The UK telecoms regulator and competition authority has revealed their plans to auction off the new 4G bandwidth for mobile phones which is to be fully operational in 2013. With this news come questions over how this technological advancement and the services it provides will affect the way organisations can market to and communicate with their consumers.
Mobile phone marketing is already an effective method of direct marketing used by organisations because of its reach, distribution and tracking abilities. So how will this increase in the speed of mobile internet connections affect the marketing strategies of businesses?
4G is the fourth generation of mobile phone internet service and communication and has already been available in countries such as South Korea and the USA for years now. The key feature and improvement that this new generation of wireless mobile internet service will provide is:
- Speed: This technology wouldn’t be much of advancement if it did not improve significantly on speed compared to its predecessor. When it finally arrives in the UK in 2013, 4G will be able to offer high quality data rates at around 100 Mbps which works out to between 4 and 6 times faster than 3G.
So what does this increase in speed allow you to do? And how can businesses use this to their advantage when marketing?
The increase in speed that 4G will provide means that mobile device users will be able to exploit the full capabilities of their online multimedia applications which includes uploading images as well as downloading and streaming music and videos at a very high quality.
This means that when you’re watching a video or streaming some multimedia content from your phone there won’t be any delays or a lot of buffering like there has been.
Organisations that currently use or are looking to use mobile devices as a form of direct marketing will also be able to benefit from these improvements to the mobile internet service. As well as being cost effective and providing excellent reach and targeting, what 4G adds is the opportunity to vary the content sent to mobile devices.
Marketing campaigns will be able to be more adventurous with adding images, videos and multimedia content with their direct marketing because they know that 4G will support such initiatives, whereas, the relatively slow connection speed of 3G has meant most people choose not to spend an eternity waiting for a video to download etc.
4G will also allow people to read their emails and update their social media profiles faster and with applications at their disposable due to the increased functionality that 4G will add to their online mobile experience. It won’t be long before the introduction of 4G to the UK brings about a plethora of 4G specific phones which will undoubtedly be able to make communication between organisations and their target market even smoother.
If you want to discuss how your marketing could develop and adapt to embrace new technologies, contact GSD via twitter at @goldsanddigital or email the team on info@goldsanddigital.com. Alternatively, call us in the office on 020 7269 9885.