Mobile devices have become an integral part of our lives. We spend more than five hours a day on average glued to our smartphones. When not in our hands, our smartphone is either in our pocket or on our desk or next to our bed—but it’s always with us! A large majority of smartphone users own more than one mobile device, and more users are spending increased amounts of time on their mobile devices than ever before.
Mobile devices have become the default form-factor for content consumption for a vast majority of internet users around the world. As such, marketers across industries are compelled to focus their marketing strategies towards mobile to deliver their messages to their buyers. This mobile-driven approach to marketing has given rise to new Martech tools, channels and tactics, and marketers are increasingly inclined to combine these to harness the power of mobile.
Understanding Mobile Marketing
With mobile marketing, companies rely on a multi-channel approach to reach out to their target audiences on their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Mobile demands specialized and mobile-optimized messages and channels such as search, email, push, in-app messages and social media.
While mobile can be a powerful tool for users to consume information, it has also be a nuisance. And so marketers must ensure that they fully understand their target audience, and personalize and optimize their messages to make sure that their content is highly engaging and relevant.
Creating an Effective Mobile Marketing Strategy
Customization and personalization are critical in delivering meaningful marketing messages. And when it comes to mobile marketing, personalization become all the more important. The nature of a brand’s business plays a key part in determining the type of messages that a brand will create. For example, whether the brand is catering to a consumer market (B2C), to other businesses (B2B), the type of business it’s in (e-commerce, education, media, entertainment) and so on.
Marketers are adopting marketing technology tools to understand their users’ behavior such as demographics, mobile operating systems, search rankings, push or email open rates, click-through-rates, time spent on the message and so on. Based off of the findings from such analytics tools, brands can better understand their buyers’ journey, what type of content keeps them engaged, what time of the day they prefer to engage and much more.
Here are some key steps in the process of creating an effective mobile marketing plan.
- Identify buyer personas: Understand your target audience’s content preferences based on key data points such as demographics, objectives, purchasing power, their role in the purchasing lifecycle and so on.
- Mobile-optimize your content: More email is read on Mobile than on desktop, and majority of internet searches by US adults is done on smartphones using mobile web browsers—so always optimize your site for the mobile web.
- Set your goals and identify KPIs: Outlining your goals from your mobile marketing initiatives will help you effectively measure your mobile marketing ROI. Then, set the KPIs based on what you want to accomplish; for example, increasing conversions from email messages, improving traffic to CTA or landing pages, generating qualified inbound leads and so on.
- A/B test your campaigns: Split test your messages, content style, subject lines, delivery days/times etc. and see how this affects the open rates, click-through-rates and conversions of your email or push or in-app messaging campaigns.
- Monitor performance: There are many tools to track a native app’s performance such as Google Search Console and Apple Play Store Analytics (that help you measure your store listing visitors, clicks, conversions, time spent on page etc.). For mobile-web sites, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to monitor mobile usage of your site e.g., content engagement, mobile conversion for landing pages etc.
- Improve and optimize: Continuously monitoring your mobile marketing campaigns will help you to understand what clicks with your audience and what doesn’t. Always keep making improvements to your content, channels and tactics.
Choosing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy Channels
There is an array of mobile marketing tactics that brands can use to engage with their target audience. What works best for a brand will largely depend on the type of business you’re in, your target audience, your goal, and your budget. Broadly, we can categorize mobile marketing strategies into two wide areas:
- Mobile-app marketing
- Mobile-web marketing
Mobile-web marketing involves marketing activities for the mobile browser such as mobile site links, Google ads and mobile ad extensions, click-to-download mobile ad extensions, click-to-call extensions and local business ad extensions.
Mobile-app marketing involves all the activities that are done within a native app’s own ecosystem or within third party apps. This can include Push messaging, In-app messaging, promoted and sponsored ad posts, in-game mobile marketing, QR codes and many others.
It’s The Future of Marketing
The adoption of mobile devices is going to continue to grow. More and more internet users prefer engaging with brands on the go.
Also, while the smartphone remains the primary form factor for content consumption, followed by iPad/ tablet devices, the mobile device landscape will continue to expand over the next few years. As wearable devices such as smartwatches, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality devices gain more traction, new channels will open up, further expanding the multi-channel streams for mobile marketing.
