How can you use mobile marketing to benefit your business?

28 October 2019

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy that seeks to reach your target audience via their mobile – be it through your website, email, SMS and MMS, social media or through apps.

Worldwide smartphone usage is increasing exponentially and according to Statista, there are 3.3 billion smartphone users in the world today, which means that in the world of wireless, 42.78% of the world’s population have a smartphone today. We have long since reached the point where mobile web browsing has overtaken the desktop, so when it comes to marketing and brand engagement, the mobile is undoubtedly a game-changer.

Creating a mobile marketing strategy

Building a good experience for your mobile audience can be supported through website optimization, configuring email sends for mobile devices, taking advantage of the SMS and MMS channels or maybe building a mobile app.

Of course, every business will be different and you need to take into account your budget constraints (an app development cost estimation tool can be helpful), as well as your industry and target markets. However, if you are looking to build an effective mobile marketing strategy, the first step in this process is to understand your target audience and how they interact with your business, so creating buyer personas is a great way to help with this.

#1 – Create your mobile buyer personas

Buyer Personas represent your ideal customers and by creating a profile that outlines their background and job role as well as their needs, challenges, pain points, and goals, this will help you identify how best to market to them. You will need to focus on their mobile behaviour too – their usage, browsing and purchase habits.

To help you build more accurate personas your own website Google Analytics can be a useful source of information when looking at traffic numbers and mobile marketing statistics can be a helpful resource when looking more generally at audience behaviour.

Customer and prospect surveys can be a useful tool to find out about mobile web & email usage and A/B testing can help you understand the success rates of landing pages, the timing of emails or subject lines in relation to mobile interaction – giving you a better insight into user behaviour.

#2 – Establish your goals

There are a number of factors that will help you build an effective mobile marketing strategy. The first point to clarify might be asking “Is any channel already addressing the needs of our mobile audience?” It will be important to understand what is already being done, establish whether it is working and how this is being measured.

·  Consider what you expect to achieve from your mobile marketing?

·  Identify who your target audience for mobile marketing is?

·  Think about your mobile buyer personas and how they might differ?

·  Which channels offer the most appropriate solution for your business, in terms of cost and audience reach, e.g. would an app be appropriate or even necessary for your business?

#3 – Set your KPIs

Similar to any other marketing campaign, it is important to set practical and quantifiable KPIs (key performance indicators) that can measure the success of any mobile campaigns – some examples include:

·  Acquisition – create mobile-friendly emails with clear CTAs (calls to action). If you are using forms think about the mobile user – too many fields might put them off. Make sure buttons are accessible to encourage better click-throughs – in essence, keep it simple!

·  Engagement – to improve SEO make sure your website is mobile responsive, be that content, blog posts, landing pages or pages that provide information about your products or services.

·  Customer Service – often perhaps a missed marketing opportunity, make sure it is easy for customers to reach you with straightforward click-to-call buttons, ideal for smartphone users.

Key to identifying the right KPI’s is to consider what you are trying to achieve – improving & converting more traffic, generating more qualified leads or increasing conversions from your email campaigns.

#4 – Examining your mobile traffic

Tools such as Google Analytics are a great way to help you understand mobile usage of your website. Audience…Mobile…Overview – shows you metrics such as sessions and bounce rates.

On the Site Content dashboard, from the Secondary dimension menu, select Users…Mobile (including tablet) to see the most viewed pages on your website by mobile web traffic.

Looking at user behaviour can help you understand which search queries are leading mobile traffic to your site, the content that engages this audience and establish which pages might need to be optimized for mobile browsing.

#5 – Building a mobile-friendly website

If you look at website browsing, desktops still win in relation to engagement when you look at time spent, bounce rates or page views. However Google’s mobile-first indexing which now uses the mobile version of your website as the baseline for determining site ranking, means that it is vital that the needs of your mobile audience are taken into account.

With 57% of users stating they wouldn’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site (socPub) your goal must be to create a seamless and positive web experience for the mobile user. To a search engine, a site that is considered “mobile-friendly” is one that returns no mobile-specific errors, where content loads quickly and this content fits on the screen without side-to-side scrolling or zooming.

·  Site Testing – google has a mobile-friendly test site which you can use to see what might need improving or you can use a Mobile Phone Emulator.

·  Site Speed – when every second counts, page loading speed is also a big consideration because this will affect your search engine rankings, so you need to think about including truncated titles and meta-descriptions.

·  Google AMP – there is also Google AMP to think about – the Google ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ project was launched in 2015 to help marketers reach their audience more quickly with pages that were “AMP optimised” by loading them really quickly for phone or table users. However this is a technical solution which needs careful consideration as to whether it is appropriate for your website – find out more at AMP from Google – what you need to know

·  Improve SEO – sounds simple, but it’s a vast topic – a good starting point to help increase your website traffic is the advice given in this helpful article Improve your SEO in 30 minutes and 8 steps to successful SEO.

·  Content – when it comes to content, half of consumers start mobile research with a search engine and a third will go directly to the site they want (Smart Insights). This underlines why it is important to optimise for mobile search results and create relevant content that makes it easy for your buyer personas to find you online. Remember when designing content, to be effective, it is important that you understand who your audience is – consider whether they are a site visitor, content consumer, or an email recipient.

#6 Sending mobile friendly emails

According to eMailmonday mobile accounts for over 40% of email opens, so designing your email campaigns so they are suitable for your mobile audience is no longer a choice. It is today’s reality if you want to maintain and improve your engagement levels.

Whilst most email marketing providers will use responsive designs, there are still some key factors you should think about:

·   CTAs – should be early in the message and buttons should be easy to access.

·  Message – Keep “from” fields to no more than 23 characters and “subject” lines up to 38 characters.

·  Landing Pages – creating mobile friendly landing pages will help to increase conversion rates and avoid high bounce rates from mobile users. Key aspects to this are making sure you keep it relevant, that you communicate value clearly and make the next steps obvious.

·  Forms – keep them simple and to a minimum and make sure images resize on different devices.

·  Layout – verify the page looks good both horizontally and vertically.

#7 Using SMS and MMS marketing channels

SMS marketing is immediate, direct and offers a high open rate. With over 3.6 billion users able to receive SMS messages – this and MMS (multi-media) channels offer a big opportunity for mobile marketing, because you are sending a message directly to a customer or potential customer’s personal device.

However being personal data it is vital that you educate yourself on the do’s and don’ts – you will need to consider SMS marketing compliance and the new GDPR regulations – which came into force on 25th May 2018.

That aside, you may also ask Is it relevant for my strategy? – because it is so personal, even if you are adhering to all necessary regulations and communicating with opted in recipients, this data still needs responsible handling and may not always be the right format to use. So it should really only be considered as one possible channel within the wider context of your overall mobile marketing campaign.

#8 How can you utilise social channels?

Making sure you have a strong social presence and taking into account that your users are most likely to interact with your brand on social sites from a mobile device, is key to planning your mobile marketing strategy.

Of course your business activity will determine which social channels are best to help build your brand – using strong, engaging imagery and clear CTAs when you post on channels like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat can represent a great opportunity to get your message across when & where your mobile users are.

·  Mobile Specific Paid Social Campaigns – targeting options for ads on these platforms represent an opportunity to achieve a great ROI, by letting you reach the right audience at the right time and on the right device.  However it is important to consider that searches by mobile and desktop users may well differ, so you will need to think about what will be most effective for your mobile audience.

·  Let’s not forget about video! – it goes without saying that the desire for video content is growing exponentially, so investing in the creation of good quality video content to share on social media is one way to make your brand stand out. However If your budget doesn’t stretch to a full blown media production, there are plenty of tools out there like Biteable which are quick & easy to use and offer another way to engage effectively with your audience.

#9 Should you develop a mobile app?

There are many benefits that a mobile app can bring to your business in support of your sales & marketing goals – it can broaden your product or service range, bring you in line with your competitors, drive customer engagement and offer an alternative platform supporting e-commerce. However with millions of apps out there in the marketplace to compete with, it is vital that you do your homework first to establish whether it is right for you.

Creating an app is a big financial and time investment for your business, so key to developing a successful app is to focus on creating a solution to a problem or obstacle that your customers may be facing – your app needs to bring real value to your customers.

As with any other marketing channel you should consider how the app could be used for acquisition – through extra features or more mobile content in exchange for user’s contact information?

Think about how the app can encourage user engagement and drive conversions through push or in-app notifications. Typical examples of push notifications include reminders, promotional messages, CTAs for specific events or goals and personalised messages based on user profiles. With in-app notifications you can direct your users’ attention to specific actions, messages or features – all of which offer opportunities for greater user engagement.

In Summary 

As a part of the mobile generation, building a good experience for your mobile audience that benefits your business has to be at the core of your digital marketing strategy. Whilst it maybe that not all of the tactics we have outlined will be necessary for your business, there are undoubtedly some mobile marketing channels that will help you reach a bigger audience – we hope that we have helped you on your way!

Disclaimer: Please note that this blog only contains general information and insights about legal matters. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. Kompass.com