The Mobile market is booming, with the use of smartphones, tablets and other smart devices growing more and more each year.

This growth opens up a number of Mobile Marketing opportunities, and the smart companies are making sure that their mobile bases are covered. Even small business owners are finding ways to branch out into mobile marketing without breaking the bank.

With the holiday season coming up, making a push into mobile marketing is more important than ever. Shoppers and travelers alike will be out in force, and most of them will have at least one mobile device with them pretty much the whole time.

If you want to tap in to this massive group of potential customers, here are a few ways to go about it:

“Checking In” Specials

One low-cost way to increase your mobile impact is to offer a small discount to customers who “check in” at your business.

There are a number of apps that let customers check in, including Facebook, Foursquare and Yelp. This will post a message to their friends to let them know where they’ve been, giving your business new Potential Customers with just a couple of taps.

People are more likely to check out businesses that they learn about through friend recommendations, and the act of checking in serves as at least something of a recommendation. This word-of-mouth trend can be a great motivator during the holiday season, when everyone is looking for the best deals. If even one person checks out your business because a friend checked in, you’ve likely just made back the value of that discount many times over.

Mobile Coupons

You can learn a lot from how to handle mobile marketing by looking at the websites of pizza delivery places.

Every major pizza chain has a website that’s optimized for mobile, putting specials front and center while making everything else easy to access. Even if you’re not in the food service industry, you should be able to recognize how good their mobile sites are designed when it comes to enticing potential customers.

One other thing that these sites have going for them is easy access to online coupons. Regardless of your industry, there are likely some things that you are able to offer at a discount heading into the holiday season.

By putting your coupons online, you’ll save printing and mailing costs while keeping potential customers coming back to your website (where they can see what else you offer). Be sure to swap out coupons periodically to ensure that both potential and established customers are checking your site before each visit.

SMS (Text) Marketing

Heading in to the holiday season, start a promotion where potential customers can opt in to receive text messages in exchange for a coupon or other discount.

This email list will give you a list of customers that you can send promotions, coupons and holiday sales info to, and it will likely just keep growing as the promotion goes on.

If you really want to draw some attention to your text marketing push, you could even announce restock dates or hot items that will soon be in stock. Mix in those messages with coupon codes or other promotions and you’ll have one of the hottest marketing campaigns around at little cost to you.

QR Codes

You’ve likely seen QR codes in a number of places.

They’re the square boxes filled with lines and designs that people can scan with a smartphone camera. Once scanned, the code directs the phone’s web browser to a specified address on the Internet; they can do everything from taking viewers to videos or sales pages to linking an online portfolio page to someone’s business card.

They never did become quite as popular as some people thought they were going to be, but they can still be powerful marketing tools.

Make custom QR codes for your business using online QR generation tools and link those codes to holiday sales pages on your website. Once the codes are ready and you’ve tested them to make sure that they work, include them on your flyers and other ad copy.

This gives potential customers a better glimpse at everything you have available for the holiday season, and even lets you update your ads with new specials without having to print more flyers. You can even explain in the ad that new content is added regularly to keep customers coming back for more.

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