In this digital age, people are more used to using their mobile phones than anything else in their daily lives. Businesses also realize that if they want to promote their products and services effectively, they need to penetrate the mobile phones of their target customers. That is why many brands come up with their own apps, or at least a user-friendly mobile version of their website.
Businesses these days want to fully use mobile marketing. If you want to promote your business competitively, you would need to do the same. But before we dive into the different ways of creating a mobile marketing strategy, let’s define what exactly mobile marketing is.
What is Mobile Marketing?
Mobile marketing refers to the efforts made by a business to promote its brand, products, and services by means that are delivered to or viewed by the target audience on their mobile phones.
Mobile marketing can be done in the form of either organic marketing or paid mobile marketing advertising. As long as the marketing content reaches the target customers’ mobile phones, the process is referred to as mobile marketing.
Mobile marketing is a form of digital marketing, which is the most common and effective way to market a brand for a business operating in any industry or niche.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Before we move to the various mobile marketing tips that we have, let’s talk about 5 major benefits of mobile marketing.
5 Main Benefits of Mobile Marketing
The benefits of using a mobile marketing strategy, although not limited to, but most commonly are as follows.
1. Easy Access
When a company runs ads that are more likely to appear on user’s mobile phones, such as ads run on social media apps, they are more easily accessible and viewable by users. Mobile phones are used by people all day long, while desktop computers or laptops are only used when they are in their office or at their desk. This is a benefit of using mobile marketing, that is, it gives easy reach on the business’s side and easy access on the users’ side for any marketing content that the business wants to deliver to its audience.
2. Personalization
Mobile ads, or even mobile websites, can be more easily personalized or customized for people in different locations. Location services are easier to use on mobile phones than on desktop devices. Therefore, mobile marketing gives more chances to businesses to localize and personalize their marketing content.
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3. Potential for Virality
Since people use their mobile phones all the time, and for all kinds of purposes, there is more potential for a brand’s ad or content to go viral if it is viewed on users’ mobile phones. When a person sees a marketing video, for instance, they may feel the urge to share it with their friends instantly. This instinct may not last long enough for the person to get to their computer, open the browser, and go through the sharing process. But if the person views the video on his mobile phone through an app, they have the option to share it from his phone instantly by simply tapping on the ‘Share’ button on the social media app they’re using. Virality comes from shareability. This means mobile marketing increases the chances that a brand’s videos, slogans, or any other marketing content would go viral.
4. Instant Transactions
Mobile marketing strategy includes the use of technology that allows customers to make online payments via their mobile phones. This means mobile marketing gives an opportunity to customers to make more instant transactions. For instance, a customer buys a wristwatch, but when they reach the cashier, they realize they do not have enough cash to pay for the watch. They also might not have their credit or debit card with them because maybe they were not planning to actually buy anything beyond a certain amount on that day. But whatever the situation is, they will surely have their mobile phone with them.
If the shop they are at has the technology that allows customers to make transactions via mobile phones, the customer can make the instant transaction from their phone and complete their purchase, instead of having to go around looking for an ATM, or going home to get their credit card or come to buy some other day.
5. Cost-Effectiveness
Mobile marketing is more cost-effective than other forms of digital marketing. This is because, although mobile technology seems complicated, it is easier to implement than the other heavier forms of technology. Developing mobile apps these days is as simple as developing a website, and in some cases, even simpler. Many tools and software are available nowadays that enable businesses to convert their website into an app in just a few hours. This makes mobile marketing less expensive to implement than ever before.
5 Ways to do Effective Mobile Marketing
Now that we know the benefits of using a mobile marketing strategy, let’s see how a business can adopt mobile marketing and make it a vital part of its overall digital marketing plan.
1. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
The first thing to do to make your mobile marketing efforts effective is to make your website mobile-friendly. You can do this in several ways.
- Make a separate version of your website that is optimized for browsing from a mobile phone. This version will be called your mobile website.
- Convert your website into an app for being browsed on mobile phones. This is usually the most suitable way but sometimes causes a bit of inconvenience, because some people might not be willing to spare the extra few minutes it takes to search for your brand’s app in the App Store or Google Play Store, and install it.
- Create your original web design in a way that it is very responsive from the start, and adjusts itself smoothly when it’s opened on different devices.
2. Create Mobile-Friendly Content
Not just your web design, but also your web content needs to be mobile-friendly for effective mobile marketing. This means the size and format of your images, the way your videos are embedded, and the way your text is aligned on your website must be checked and arranged in a way that it can be clearly viewed from a mobile phone. Mobile-friendly content usually means larger font size, more spacing, and more carefully aligned images. Creating mobile-friendly content alone is still not enough though if your overall web design is not responsive.
3. Make Ads That Are Suitable For Social Media
Since mobile marketing is mostly done through social media, it is best if all the ads a business make are in the format that is suitable to be uploaded onto social media sites. Sometimes, the resolution or file size of explainer videos is so big that they first need to be resized, and only then can they be used on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Resizing or editing videos drops their quality. That’s why the way to go about this is to prepare marketing content that’s suitable for mobile apps from the beginning.
4. Get Your Brand on Google
Verifying your brand website with Google Search Console is necessary for almost any kind of digital marketing to work out for you. The process is not even complicated and can be completed without having to write any code. These days, many websites are built on website-building platforms, whereby you just have to key in the Google tracking code into a given field, and your site is verified automatically by Google at the other end.
If you use Strikingly to build your website, you can do this with a quick process. Click on ‘Settings’ from your Strikingly editor left panel, and select ‘Services’. In the field that says ‘Verify Google Webmaster Tool’, paste the tracking code that you get from Google when you register your site’s link with the search console.
Image taken from Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly
5. Use SMS Marketing
Besides social media, mobile marketing can also be done by sending instant text messages. To make your mobile marketing advertising more effective, you must also make use of SMS marketing. SMS marketing can cost you a small amount of money, but it is still quite cheap compared to the other forms of digital marketing, such as running non-skippable YouTube ads or building long marketing funnels.
It is easy to implement mobile marketing and other forms of digital marketing strategies if your website is user-friendly and simple to edit. That’s why we at Strikingly offer our users many features that make it easier for them to create, run, edit or update, and maintain their websites. We are happy to see our users make progress in their business and want their web maintenance the least of their headaches in their struggle to make their businesses grow. We, therefore, offer full-time live chat support to all our users. We also welcome inquiries via our contact form and encourage our users to share their feedback with us in our online community.
