What will users do with their cellphones three years from now? Always more industry insiders are ready to bet that Search will be a killer application.
It’s also true that one could build a parallel universe with all the fancy predictions about mobile and there’s probably one out there where users are holed up in their homes, fearing to go outside where they’d get bombarded by local coupons and nearby strangers looking to hook up in an otherwise deserted world….But the leap of faith in this case is not an impossible one. So let’s assume that the future is really going to shape up as a proximity marketing playground.

Market firms claim that Mobile Search will gobble up 70% of the soon- to- be $3billion dollars mobile advertising business, and that should happen in just about 3 years from now. Understanding how to get into the game early and how to out win competition is therefore critical for any business. Let’s take a look at the basics steps.

Mobile Local Search
A little bit of background. There are three major local search engines –Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing, who collect data from business owners as well as from other directories, with Localeze, InfoUSA, Acxiom and YellowPages being the most authoritative. The reverse is also true: all these services  and hundreds more, that are built on a local business knowledgebase, fetch their data through Google, Yahoo or Bing indexes. (The folks at Getlisted.org have compiled a great list of resources).
Now, local search is being accessed always more via mobile browsers. Need a proof? Check Google’s recent announcement of its new Mobile Local Search. This video provides also a nice visualization of what you should expect the users to do, if you’re willing to get over its goofiness.

=>Take home #1: Being listed and ranking high on any of this search engines is the step zero in any proximity marketing strategy.

In order to be featured in the Google Maps Listing, business owner need to claim their business. To rank high, you could use specific SEO tactics. But since most humans have no clue of what SEO is (and even most marketers), Google has decided to take the Yellow Pages route -dumb down its advertising service so that you don’t need an agency to post a simple ad!-  and has announced a new local advertising product that requires zero knowledge of keywords bidding. All you’re asked to do is pay a monthly fee and you’re good to go.

A lots of interesting analytics is included in the package. As an additional perk you get the option to link the ad to a Google voice number so they know which calls are being referred from the search ad. The voice number allows businesses that don’t have websites the ability to track the performance of their ad. For now the option is limited to San Francisco and San Diego. But it’s not hard to see this service scaling up very soon on a national basis.

Local Reviews
Want some reasons to start paying attention to local reviews sites and applications? Take this:
- Consumers love them: Zagat is the 77th most downloaded app on the Apple App Store. Yelp is growing at about 80 percent a year, with 25 million visitors in August. And the list could go on.
- Search engines like them too: Reviews are like links for a website. They determine the ranking of your business in local search. In SEO words (ah I did it again, sorry) this is like link building, with the difference that you can only try to influence users’ reviews but you can’t buy them.
Think that Yelp is only for restaurants? Think twice: Yelp’s influence on users’ buying intentions ranges from travels to pet stores to hotels and nails salons.
So a wise thing to do would be hurrying up to unlock your business Yelp account and make sure that it shows up in the results when people use their iPhone’s browser.

Get found by local Twitters
Twitter users are soon to be offered the option to opt-in and make the location of their tweets public. Combine that with the fact that tweets are public and you can use simple tools to monitor conversations by keywords (e.g. looking for a used in Orange Country). and you see where I’m going.
It’s not complicated and it can be highly rewarding. TweetLater or TweetDeck are  easy to use tools to manage your Twitter account, without having a degree in Social Media.
What you can do on Twitter, through Twitter? …the sky is the only limit. Just to stimulate your fantasy, here are a few examples collected by Forbes. But the best thing to do would be reading Twitterville by Shel Israel: it has plenty of best and worst practices on what to do once you get over the “I’m on Twitter, now what?” stage.

• Coupons.California Tortilla, a chain of 39 Mexican restaurants from Rockville,also uses its Twitter feed @caltort to spread passwords that must be spoken at checkout to be redeemed.
• Sales Channel. Customers of the Coffee Groundz, a Houston java joint, send direct messages to the Coffee Groundz tweet account to place their orders (and the manager is “Twitterized” almost 24/7 via his BlackBerry). So what? Well, Twitter supposedly has not only increased its sales 20-30% but also helped Coffee Gourndz steal share from the nearby Starbucks.
• Direct Sales.The Roger Smith Hotel in New York City uses Twitter search to find new customers and offers them a 10% discount off the lowest-rate rooms. The hotel estimates that Twitter and other social media have brought in $15,000 to $20,000 in additional sales
• Mobile Marketing. Food trucks tweet their location from iPhones to let customers know where they will be. Kogi, a fleet of Korean BBQ trucks in Los Angeles has been doing this for months and seems very pleased with the results (and media coverage).
• “Tweet-Ups”. Host regular meetings–or “tweet-ups”—of local tweeters. They can bring hundreds of customers into a store.
• Timely Communication. When a major snowstorm hit Bartlesville, United Linen used Twitter to let customers know deliveries would be delayed.

Mobile Applications

When it comes to the much hyped mobile app world, think of it this way. We haven’t seen anything yet. Businesses are only now starting to experiment and integrate the possibilities of mobile apps in terms of branding, commerce and CRM.
Developing an application is not an easy endeavor, neither is it cheap. Most apps take at least six months of full-time work and cost between $20,000 and $150,000 to develop, according to Forrester Research.

How to reach those very valuable customers?

As a business owner, your data are already there through apps like Yelp, Eventful, Where, Yowza, YellowPages, etc. So go back to point 1, and make sure your listing has the correct data. Nothing is worse than finding the wrong address or phone number and the customer will blame it on you not on a Google…

Other options are also emerging. One of the most interesting one is Aloqa, a mobile search company that sends users information about events, friends and other data based on their location. Aloqa is sourcing content from different sources (Google, Yelp, and Eventful, etc), to create channels inside the app which customers can activate. But the interesting thing is that the company has also an API so that any publisher could push content to their users on an Aloqa channel. So if you want to be Smart, test their platform. It is a much more effective (time and money wise) solution than building a new app and having to promote it.

Augmented Reality

Ok, you’re probably over-dosed from AR these days. But here’s the interesting thing you should look at: there are companies who integrate their AR proximity based platform into an existing iPhone application.

Mind-blowing? Probably. Still a few user experience kinks need to be worked out before AR can take off .  But  if your business targets higher-end customers, this should soon be part of your proximity marketing strategy.

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There are more options available, but regardless of the channel, one thing is undeniable. Marketing is coming close to you, like a body with sensors it will soon be able to detect customers in your area and alert you.

Being found is definetely step 1. How to engage customers and communicate with them in relevant way is a different beast. Twitter provides some good examples of how the two things can be tackled. As I argued before, FourSquare is another great example.

More to come in the next posts.