Mobile mania has taken the world by storm, and marketers are coming along for the ride.
Mobile phones. Where would we be without our mobile phones?
Think about it—what other piece of technology has so ubiquitously taken hold of our society? Everyone has a phone these days, much to the chagrin of landline phone service providers.
For those of us in marketing though, the rise of mobile may be a dream come true. We now have ways to gather information, track behaviors, and target our customers better than ever before. The possibilities for mobile advertising are pretty exciting—as long as you go about your efforts in the right way.
The Growth of Mobile
There’s no denying that the mobile landscape has some serious market share up for grabs. Data by Venturebeat found that mobile growth is rising in all areas:
- This year, there will be 2 billion global smartphone users
- 80 to 90 percent of time on mobile is spent on applications
- Overall time spent on mobile grew 76 percent in 2014
What does this mean for your mobile marketing? It means that your customers’ eyes aren’t leaving the screen any time soon. Leveraging the right type of mobile advertising spend can drive big benefits for your brand visibility—Venturebeat reported an all-time single-day high of 8.7 billion impressions in January 2015. Just imagine the impact that your content could make with that kind of visibility.
Context and Personalization
All of this hubbub surrounding mobile marketing is no surprise. Anywhere there’s a screen, advertising will follow. Fortunately for our marketing goals, most of us are attached to our phones at the hip. This presents plenty of new opportunities for contextual and location-based advertising.
The above report by Venturebeat discussed the value of this type of outreach. When it comes to contextually-appropriate ads, 49 percent of users will give your ads their attention, 17 percent will engage further to assess its value, and 24 percent will check out what you’re offering.
Unique Open Rates for Emails with Personalized Subject Lines by Industry, as found by Marketing Land
And speaking of contextually-relevant advertising….
Content personalization is a necessary for seeing meaningful results from your mobile marketing. A marketing study by Experian Marketing Services found that personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, yet 70 percent of brands fail to use them. On top of that, Hubspot found that 74 percent of consumers get frustrated when online advertisements, offers, and promotions were not personalized to their interests. Use the data gathered by your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to learn what your market wants to see, and how to give it to them. Combining personalization with location and contextually-relevant marketing will make your mobile outreach quite formidable in the competitive marketplace.
All that’s left now is to get it up and running.
Starting the Mobile Mania
With the benefits of mobile marketing well-established, you’re probably wondering how you can get in on the action for yourself. Keep the following tips in mind when kicking off your mobile campaign:
1. Optimize Your Site
Your site must be viewable on all mobile and tablet devices. This means rendering correctly, displaying the proper resolution to fit the screen, and ensuring your links are clickable with large, clunky fingers.
2. Mobile Paid Search
Though it might seem like a given in our conversation about mobile marketing, your paid ads must show up on mobile devices. Make sure your paid search campaigns are giving you your money’s worth for visibility, and don’t be afraid to include contact information to give your market an easy way to proceed down your sales funnel.
3. Mobile Display Campaigns
The wealth of options available to marketers these days makes diversifying your outreach a breeze. Google provides self-service platforms to let you create targeted campaigns based on location or behavior. This can be a great way to target populations looking for specific products, or users passing by storefront displays. Add a mobile display to your existing display campaigns.
4. Mobile Web Forms
Web forms work a little differently on mobile. Mobile devices offer a much smaller, narrower viewing window—cluttered displays are way more distracting on mobile devices. Any web forms your site may have, including email subscriptions, membership forms, or calls-to-action should be simple and straightforward.
5. Optimize Email
Plenty of folks forego their desktops and only check email only on mobile these days. If you want your mobile marketing to succeed, you must make sure your email templates are optimized for mobile. This includes many of the same elements listed above: easily-clickable links, simple interfaces, and easy-to-read font sizes.
A Marketer’s Job Is Never Done
Mobile advertising is a new frontier in the marketing world. The rules of the game are still being developed, but several of the classic marketing rules remain the same. You must know who you’re targeting, what they want, and what your outreach plan is. Keep an eye on your metrics during your deployment of your mobile marketing strategy. Like every other marketing campaign, you’ll likely find that your outreach will need some fine tuning as time goes on. Once you get the basics down, you can begin customizing your campaign to provide more specific and meaningful value to your organization.
