The rise of mobile (mobile marketing) as a marketing channel and key customer touch-point, drives yet another opportunity for the shift of marketing budgets from traditional marketing media spend to more direct channels such as direct mail, e-mail, digital  and of course mobile. 

Mobile marketing will likely provide the next advancement in multi-channel and integrated marketing, offering higher levels of targeting effectiveness and impact. 

Analysts now project that location based mobile marketing spend will top $4 billion by 2014.  Recently, Google stated that one third of Google mobile searches via the mobile web "pertain to some aspect of the searcher's local environment."  Both are stats to think carefully about!

This year (like the past couple of years) started off with lots of promise and enthusiasm about 2010 being "the year of mobile marketing."  While I am not sure it will come to pass in 2010, several aspects of mobile marketing seem to have come of age.

The most important are location marketing, smart phone applications and mobile payments and transactions.  The only down side I see currently, is that most (if not all) location based marketing programs seem to use discount and product promotion to drive participation....all the time!  I would like to see a balance of relationship applications and discounts.

I believe that the real opportunity is to integrate mobile into triangulated multi-channel programs.  This is the development of integrated multi-channel marketing efforts that triangulate a minimum of three channels such as website, in-store and smart phone mobile application and  location marketing....this is real integrated marketing!!

There is no doubt in my mind that mobile marketing is here to stay and will become an increasingly powerful force in our customer marketing efforts.

What do you think?