We live in a world where people are more heavily reliant on their mobile phones. These devices have become ubiquitous, and increases in processing power have meant that most people can do just as much with their phones as they can do with their computers.
For this reason, mobile phone adoption has soared. According to estimates, 6.64 billion people in the world have smartphones today. This covers 83.40% of the global population. And, when you consider the people who don’t have phones due to their age, you’ll find that these devices are even more ubiquitous than you can imagine.
Phones aren’t just ubiquitous – they are also in significant application. An average person taps, clicks, or swipes their phone over 2,600 times daily. This means that phones have become more than just luxuries – they are necessities to many of us in real-time.
With this realization has come the need for companies to find ways to engage with prospective customers via their mobile phones. This is where mobile marketing comes in. So, what exactly is mobile marketing and how does it help companies?
Table of Contents
Mobile Marketing: An Introduction
Put simply, mobile marketing is a form of digital marketing that capitalizes on channels through which companies can reach their audiences via their mobile devices. Whether it is tablets, smartphones, or any other device, mobile marketing focuses on capturing people’s attention while they are on their mobile channels.
Mobile marketing could include social media advertising, optimizing ads for mobile SEO, sending ads into mobile apps, SMS advertising, and much more. It could even be something as simple as sending push notifications to people who have your app installed to keep your brand fresh in their minds.
Whatever the strategy, the overall objective of mobile marketing is to engage people with the way they already interact with their mobile devices on a day-to-day basis.
Mobile Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: What’s The Difference?
If there’s anything that has become clear about marketing today, it’s that it can be very broad. Companies looking to reach new and existing customers have different avenues through which they can get this done, and both digital and mobile marketing are two prominent ways. However, they’re not quite the same.
As its name suggests, digital marketing encompasses every medium through which a company can advertise and reach more people via digital means. This includes Email, social media, paid ads, organic search, and much more. On the flip side, mobile marketing takes all of these strategies and focuses them on a simple medium – mobile devices.
This essentially means that digital marketing is a much more comprehensive marketing strategy than mobile marketing. While mobile marketing focuses more on advertising to people via their mobile devices, digital marketing casts a wider net, focusing instead on other devices as well – desktops, laptops, etc.
While mobile devices are more ubiquitous and easier to access, it is worth noting that there is a market for other devices as well. Many of us use desktops and laptops for work, communications, and other purposes. With digital marketing, a company can target all of these devices and ensure optimal exposure for their brand to the people who predominantly use these devices.
What Makes Mobile Marketing Important?
It’s easy to see why mobile marketing is important – in a nutshell, it’s very necessary. Right now, your customers are already being bombarded with paid ads and branded content from other brands on their mobile phones. And because they take their phones just about everywhere, they’re seeing all of this content all of the time. If they need a product or service, you can bet that these are the companies they’d call first.
Smartphones are essentially an extension of your ideal customer. These people spend more time looking at their smartphones than any other device, with the average American spending about 5.4 hours a day on average on their phone. And this isn’t to talk about people who use multiple devices.
So, if you’re not concentrating your efforts on the mobile aspect of the customer experience, you might be playing at a loss. Mobile marketing opens you to a new world of engagement potential. And right now, brands need to add it to their portfolio if they hope to truly grow their reach and capture the attention of their audience.
The Benefits of Mobile Marketing
Broad Audience
One of the easiest benefits of mobile marketing to understand is its essence itself.
Today, mobile phones are everywhere. People of all walks of life and backgrounds use mobile devices and spend a significant amount of time with them. No matter what they’re looking for, it’s always easier to find it on their mobile devices.
Even the majority of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Ever since 2011, the amount of mobile internet traffic has surged significantly, going from about 6.09% to 54% in 2021. This means that it doesn’t really matter what audience you’re looking to appeal to – at the end of the day, you’ll end up having to meet people with their mobile devices. Mobile marketing is your key to doing this and doing it effectively.
Localization
Another benefit of mobile marketing is the ability to better target people based on their location. You can easily reach mobile users in their specific locations, and you can adapt your messaging and campaigns to accommodate these differences.
Since people carry their smartphones with them wherever they go, geographical targeting is a significant advantage for any business to have. You can send location-specific messages and notifications to users, prompting this section of people to take action that could benefit them and help you in the long run.
Personalization
As explained earlier, mobile devices aren’t just physically close to people – they’re also very personal. These are the devices we use to communicate with the people we love and with the world in general. These devices, as well as their ability to help us communicate, have become critical to our daily lives in a deeply personal manner.
Personalization has become an increasingly important trend across digital media. And with mobile marketing examples like push notifications and more, you have a much broader opportunity to communicate personally with more prospects.
Testing and Optimization
One of the key benefits of all forms of digital marketing is that it allows you to test campaigns and tweak them based on feedback. Mobile marketing examples have inherited this benefit as well.
You can easily run a mobile marketing campaign, perform an A/B test, and improve it based on the results you get to ensure efficiency. And with the speed at which these campaigns tend to start seeing results, you don’t have a problem with getting the right feedback.
Sharing Speed
Compared to most other digital marketing methods, mobile marketing has the highest potential to go viral. Mobile phones make it very easy for people to share content – memes, photos, social media posts, pictures, and even videos. With a few taps on their screens, they can make something go viral just like that.
With proper testing, you can create the right type of content that appeals to people. And once you’re able to elicit reactions, users won’t hesitate to share your content. From one person to another, you start to build viral appeal.
Higher Response Potential
Usually, mobile ads tend to get better responses in consideration than other types of digital ads. People are more likely to convert when they use a desktop, but the desktop platform has a significant disadvantage; while people consider your offer, they won’t be seeing your ads more consistently.
With mobile marketing, your business can stay in peoples’ minds because they keep seeing your ads.
Innovative Freedom
Finally, mobile marketing allows you to be more creative than traditional ads.
For instance, you could easily place a banner ad on a platform like Facebook. However, a similar campaign for Instagram could require a video while the Snapchat campaign usually works better when it is accompanied by a filter. You have so many ways to reach people, with different innovations working for different apps.
Each app on mobile comes with its unique audience – and a unique language that they understand. With mobile marketing examples, you can be more creative in the way you try to target people across the board.
Most Prominent Mobile Marketing Strategies
As explained, there are several mobile marketing examples you could easily incorporate into your campaign. Some of them include:
App-based Marketing
This is primarily a form of mobile advertising that involves using mobile apps. App-based marketing is especially important because you can run ads without actually having an app. Thanks to services like Google AdMob, you can create a mobile ad that will appear within other apps on the store. Simply pay for the placement, and you can start getting engagement immediately.
Even Facebook has tapped into this. With the platform hosting over 2.5 billion users, it now allows advertisers to create ads that will immediately be integrated into its mobile app.
In-game Marketing
This refers to mobile ads that are integrated into games. These ads can appear as banners, pop-ups, image ads that cover the entire page, or even video ads that appear while the game is loading or there’s a break in gameplay.
For most in-game ads, the people who see them are those who play games entirely free. Instead of paying, they choose to play their games with ads supported. And with most people choosing to play games for free instead of paying, you have quite a significant market to choose from here.
QR Codes
With this mobile marketing example, you create QR codes that people can scan with their phones. Once the scan is complete, the recipient is taken to a specific webpage that is connected to the QR code.
This strategy is usually applied to gamification, and it works because it creates a sense of mystery that your target audience will love. Users don’t know what they’ll see at the end of the QR code when they scan it, and this curiosity drives them to scan.
Location-based Targeting
We already spoke about this earlier. With location-based targeting, you send mobile campaigns to people based on their location.
Depending on the goal of the campaign, this could actually work well in your favor. Some advertisers might only want to send ads to people who are within a specific radius of their business.
Search Ads
These are Google search ads that are built for mobile devices. They usually come with additional extensions like maps, click-to-call features, etc.
You could also incorporate mobile image ads – essentially, image-based ads that are built to appear on your users’ devices.
SMS Marketing
With SMS marketing, you get a user’s phone number and send them offers via text. This isn’t so popular because a lot of people don’t really text anymore – thanks to the advent of social media and messaging apps, texts have become less popular. Plus, a lot of people tend to think that text offers are a bit spammy – while others could suspect them of being phishing scams.
Best Practices For Mobile Marketing
To conclude, it is important to keep a few things in mind when conducting a mobile marketing campaign:
Prioritize brevity
Mobile marketing calls for you to be as concise and brief as possible. Already, mobile devices have much smaller screens than desktops and laptops. Also, people prefer to consume information as quickly as possible when using their phones.
When your ads are cluttered and crowded, there’s a much lower chance of a conversion. So, be as clear and brief as possible.
Optimize for your local audience
According to estimates, almost 50% of all mobile searches have local intent. Users want to know who is closest to them and that can deliver what they need. Where’s the nearest grocery store? Who runs the closest food delivery service?
So, be sure to optimize for local mobile marketing. Know what your closest users are searching for, and work with that.
Always test
Mobile marketing provides a lot of room for you to experiment. So, don’t be scared to test things out. The more you’re able to test, the easier it is for you to understand what works and what doesn’t – as well as who fits best with specific types of campaigns overall.
Track everything
It’s great to test things time and again, but the outcomes of your test make no sense if you’re not tracking results to see the outcomes.
Record the results of your tests, understand what works and what doesn’t, then optimize for the former.
General Mobile Marketing FAQ
What are the major mobile marketing channels
The major mobile marketing channels include;
- Mobile Apps
- Social media
- Short Message Service (SMS)
- Mobile responsive websites
- Push notifications
How Effective is Mobile Marketing?
Mobile marketing is extremely effective because and 30X more effective compare to other means of marketing due to it’s hyper-personalization targeting and effectives.
What are the benefits of mobile marketing?
Here are 10 stunning benefits of mobile marketing
- Mobile personalization
- Location-based targeting
- Virality
- Accurate tracking and analysis
- Instant transaction
- Cost-effectiveness
What are the strategic drivers of mobile marketing
- Voice activation
- Privacy
- One-click payment mechanism
- Growth of social network
- Context
