Although content marketing has always existed, it’s no longer produced and delivered as it was in the old days.

“Companies have long created white papers, articles, charts and graphs, videos, and reports to position their brands as thought leaders and industry experts deserving of loyalty, with the goal of generating leads and sales,” today’s report reads. “It’s the delivery model that has changed — mailboxes used to be chock full of ads of every type, from sales circulars to envelopes full of coupons, while newspapers and magazines consistently ran ads for consumer products, clothing, attorneys — you name it.”

That content is now delivered digitally via search engines, email, social networks, and corporate websites.

Based on the information presented, 90% of organizations now market with content. On average, marketers spend more than 35% of their budget on content marketing today.

To learn more, check out the infographic below.

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MobileStorm, a mobile marketing company with 10 years of experience under its belt, set out to answer this question in it’s October 2009 White Paper titled: “How to Choose an SMS Vendor,” including a 30-Point SMS Vendor Selection Checklist that aids in figuring this out. The paper focuses on three key areas — expert advice, technology & product features, and the account management & customer service.

The report notes that when choosing an SMS vendor, you should look for:

– Tech Gurus Who Get Service: look for a company that is offering SMS services. A company built on services, versus technology, is more likely to understand your marketing needs.
– Best Practices: Make sure the company running the campaign is well aware of best practices and has a way to remove people from your database. The last thing you want is to come off as spam when sending out legit mobile marketing messages to promote your product.
– A Pilot Partner: Find a company willing to work with you on a sustainable, long-term relationship. Prove that a model works before implementing a strategy.
– A Short Code Manager: You want to find a SMS vendor that will help you find, acquire, and manage your short code needs.

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According to Sara Holoubek, SEMPO President, the gap between mobile and desktop searchers is getting much narrower, and SEMPO felt it was important to examine this powerful shift in how consumers are searching and present some ideas, for not only marketing via mobile, but also creating compelling content that works optimally for the mobile search medium.  Some key questions SEMPO wanted to discuss included the following:

1. What mobile channels are available to search marketers and which show the most promise?
2. What are the prospects for search, particularly local search, on mobile devices, and how is the landscape changing?
3. What steps can marketers take to effectively target and reach consumers using mobile?

With mobile Internet access growing at an accelerated rate, eMarketer expects the gap between desktop and mobile Internet users to narrow by the early part of the next decade.  What’s more, these users are searching- according to a recent study from ABI Research, over 70% of US respondents used their devices to conduct some kind of search in 2008, a 14% increase over 2007, and similarly high figures pertain to Japanese mobile users as well.  Mobile search is on the rise across the globe as well- comScore found that weekly mobile search activity jumped by 50% across Western Europe from June 2007 to June 2008, and by 104% in the US during the same time period.  The Kelsey Group predicts that US mobile search users will expand to 56.2 million by 2013, up from 5.2 million in 2008.

In conclusion, from SEMPO’s point of view, the complexity of the mobile Web ecosystem puts the desktop environment to shame- disparate hardware and software platforms, competing app stores and rival search engines make for a marketer’s headache.  However, putting key steps in place has the potential to yield better visibility, more accurate targeting and more successful conversion than ever before.  Some steps that can be taken include creating usable mobile content, catering to your users only and making it worth while for them, redirecting mobile users to mobile content, extending paid search to mobile and simply experimenting and constantly refining your strategy.

As more and more people begin searching from mobile devices, those providing the content, search engines who organize the content, and marketers who advertise alongside the content will all have to redefine their strategy to remain constant as the ecosystem changes- it happened when traditional search was expanding and evolving, and the same is true as the shift to mobile continues.

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