More and more companies are now using mobile marketing in their promotional campaigns. One of the main reasons why mobile marketing is becoming so popular is because sales of mobile devices have sky rocketed in the last decade. In fact, in the Western world, the mobile penetration rate is expected to exceed 100% within months.

There are many different types of mobile marketing campaigns that companies can run depending on their budget. Below is some information about a few of the most popular mobile marketing campaigns.

1. Opt-in mass push marketing via SMS or MMS.

This type of campaign works in the same way that traditional subscription based email newsletter campaigns work, however, due to the limited number of characters that can be displayed within each message, companies have to be extremely creative. SMS and MMS messages can be very effective, as even people with very short attention spans are likely to read the entire message. The advantages of SMS or MMS campaigns are that the messages are compatible with the majority of mobile devices and the messages can cost as little as $0.01 each.

2. Mobile Applications.

While these applications can be fully customized to portray a company’s brand, the applications can only be used on Smartphones, so the target audience is somewhat limited. Furthermore, the average cost of commissioning a mobile app is about $9000 and this cost increases significantly if the app is designed to run on a multitude of different mobile operating systems including iOS 5, Android and Windows 7. However, as the Smartphone market grows, it is likely that this type of campaign will become more affordable.

3. Check-in services.

Basically, when a customer’s enters a business’s premise and “checks in” with their mobile, the business can automatically send promotional discount coupons and information about new in store products to the customer’s phone. This type of marketing campaigns is now becoming very popular on the high street because it is cheap to run and can dramatically increase the number of goods each customers buys.

4. Bluetooth Marketing.

This type of campaign works in a similar way to a check-in campaigns, however, customers do not have to opt in to receive marketing messages via Bluetooth, so it is possible for companies to reach a larger audience by using this type of mobile marketing campaign. Unfortunately, many people won’t be expecting a marketing message via Bluetooth and they may find the message intrusive.

5. Mobile internet adverts.

These adverts are displayed on a website when internet users visit the website via mobile browser. They are not dissimilar to normal online advertisements such as banner ads, text ads, etc. The adverts are relatively cheap to purchase depending on the popularity of the host website.

There are a number of different ways in which a company can get started with mobile marketing, so it important that each option is fully investigated and analyzed before deployment. Many companies actually find that it is best to use several different mobile marketing campaigns simultaneous in order to target the largest number of mobile users.