What is mobile marketing? Mobile marketing uses any and all digital, social, and related content marketing channels to reach an audience via their mobile devices. Mobile Marketing Strategy A mobile marketing strategy uses a combination of marketing channels to connect with an audience through a mobile device, and generates leads through these channels. Email Marketing Did you know mobile users check their email three times more often than non-mobile users? SMS Marketing SMS marketing is another term for text marketing, which uses text messages to reach an audience with messaging related to their business. See if site visitors are indeed using mobile devices to visit your site and what devices they are using most frequently. While mobile devices have capabilities beyond the desktop computer, also keep in mind their limitations when designing a mobile site or app. In addition to optimizing your website with responsive design, and enhancing your social media presence to include mobile-specific platforms like Instagram, you can also do the following: Integrate mobile campaigns with your CRM. Here's how you can customize the mobile experience to your unique audience: Use both mobile apps and mobile sites. Get your own short code for use in SMS marketing campaigns.
As of 2018, there were 3.7 billion people who accessed the internet through a mobile device, according to Statista. That’s more than half the world’s population.
Aside from the astounding growth of mobile, many countries are witnessing people purchase smartphones first, bypassing PC ownership as their first means of internet connectivity. And marketers need to adapt.
How do inbound marketers leverage the power of the mobile device to provide a personalized experience for the user while not intruding in their day-to-day lives? The answer lies in not thinking of the mobile device as another PC, but rather another limb for your busy, active customers and prospects.
Here’s a comprehensive list of tips and tricks every marketer should know to master mobile marketing.
What is mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing uses any and all digital, social, and related content marketing channels to reach an audience via their mobile devices. In a sense, it takes a marketing strategy — its messaging, design, and target audience — and optimizes it for delivery through a smartphone or tablet.
While mobile marketing limits the use of some marketing channels you might focus more on outside of mobile, it also presents several new ones. The following is a list of marketing channels you can include in a mobile marketing strategy — we’ll go over each of them in more detail in this guide.
Mobile Marketing Strategy
A mobile marketing strategy uses a combination of marketing channels to connect with an audience through a mobile device, and generates leads through these channels. Which channels you use depends on where your buyers spend their time and what type of content they’re consuming on their smartphone.
Responsive Website
A responsive website is one that might’ve been developed originally for PC, but has been optimized for navigating to and from on a mobile device. This “responsive design” allows users to reveal buttons, text, and webpages within the website they might not be able to see on a mobile screen had it not been optimized correctly.
Making your website responsive allows it to remain a critical marketing channel when your audience switches from computer to mobile. Learn how to make your website mobile-friendly using this guide.
Mobile Search
More than 60% of Google searches take place on a mobile device, as opposed to a computer. With such a high percentage of searches done over a smartphone, search engine optimization (SEO) should be just as a big a part of a mobile marketing strategy as it would in a broader digital marketing strategy. Learn about some of the most important Google ranking factors here.
Email Marketing
Did you know mobile users check their email three times more often than non-mobile users? Not only that, but mobile is responsible for at least 50% of all email opens, according to data we collected from Campaign Monitor. Make sure the email newsletters you deliver to your subscribers are optimized for viewing on most mobile email platforms — we’ll go over how to do this in a few minutes.
Not only is social media enjoyed on mobile at least as much as it is on PC, but some social networks are designed for mobile. Instagram, the mobile photo-sharing platform, has more than 1 billion monthly active users — and all of them are required to upload photos via their mobile device. Implementing an Instagram presence — in addition to social networks like Twitter and Facebook — into your mobile marketing strategy is a no-brainer (if your audience is on Instagram, that is).
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is another term for text marketing, which uses text messages to reach an audience with messaging related to their business. Texts aren’t often associated with brands, and therefore texts from anyone other than a person’s known contacts can be dicey. Nonetheless, there are types of SMS messages that are appropriate coming from a business. I’ll elaborate later in this blog post.
Mobile App Development
It sounds like a big undertaking, but with just a few engineering resources, you can attract your audience through app marketplaces native to various smartphones. What sorts of apps should you create, you ask? That depends on what your goal is. Got an event coming up? Deliver the event schedule to attendees through a mobile app. Are you in the software business? Your customers might crave a mobile version of your product — you just don’t know it yet.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Virtual and augmented reality are two of the newest opportunities in digital marketing, and in some cases, all a user needs is a smartphone to enjoy it.
Whereas virtual reality (VR) simulates entire environments through a smartphone, augmented reality (AR) literally “augments” the appearance of what’s in front of a user when they look through their mobile screen. Numerous companies have already taken advantage of this technology to offer branded experiences to their customers and even help them make better purchase decisions. Home decor vendor, Wayfair, for example, recently created an AR feature as part of its mobile shopping app that lets its customers see what an item might look like in a certain spot in their home.
How to Launch a Mobile Marketing Strategy
To launch a mobile marketing strategy through the channels outlined above, you’ll do three things right off the bat:
- Identify your mobile users. See if site visitors are indeed using mobile devices to visit your site and what devices they are using most frequently. Knowing the devices used to visit your site most frequently, such as an iPad, Android, Blackberry, or iPhone, will help you prioritize optimization efforts toward those devices.
- Set measurable and realistic goals. If you’re just getting started with mobile marketing, this will help you determine if your tactics are working. For example, if you’re looking to start an SMS campaign, a good first goal would be to build your opt-in database. If you’d like to optimize your site for mobile, consider starting with the content assets that drive the most leads to your site as a way to dip your toe in the mobile waters.
- Create a test base. Identify some loyal customers on which to test new mobile campaigns. Mobile requires customization, and a short test phase in which users can give you feedback will help catch glitches and create a better user experience before a large-scale rollout.
Mobile’s Limitations
As I mentioned earlier, optimizing a marketing strategy for mobile devices should take into account the things users won’t have access to when switching from PC to mobile. Here are a few of those things to remember when launching your mobile marketing strategy:
- Customize for mobile, not desktops. While mobile devices have capabilities beyond the desktop computer, also keep in mind their limitations when designing a mobile site or app. Create content and designs for a small screen, no mouse, and a device on which extensive typing is unwieldy.
- Don’t require users to…
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