Is there still a blogger or marketer that doesn’t possess an iPhone or BlackBerry? Are there any people who don’t have a smartphone? A lot. But with the continuing drop of smartphone prices and the clear market demand for ‘smart’ mobile appliances, it won’t take long before most people will have a combination of a phone, camera, GPS and mobile internet device in their pocket.

While everybody is watching the social media evolutions, developments in the mobile sphere go a lot faster: it’s one of the reasons why we often advise companies to make work of improving their mobile communication now. Mobile search is already here and mobile email is getting more and more important.The combination of place, person, communication and content also result in an explosion of so-called location-based services. You can conceive this concept very widely but services such as “new” social media phenomenon Foursquare can be definitely included.

Today, Foursquare is still in the stadium where a lot of people are using it to say where they are, but it is more and more becoming a relevant promotion and marketing service. Relevant to both advertiser and user.

I live in “the middle of nowhere”. And even here, there is somebody who understands the benefit of a service such as Foursquare for customer and marketing purposes: a restaurant that offers a free cocktail to every person who comes and signs in with Foursquare (off course hoping to get a good review). It is a simple example but an example indeed.

Who is taking the 1.5 billion USD?

Whether it will be Foursquare, Facebook Places (which gets a lot of criticism), Gowalla, Google or no matter which other player (think about the many possibilities Google is already offering and will keep on introducing): it does not matter. What is sure is that the market of location-based commercials will grow fast and that new models and services will arise.

According to a recent rapport of ABI Research, by 2015, advertisers will spend approximately 1.5 billion USD on location-based services.

Often such predictions are wrong. But for once I think these expectations might be too conservative.

The market isn’t mature yet, there are different players and models and there is still resistance amongst many people (the mobile phone is really a private thing, an important reason why direct marketing through SMS has to be approached very carefully).  

But still: recent other investigations show that a lot of people are open to it. How do you succeed as marketer?

The answer is simple: be relevant and creative, think from the “user” perspective and make location-based and other mobile marketing efforts a part of your global marketing strategy.

J-P De Clerck is a 360 degrees interactive marketing, content, conversion and social media consultant. You can connect with him on Twitter, his site or his personal blog.