The Internet is flooded with mobile marketing tips, tricks, tools, and strategies, especially during the pandemic-induced spike in digital marketing. It’s tricky to determine which approachable route is best in terms of delivering the results everyone is looking for. The pressure piles on when you consider that mobile is the most personal and targeted marketing channel available. There are endless options in terms of opportunities and strategies that can be implemented to reach mobile consumers and engage them. As with any other marketing channel, the tech is constantly evolving, and the marketing strategies end up adapting to the changes—but where should one start?
Whether you’re an online marketer with limited experience in the mobile realm, or a bootstrapped entrepreneur that needs to figure out mobile marketing with limited resources—hope is not lost, and you too can tackle mobile marketing like a champ.
Research Your Audience
You must conduct research on your targeted audience. You may have already done so to a degree while coming up with customer personas in the past, but this time you would need to take it to the next level to determine their social networks of choice, and the messaging style to which they would respond best. While you’re at it, research your options in terms of data management for segmentation purposes, reporting, and analysis. It’s important to gain deeper insights on your funnels, retention, user cohorts, and lifetime value.
It’s highly recommended to also put some effort into also researching your competitors. What are they putting in front as the big USP? Look into their value points, the nature of their promotions, and how they are communicating with the audience you are also trying to reach. Through their efforts, you can gain some insight well in advance in terms of what works and what doesn’t work.
Before You Begin
You must decide what you want your objective(s) to be for each campaign. Depending on your product/service, the objective can be anything such as a certain percentage increase in opt-ins, registrations, website traffic, app downloads, game plays, coupon distribution/redemption, social media engagement, and more.
If you are promoting a mobile app for app downloads, the management of that campaign would be different than if you are just looking for eyeballs to see your ad on mobile. Depending on what you are promoting and the objective, mobile channels can change or be entirely different.
Most sites today are already mobile ready, which refers to being supported for mobile. If your main website is not mobile ready, you must tend to that first. Regardless of any campaign this is a must. Most views come from mobile, and not PC.
For each relevant campaign, you need to create a mobile-friendly website/landing page/supported content item OR a separate mobile app. As far as messaging is concerned, less is more, so keep messaging at a minimum by writing in short bursts, and incorporate well-placed visuals with a clear call to action across all touchpoints. Don’t forget to add tracking links and pixels for tracking purposes.
Location is the biggest advantage of mobile marketing, for targeting purposes and being relevant by location. As such, check if Location Based Advertising (LBA) is needed and right for your objectives.
Mobile Marketing Strategy Ideas
There are many traditional marketing approaches that can be tweaked to be mobile-first, such as mobile-friendly email marketing campaigns, or vertical video marketing campaigns on dedicated mobile social apps .
Then there are other unique ideas that may be worth exploring if relevant in an effort to really stand out. These ideas include geofencing, the implementation of augmented reality, and user generated content campaigns if you have a strong community. You may also want to explore using other third party solutions and indexes for promoting your brand on mobile, or even using external push services to further nudge your target audience.
Mobile Marketing Success Stories For Inspiration
There are many mobile marketing success stories one can gain inspiration from, as highlighted by SingleGrain, and companies wouldn’t necessarily need deep pockets to implement many of the strategies carried out by large companies.
Airbnb went the route of capitalizing on user-generated images across popular social media platforms, which quickly led to influencer collaborations. In many ways, they turned into an engaging travel forum in doing so.
Dove made headlines a few years ago with their real beauty campaign, and more recently took things another step forward: “Project #ShowUs, a collection of 10,000+ images of women and non-binary individuals in 39 countries that offer a more inclusive vision of beauty for all media and advertisers to use.”
Slack went an unconventional route, and capitalized on customer relations by creating (and consistently enhancing) a stellar customer experience in their app. Their product offers plenty for everyone to love, and in the event of troubleshooting, response time is quick.
Before taking the plunge, we highly recommend you get up to speed on where mobile marketing fits into the online marketing mix, and get a good understanding of its benefits and limitations. You will then realize that when it comes to messaging, one size will not fit all, especially when you consider things like text messages, versus multimedia messages, versus mobile emails. All in all, the power of mobile media, in-app advertising, applications promotion\ advertising, and advertising campaigns are boundless; and there is no time like the present to begin tapping into that realm.