggest dilemmas of a typical day (“What’s for dinner?”) a voice comes on to tell me that I can go to BeefForDinner.com on my mobile phone for recipes and ideas.

Sweet, now I have a perfectly valid reason for posting a photo of Matthew McConaughey on my site. This is a Mobile in the Wild moment!

Unfortunately this is where the fun ends for me. I can’t make the mobile site come up on my Palm Pre. The device detection won’t allow me to access it and there is no specific mobile link for me to click. I am stuck with the full size site on my Pre.


MOBILE SCREEN CAPTURE OF BEEFFORDINNER.COM

While my phone certainly can access that full sized site, I am not likely to stand in a grocery store and pinch and squeeze my way around the site. I want the MOBILE site!

No matter how cute Matthew is I guess I won’t be finding a beef recipe on the beeffordinner.com site.

WILD LESSON:
Always put a link from your desktop site to your mobile site. You have no idea when your device detection won’t offer up the site that your visitor actually wants.

Join industry leaders at the annual MMA Forum in New York, as they discuss where the mobile channel is now, and more importantly, where it’s heading next. There is no doubt that in the past year, the mobile industry has grown by leaps and bounds and truly evolved. Seemingly implausible predictions from 5 years ago, promising that over a billion mobile devices will be sold annually, are a reality in 2010. For marketers, this tremendous growth raises important questions about engagement, best practices, and gauging the success of their mobile campaigns.

This is sure to be an amazing event.

That was my first indication that Sears is doing a great job with this mobile campaign. I was able to remember the keyword and the short code easily enough while I got to my phone and typed it in. This was a single key word (not two with a space) that I could remember and was relevant to the offer. CLEAN was the keyword about a carpet cleaning offer. The short code was easy too – 50101.

The other terrific thing that I noticed right away was that the text call to action was on the screen for the entire 30 seconds of the commercial. It was not a flash up at the end that was over before I could even spot it.

< This is a photo of the TV screen.

Here is a screen shot of the mobile coupon offer I received after texting in. It has the offer, a TRACKABLE call to action (notice the 1-800 number in the text message is different than what was showing on the screen), the disclaimer and the mandatory notices to keep the campaign compliant.

This is top to bottom a GREAT mobile marketing campaign! My hat’s off to Sears and their agency for creating such a smart mobile campaign. (If you know who the agency is who created this, let me know and I’ll update the post to give them credit.)

Enjoy and please share your comments. What did you think of the mobile commercials?

LINKS TO FULL COMMERCIALS:

Dockers “I Wear No Pants” Super Bowl Ad

Timothy Richman – Cars.com 2010 Super Bowl Ad

kgb – text for answers Super Bowl commercial

Flo TV – Live Mobile TV Super Bowl Ad 2010

Teleflora – Super Bowl Ad

Motorala SB – Megan Fox Super Bowl Ad

Boost Mobile – Super Bowl Shuffle

Denny’s – Chicken Warning Super Bowl Commercial

MOBILE HIT

Last night I was watching the US Ice Skating National Exhibition and caught just the end of Johnny Weir’s Poker Face routine. It looked so good I wanted to see the whole thing so I did a quick Google search and discovered the NBC Olympics site. Not only did I find the video I was looking for, I found *so*much more.

This site is an amazing display of what the Internet should be. Truly it is the BEST site overall I have seen in a long while. It has everything – the schedule, athlete bios (and their Twitter streams), videos, medal counts, inspiring stories, interviews, information customized to my local area and a strong mobile component featured prominently in the top navigation.

Their mobile-friendly website (m.nbcolympics.com) is available on any mobile browser and has content modified for mobile consumption. As great as the full website is, I have no intention of being able to consume as much of it when I check in on the Olympic action via mobile. Bravo to them for modifying the content on the mobile version of the site. The design of the mobile site is not completely wonderful but it is hard to achieve perfection in mobile.

Next up in the mobile department is mobile Olympic alerts. Actually, they offer email and mobile alerts and anyone can sign up for a combination of the alerts based on their preferences. You can sign up on their comprehensive alert sign up page or you can simply text OLYMPICS to 51515. (Message and data rates may apply.)

While NBC may not have their act together in the late night show area, they surely do in their Olympic coverage via mobile. NBC Olympics is a HUGE mobile hit.

MOBILE MISS

This weekend I saw a commercial for QuickBooks and one of the points in the commercial was that now you can access your financial data anywhere. Thinking I would be thrilled by this, I decided to look into whether or not QuickBooks Online was something I couldn’t live without.

Unfortunately, upon reviewing their site, I see that QuickBooks Online via mobile is only available for BlackBerry and iPhone users. While I am happy to see they didn’t stick only with the iPhone, I am very disappointed that they are making web based software available via mobile apps and not the mobile web.

It is possible that the service actually is available on the mobile web on more than just these two devices, but they do not promote that fact.

So, while I do applaud Intuit for doing something with mobile, I give QuickBooks Online a mobile miss for giving only BlackBerry and iPhone users access to their financial data via mobile. Or for not telling everyone with decent mobile browsing capability that they can access it too.

Brian asked a lot of great questions and we covered a lot of ground in the interview titled Practical Mobile Marketing Advice for SMBs with Kim Dushinski. Enjoy!