Fresh Ideas For Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Most marketing experts agree that if you aren’t engaging customers through a strong mobile marketing strategy, you’re falling behind the times. It’s estimated that about 36% of the world’s population uses a smartphone, and a whopping 77% of Americans use one. In countries like Mexico, India, and Indonesia, smartphone ownership outweighs desktop ownership by as much as four times. What’s all this mean? If you want to reach an audience on a broad scale, you must meet them where they are, and based on the above stats, it couldn’t be clearer—they’re on their smartphones.

Mobile marketing is exactly what it sounds like—marketing to potential customers through mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. Ads reach customers on these devices through websites, email, social media, apps, and push notifications. If this is unfamiliar territory to you, perhaps you’re wondering what the big stink is—why does it need to be mobile specific if you’re already targeting customers online, for instance? It all comes down to optimization. Optimizing your ads for mobile devices means, in simple terms, that they’ll work better on a smartphone or tablet, helping to ensure maximum engagement.

Like we said, if you aren’t already running a mobile marketing strategy, you’re lagging. Keep reading for our top tips to get you started:

Mobile Marketing Tips and Fresh Ideas for Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Create a Site that’s both Mobile Friendly and Mobile Optimized

Having a mobile friendly site means that your website is displayed correctly (and is fully functional) on a mobile device. Ensuring that your website is mobile friendly is considered a best practice by search engines. In today’s mobile-expanding world, it’d be foolish not to do it. For more information on mobile friendliness, Check out these tips.

Yes, there’s a difference between being mobile friendly and mobile optimized. While being mobile friendly is considered essential nowadays, it’s also pretty much the bare minimum one should do. Creating an optimized site is the next step up—but what’s the difference? Being optimized means your site goes under (varying degrees of) redesign to best fit a mobile application—this is more sophisticated than simply shrinking down your current website to be mobile friendly. Some of the key differences include navigation that is “finger friendly” and downsizing graphics so they don’t end up taking up the whole screen.

Create a Responsive Design

A third option for ensuring your site will display and function correctly on a mobile device is to have it be created with “responsive design site”. It might sound complicated, but the heart of this type of design simply means that the website will reformat/design itself based on the screen size of the device being used. It’s extremely flexible, smart, and covers all the bases—you have a single website that’s smart enough to adapt based on users’ devices.

Track Mobile Website Data and Mobile Campaigns

Getting your site mobile-ready is no small feat. If you don’t have an in-house team of software engineers busy working on it, you’ve likely teamed up with a vendor to do the heavy lifting (and we can bet it’s not been cheap). With all that effort to arrive on mobile platforms, surely, you’ll want to monitor how your website/campaigns are faring. Further, you will likely want to make changes/updates to the site based on the data you’re getting back, which can include demographics, volume, and buying patterns.

Monitor Site Speed and Compress Images

“A picture is worth a thousand words” which is why they’re a key ingredient in creating smart, visually stimulating and engaging websites. That said, all those graphics can seriously drag down speed, ruining a customer experience. For example, perhaps they popped on your site for an impulse purchase, but the images are taking forever to download. What happens next? The customer likely backs out of your site and moves on. Maybe not a huge deal for him or her, but you’ve just lost a sale (or worse, a potential customer). Therefore it’s essential for you to monitor your site speed and make sure things run smoothly on the customer’s end.

For a more exhaustive explanation, check out this article, which includes suggestions for ways to speed up image-heavy sites.

Promote Your Social Presence with Examples of User-Generated Content

User-generated content has long been deemed more influential than brand content. Plus, you can usually nab it for free simply by asking customers for reviews or running a social media campaign (hashtag in hand). For example, try bridging your website with your Instagram account. It’s a great way to pull in real-life examples that makes your site/product/content more trustworthy.

If you really want to engage customers, create incentives for them to write reviews, enter your Instagram campaign, etc. This could be a point system that equates to gift cards for merchandise or freebies, or a prize awarded at the end of a big online campaign. Freebies could include useful cell phone accessories, Bluetooth items and popsockets.

Brainstorm Interesting and Engaging Ways to Use Push Notifications

In theory, Push notifications are fantastic. They jump front and center to catch a customer’s attention by essentially interrupting their viewing. The downside? That can be both intrusive and annoying! If you’re going to interrupt your customer’s experience, this article advises that it should be timely, personal, and actionable. For instance, if a customer is looking at an item to buy, now is a perfect time to have a notification pop up that offers 15% off a purchase in exchange for signing up for your email list. If a discount doesn’t quite fit the bill, consider something a customer might find interesting or funny, but make sure it relates to your brand.

Be Micro-Moment ready

The expanse of the world wide web can be quickly overwhelming to customers, which is why many brands are turning to “micro moments”. These are bite-sized pieces of information created to specifically and quickly answer what the customer seeks. Again, lots of mobile surfing/purchasing is impulse-based. If you don’t show up in that single moment, you risk losing the customer. In order to do this, you need to anticipate what your customer is going to need, and have it ready in a quick, easy package for when they come asking. This article explains micro-moments in more detail and why you need to pay attention to these opportunities.

Get Creative with Email

Most people check emails on their phones. If you’re going to utilize an email list, make sure you churn something out that’s worth reading. Offer a coupon, special VIP code, or other tempting discount to encourage customers to jump over to your site (via link in said-email) to take advantage of the savings. Or, send out a monthly newsletter that appeals to your customer base with helpful or interesting information. For example, if you’re a swimwear company, instead of just showing your product month after month, write up a short piece on a hidden Costa Rican beach gem, a sustainability effort being done in the tropics, or a humanitarian campaign to clean up remaining hurricane disasters in the Caribbean. If you can pique customers’ interests on multiple levels, you may not only gain a sale, but the blessed forward to a friend – your future customer.

And there you have it, our best tips and ideas for getting started on your mobile marketing strategy. While it’s certainly a big task, we hope that we’ve helped communicate the importance—and benefits—you stand to win by fully utilizing mobile. Smartphones are like a third arm these days; make sure to offer something worth holding on to.