What is mobile?
When we talk about mobile, we mean tablets and smart phones, but the dusty old Nokia you’ve got in a draw somewhere counts as well.
What is mobile marketing?
Increasingly we do everything with a mobile device, so… Mobile = Social.
What do we mean by that? The action of writing a tweet, or checking in on Foursquare or even updating your Facebook is done on the move and is mobile behaviour, so mobile marketing is an aspect of social media marketing.
Mobile marketing is also tied to how you get traffic to your website, as up to 60% are coming from mobile devices, with the average being about 25%.
You need to optimise your site for mobile so that it displays correctly on mobile devices; another part of that is making it easy to connect with you and share your content on social media while using a mobile device. 46% of consumers are unlikely to return to a mobile site if it didn’t work properly during their last visit. So while mobile marketing is a microcosm of your existing marketing, it also presents unique opportunities. Let’s take a look…
How are people using their mobile devices to get online?
Potential customers who are mobile users are always on the move, so they can use them in-store to compare prices, seek bargains, or find where they might look next for what they want to buy. Because of this, the potential revenue per click is much higher.
Why should you investigate mobile?
A lot of you will already be using social media as part of your marketing, and this doesn’t seem so tough, because you’re probably using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for your personal life – or you were at least very familiar with them before you started using them as marketing tools.
Mobile is not mysterious. You don’t have to be super techy to do it, and as with social media marketing, it’s only as complicated as you want to get.
So where should you start? Let’s break it down…
The main aspects of marketing to mobile users:
Text-in Campaigns – shortcodes or QR codes that are promoted off-line, where people have to text the brand to start receiving marketing.
Text-out Campaigns – Mobile flyers and SMS runs that come branded and your recipients receive like a normal text. They are popular because they have a much higher open rate than direct marketing like emails, Over 90% of texts are read within 3 minutes.
Mobile Websites – You need to optimise your site for mobile, 74% of consumers will wait 5 seconds for a web page to load on their mobile device before abandoning the site!
Three ways to become mobile friendly are…
1 – Create a separate version of the website formatted for mobile
2 – Make your website ‘responsive’, so it automatically slides to the correct layout depending on screen size.
3 – Build your website on a blogging platform like WordPress, which comes optimised for different devices.
Mobile Banner Ads – Just like on websites, apps are ripe for banner ads, but beware – when was the last time you clicked a banner ad on purpose, rather than because of ‘fat thumb’ syndrome? As these get more targeted, they’ll be more worthwhile but depending on your budget, you should probably hold out for that.
Mobile Paid Search – just like Google Ads, but you can run campaigns that only run on mobile devices and do some very clever targetting. Look out for a future blog post on this very topic.
Apps – Strictly for bigger budgets, and we recommend you do this last, either way, this is a standalone app for your brand that can be downloaded from the Apple or Android App Stores.
That’s all folks! Like, comment, share and go try out some mobile marketing.
This blog post was written by Natalie Grout evvnt Communications Manager.