I tackled the mobile advertising industry in my last post. Having heard that SMS marketing is in a resurgence in the UK and Europe, I'm tempted to revisit my old stomping ground - what we seem to call mobile marketing, as opposed to advertising.

Direct-to-consumer SMS marketing has been around for nearly ten years in Europe now, so you'd think there would have been some lessons learnt by now. Unfortunately, the majority of  those providing these services are, well, grubby little businesses. Sure there are some lovely respectable public companies in the mix, too, but the whole landscape has a tendency to be brought to its knees, in terms of respectability, by the 'I was just spammed by my bank' anecdotes most of us have heard or experienced. Anyone who has ever worked with me will know this is something I've banged on about at length for years. Most mobile marketers have either disagreed with me or ignored me, which I've taken as a good sign.

One of the primary lessons learned over a decade of interacting with consumers over their mobile devices is what I used to call 'the unique way they interact with their 0-9 keypad'. These days it's as likely to be a QWERTY keyboard or a touchscreen, but the principle is the same. Context is king...

Something which sometimes confounds mobile marketers is that people reply to their campaigns. Odd that, given that the primary purpose of their mobile phone is two-way communication (as I keep saying, stop looking for the killer app of the mobile phone, it's been found: the ability to communicate with others wherever you are).

Often it's a tiny percentage who respond, but they are usually the people who matter (they're the ones likely to switch: angry customers; or the ones likely to be upsold: interested customers). Consequently, I've found that the best mobile marketing 'campaigns' (and I'll come on to the terminology in a second) quickly turn into mobile CRM. Far from being 'successful' because 99.9% of people blindly followed your instructions, the 'campaigns' that I've worked on that produce the best results have been the ones that have truly engaged large numbers of the target audience. They reply. They call you. They interact with you. They don't just text a code from an on-pack promotion.

The best mobile marketing becomes mobile CRM, whether you want it to or not.

And you should want it to. Because the messages your brand sends to customers are destined to become, once we have spam folders on our phones, spam, unless they're useful. The best 'campaigns' aren't campaigns at all - they're services. Utility is king.

And the good news for mobile marketers is that services save you from wearing out your shoe leather winning campaign after campaign. Services are annuity revenues.