This week we wanted to put the spotlight on the Mobile Marketing track taking place on day 2 of this year’s SMWF Europe (27th-28th March, Olympia London). According to a recent report by Berg Insight, the mobile advertising market is growing by over a third year-on-year, and is expected to be worth EUR 17.2billion by 2016.

The growth in this market is due to the surge in smart phone ownership, which has also led to a knock on popularity for location based services; creating a new frontier for consumer marketing. We caught up with Omid Ashtari, SMWF speaker and Director of Business Development for one of the trend’s leading services, Foursquare.

Industry commentators suggest that, while location services continue to increase in popularity, we’re yet to see the deep service integration that geo-location technology could provide. Services in development currently will see location enabled apps able to react not just to where you are, but also what’s going on around you and where you’ve been before.

For example, hypothetical future apps could be able to use your location to realise you’re about to hit traffic and re-schedule that important meeting that you’re about to miss.

“People in 5 years will probably wonder how they previously lived without location aware apps,” says Ashtari. “We can and will provide our users with so much valuable information about their surroundings that they will perceive their cities in a completely different way.”

For the time being, services like Foursquare are allowing local businesses to deliver their marketing content with a level of relevance previously unheard of. “Foursquare allows bricks and mortar retailers to engage in new ways with potential and loyal customers alike,” says Ashtari. “Users can discover this content when they are in a specific location which makes it immediately relevant to them, offering innovative ways for marketers to deliver a truly novel experience.”

With 130 million people worldwide using navigation apps or services in 2011, and that number predicted to grow to 340 million by 2016, the question is how deeply could location apps integrate with people’s lives in the next few years?

Come along to SMWF on 28th March to hear more about growing mobile marketing trends. Omid will be joined in the Mobile Marketing workshops by senior representatives including Google, Hootsuite, eBay and Centrica. Click here to find out more and register.

Related articles

• Why 2012 is the year for location based marketing. (socialmedia-forum.com)
• New conference tracks announced for #SMWF Europe 2012 (socialmedia-forum.com)