Gone are the days when your customers browsed the internet and did their online shopping from a desktop computer. Nowadays, people use their mobile devices to access their favorite sites, search the web, and buy from their favorite stores. Over half of all web traffic is now mobile, and mobile e-commerce (or “m-commerce”) accounts for 70.4% of all online purchases.
As an entrepreneur, you should embrace these changes if you want to stay competitive. Mobile marketing is an essential component of any modern marketing strategy.
What Is Mobile Marketing?
A mobile marketing strategy uses advertisements, effective UX design, email, mobile-optimized websites, social media, apps, or a combination of these options to reach a target audience via their tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices.
Mobile marketing best practices include optimizing marketing assets, so they are easily read on small screens, and designing online stores that make it simple for customers to place an order with just a few clicks.
Although mobile marketing is a relatively new field, the classic principles of marketing still apply to it. For example, you still have to conduct research of your audience and draw up buyer personas for mobile platforms and make sure their products align with their target demographics. Mobile marketing is about getting the right content in front of the right audience at the right time.
Mobile Marketing & Data Analysis
Analytics are key to a mobile marketing strategy. They let you see how your target audience is interacting with your content and brand online across different platforms and mobile devices. This is useful because this enables you to tailor your messaging to people who fit your buyer personas, thus maximizing your mobile marketing efforts.
For example, comparing analytical data from your Twitter and Facebook mobile marketing campaigns might show that your customers favor one over the other. This gives you valuable insight into how and where you should be spending your mobile marketing budget.
How To Appeal To A Mobile Audience
Fifty-two percent of customers say they are less inclined to interact with a company if they don’t offer a smooth mobile user experience. To excel in mobile marketing, it is advisable to think about the journey your customers will take as they discover, engage with, and ultimately buy from your brand.
This means making sure your site, marketing emails, and social media posts are accessible and engaging to mobile users.
Ask yourself these questions:
1. Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?
Your business website is at the heart of your mobile marketing efforts. It must display well across a range of mobile devices. Visitors must be able to view your content without having to zoom or scroll to the side. All content must load quickly and be easy to read. If your pages don’t load within seconds, your visitors will likely go elsewhere, and monetizing your site will be hard.
If you are building a website using an all-in-one solution or design software, choose a service that prioritizes mobile-response design. For example, Boxmode templates are fully mobile-responsive and designed with mobile marketing in mind. Don’t forget to optimize landing pages and opt-in forms. As a general rule, the fewer fields a form has, the easier it will be to access on mobile devices.
Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test tool gives you immediate feedback on your site. It tells you whether your pages are mobile-responsive and shows you how a website displays on a smartphone.
2. Are Your Marketing Emails Mobile-Friendly?
Emails are a mobile marketing staple. Your recipients are likely to delete an email that doesn’t display well on their mobile devices. If you have a CTA, place it above the fold, so your reader doesn’t have to scroll down. If you include buttons in your message, make sure they are clear and readily responsive. Make subject lines short and to the point. If your recipient can click through to a landing page, ensure that it’s optimized for a mobile screen.
3. Are Your Social Media Posts & Pages Mobile-Optimized?
Create an approachable, yet professional, social media presence with content that looks good on small mobile devices. Best practices vary across platforms; you’ll need to do a bit of research to discover what kind of posts layouts look best. For example, on Instagram, ideal image sizes are 1080px by 1080px for square photos and 1080 px by 1350 px for portrait images.
4. Are You Engaging With Your Target Audience?
Your business needs to engage with its followers. If you are advertising on social media, you need to remember that it was originally designed to encourage human interaction, not to serve as an advertising or mobile marketing platform. You don’t have to reply to every message, but you should invest time in showing that you care what people are saying about your brand. Use hashtags carefully. Be discerning. Irrelevant hashtags appear “spammy” and will leave a negative impression.
5. Have You Optimized Your Mobile Ads?
Google Ads makes it easy to set up highly customized ad campaigns, and they offer free in-depth guides to help you get the most out of their ad display network. You can choose which mobile devices, mobile carriers, places, search keywords, and audience demographics you want to target. You can create ads that appear as images or text on mobile devices. With the help of Google Web Designer, you can create HTML5 ads. If you want to use in-app advertising, you may use additional formats, including video ads.
Consider using extensions that expand an ad. They provide viewers with additional information and interactivity. For example, the “click to call” extension lets the person viewing your ad call your business directly. Other useful extensions include mobile site links, which let you provide links to specific website pages within your advertisement. These extensions don’t incur any additional costs and can lift your mobile marketing to the next level.
6. Have You Explored In-App Marketing?
According to FinancesOnline, an average person uses 25 apps monthly. Creating your own mobile app helps your target audience engage with your business, purchase your products, and promote engagement. Consider offering users some valuable content, such as a set of video tutorials, in exchange for an email address or phone number you can use for mobile marketing purposes.
It’s a good idea to use push notifications in the app to alert users to new promotions, product launches, and to deliver messages based on their user profile. In-app notifications are also useful for improving engagement and increasing conversions. For example, you can send users messages that encourage them to interact with new app features or content.
If developing your own app isn’t an option, services like Google AdMob can match you with developers keen to monetize their apps. Social media platforms, including Facebook, let you set up ad campaigns tailored to groups of people you think will be interested in your products or services. This could be a valuable part of your mobile marketing strategy. You can use built-in analytics to track the success of your campaigns and run split tests.
Gaming apps are incredibly popular, and the mobile gaming industry is worth over $10 billion per year. This presents business owners with a fantastic opportunity to advertise their products and services to players as they play a game on their mobile devices, a mobile marketing strategy known as “in-game mobile marketing.”
7. Are You Targeting Your Audience By Their Location?
Smartphone users appreciate location-targeted content and advertising because it tells them what products and services are available nearby. There are several avenues open to you if you want to try this kind of mobile marketing. For instance, if you have developed an app, you can ask the user to share their location and then program the app to send them location-based content in real-time.
Other forms of location-based marketing work over days or even weeks. For instance, you could create a campaign that delivers advertising to customers who have visited your store before—or even a store owned by your main competitor. Historical data gives valuable insight into your audience’s behaviors. If you don’t have your own app, you can set up location-targeted advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook.
8. Are You Split Testing Your Mobile Marketing Campaigns?
A/B testing is a key pillar of mobile marketing. For example, you might find that a video-based ad is more effective than a photo, or that one email subject line clearly outperforms another.
9. Could SMS and MMS Marketing Be A Smart Choice For Your Business?
Almost all SMS (short messaging service) messages (98%) get opened, and most (90%) are opened within just 3 minutes. These channels are direct, personal, and effective. Respect your audience. It is better to specify who is sending the message, keep it short, and end with a call to action.
If you want to use pictures or GIFs, try MMS (multimedia messaging service). Because they let you include visual media, MMS marketing messages are more shareable. They can be an effective part of a multi-channel campaign that builds brand awareness and provide a direct link to an online store or landing page.
Takeaway
Mobile marketing is here to stay. Whatever the size of your business, your budget, or your target audience, it’s essential to your success. Most internet users spend hours on their mobile devices every day. How you choose to take advantage of this is up to you. When properly planned, mobile marketing can be the key to unlocking a whole new market or, at the very least, engaging with people who already support your business.