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.
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.
Social Media
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.
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