More and more marketers are taking advantage of advances in mobile technologies as a way to reach many prospects at once while still keeping the impression of being intimate.

As mobile devices become ubiquitous and the sophistication of smart phones increases, mobile marketing will evolve and become a more significant part of the marketing mix.

Since mobile marketing is such a new and evolving field, it will be a challenge for most firms to develop viable marketing programs and to develop organizational best practices.

The issue will be how companies design and implement campaigns to accommodate all different sorts of mobile devices as well as being able to analyze results.

In a recent study, the Aberdeen Group outlined a few ways in which an average firm might break into mobile marketing successfully:

• Determine performance metrics for measuring mobile marketing effectiveness. These metrics are necessary for tracking success over time. Like many other initiatives, mobile marketing is a continuous improvement process, and without these key metrics it can be difficult or impossible to assess and improve on a campaign.
• Streamline the process for allowing a customer to opt-in or opt-out of these mobile marketing campaigns. Beyond the obvious, this will give the company another set of metrics for determining success.
• Hire resources that have mobile marketing as part of their job description. Mobile marketing specialist agencies can assist with campaign development, implementation, and analysis.

In addition to these three tactics, Aberdeen surveyed top performing firms to assess the strategies they used to produce results via mobile marketing.

The audience for mobile campaigns may be larger than that available through other marketing channels. Although reach is one of the main incentives for exploring mobile marketing, marketers need to realize that volume does not trump the importance of targeting; unqualified responses will not move the needle. Taking this attitude ensures that not only will the firm generate many leads from mobile marketing but that a good portion of these leads will be quality and will close.