I was at one of the restaurants in Riyadh and while being seated, four young boys were entering the restaurant at the same time and they were chatting and laughing loudly. I sat on my table and started browsing through the menu then I realized that all of a sudden the laughter and loud chats had went silent. Out of curiosity, I turned around to see what had happened, and then I saw this scene in the picture, the four young people sitting together and were fully engaged in their mobile phones, each indulged in his own private world.

It is amazing to see how Mobile has changed the way things work in our social life. Being highly interactive , Mobile and Instant, mobile today is an overwhelming tool that has changed the face of communication forever. For many reasons Mobile has become an engaging gadget and people cannot do without.  Many believe that it is the best marketing channel that has several tools to utilize.

How To build a Mobile Marketing Strategy?

If we are to look at the basic statistics and insights on Mobile in Saudi Arabia , we will see that the mobile penetration is 182% according to CTIC, which means that there are around 57 Million active mobile lines on the networks. There is around 48% of those have mobile internet access. if we want to look at the mobile internet consumption through Apps, it is also massive , as Google’s graph shows. Websites in Saudi Arabia, YouTube and many other social networks report that more than 48% of the traffic comes from mobile devices.

Therefore, for Marketers the question is what the Mobile marketing strategy to implement. In addition, to the way to harness this marketing channel effectively. Like any marketing strategy, it starts with looking at the vision, mission and the objectives of the organization and aims to reflect those in the strategy to plan. Then it goes down to the measurement framework. Moreover, how to measure progress and success there. We should consider this as the basic step in building a mobile marketing strategy for any kind of business today, and by looking at the different dynamics in the Mobile communication space, should we build a mobile website experience or build Apps for the different Mobile operating systems in the market. Because of the diversity and the huge amount of effort, time and money that need to be spent on such ideas, we should prioritize what is more important based on what objective are we trying to achieve for the business.

Mobile marketing is another interesting and engaging channel to use, so Search Marketing, Display, Location based, Click-to-call and other techniques can be used based on the kind of objective the organization aims to achieve. First, there is no room for choosing apps or Mobile web, as the basic thing is to have a responsive website experience that supports mobile screen resolutions.

If one wants to weight the advantages vs. disadvantages for Mobile web or Mobile Apps then it is not going to be fair, because each one of them has its own edge. so how to choose! There is no specific answer to this, but the rule is whatever delivers the objectives then easily measured and optimized for the business based on the capability at hand, will be the best answer.