During this holiday shopping season, consumers are consulting mobile devices for holiday shopping more than ever before, according to eMarketer. Smartphones are quickly becoming on-the-go shopping assistants, a la iPhone’s Siri.

Shoppers are using mobile devices for product research, online shopping and help in making purchase decisions while in brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, certain product categories like books, CDs and DVDs, video games, clothing and electronics drive more smartphone usage than others.

This time of year, it is important to be in the consumers’ eyes, especially if you have an e-commerce web site. One easy way to become visible to the mobile customer and get quick results is to segment your pay per click (PPC) traffic to specifically target mobile devices. One important item to note is that you do not have to have a mobile website in order use mobile targeting.

You can simply target mobile devices in the Settings tab of each PPC campaign that you create. Also note that you should exclude mobile devices from your desktop campaigns in order to avoid your campaigns from competing against one another.

According to Google, the average mobile cost-per-click (CPC) is approximately $0.05 to $0.10 cheaper than its counterpart desktop CPC, so not only will your ad be visible to mobile visitors, but you will also be paying less for these visitors.

I received an email message that CommScore reported 14 million United States users scanned a QR code in the month of June.  This begs the question, what are folks doing to leverage QR in their business?  We continue to see the reports that smart phone shipments are outpacing PC shipments; it becomes when not if they overtake the number of PCs.  All of these smart phones present opportunities for keeping your customers engaged, which means at a minimum one must have a mobile-friendly web site and content specifically developed for the growing number of smart phone users.

I think the US lags behind Asia and Europe in harnessing the marketing power of QR.  I expect we will see more uses for QR, which will shortly morph into near field communication (NFC), by advertisers in ways that continue to improve quality of service and communication with their audience.  For instance in Asia, one can scan a QR whilst commuting to work in the morning, and upon returning home that evening the product, will be at their door ready for use in the evenings dinner.  Other examples I have found include embedding a QR/Chip into monuments for our departed to be remembered in a multi-media format.  Headstone maker’s need only embed an inexpensive chip into the stone/vase/niche.  If you have been to a museum in the past year, you have probably experienced this technology at work, when you scan and listen to the art history.  Disney World’s Epcot even used this technology to allow children to engage in an episode of Kim-Possible, while mom and dad make their happy hour pub crawl through the world show case, brilliant.

The mobile market is booming.  In fact, one would be hard pressed to find someone without a cell phone. However, a big question is what strategies businesses should use to reach people on their mobile devices? Businesses have to learn how people interact with their mobile devices, in order to craft a proper strategy to reach them.

It’s no surprise that mobile users are constantly on the move and looking to get information quickly when searching for it.  Therefore, businesses have to make information quickly and easily accessible to them.  For example, let’s say a business has a landing page with a lead generation form. In order to get more details, a person has to fill out the form. This is fine for computer users, but probably not the best way to reach mobile users. It would be better to have a landing page with a phone number that says to call for more information.  For a mobile user, calling a business is easier than trying to fill out an online form.

Another way to reach mobile users is through geo-targeting; specifically physical location targeting. Basically, physical location targets device-based location signals and only shows your ads to people who are physically in your target area.  A local business can truly benefit from using this targeting strategy.  Let’s say a couple from North Carolina is visiting family in New York. They are driving around looking for a good restaurant. They check their mobile device and receive an advertisement from a restaurant that is only 2 miles away and decide to try it out. This restaurant benefitted by using physical location targeting. If they had just targeted the New York area, they might have missed out on the couple from North Carolina. However, by doing physical location targeting they were able to reach the North Carolina couple because the couple’s actual location was only a few miles from their restaurant.

They are many different strategies which can be employed to reach mobile users, and businesses should sit down and decide on the best ways for their business to proceed. Once the strategy is created, implement it and make adjustments as you go.