A solid mobile marketing strategy is a critical aspect of growing your business and building your brand. Let's examine this in more detail as we look at what mobile marketing is, which trends are driving change in the market, and how you can do more with your own mobile marketing strategy.
Mobile marketing is the art of promoting and advertising products and services on mobile devices. Once upon a time, when mobile internet was in its relative infancy, mobile marketing was just an afterthought to the broader campaign. Today, this is a highly specific — and highly important — marketing discipline.
In fact, mobile marketing has become crucial to brands. In 2020, smartphone penetration exceeded 78% across the globe, up from less than 50% in 2016. What's more, Google's recent mobile-first initiatives have made mobile-optimized content a key indexing factor for the search engine.
All of this means that brands need to put mobile at the very forefront of their marketing activities. Mobile is likely to become even more key to the global internet browsing landscape, and so will be increasingly important to marketing activities.
What are the mobile marketing trends you need to be aware of? We've compiled a few of the most important market shifts to help you gain a better understanding of how you can get the best from this method of marketing.
We've already mentioned how Google now puts mobile content first when it comes to indexing, but this is worth exploring in more detail. This is having major ramifications across the digital marketing landscape, as only mobile-optimized content is now taken into account during indexing.
This has turned all digital marketers into mobile marketers. Businesses — afraid of losing their hard-won rankings on Google's search engine results pages — are turning to mobile marketing solutions to future-proof their websites and content.
It's not just webpages and related content that are being viewed on mobile. Mobile applications are a huge part of smartphone browsing and internet usage. The market was estimated at $581.9 billion in 2020, and this looks set to increase to $935 billion by 2023 — an incredible surge in value that underlines how ubiquitous these pieces of software have become.
Even beyond the direct revenue opportunities that apps represent, there are other advantages to be gained. If a user is downloading your app and accessing it on a regular basis, this is fostering high levels of engagement. What's more, you are also offering a great experience to your users that could push your brand forward. Mobile app marketing is something you need to be doing as you grow your audience.
Mobile marketing platforms and solutions have given businesses of all kinds access to this new marketplace. In other words, everyone has the tools required to achieve effective digital marketing for mobile devices, and so you can expect that your competitors will be taking advantage of this.
But the marketplace is growing increasingly crowded in other ways, too. Mobile marketers might be working in a burgeoning medium, but they also face stiff competition for their audience's attention. The phenomenon of the "second screen" has become a reality in recent years, as users find themselves checking out smartphones and tablets while doing other things, such as watching TV or using desktop computers. Thus, marketers really need to work hard to stand out in this environment.
A mobile marketing strategy has become much more than simply a means of selling products directly. It is also a vital data resource that businesses can use to really get to know their customers. Browsing data can be stored and managed on mobile marketing platforms, telling you exactly what your users are engaging with online. Meanwhile, data capture forms delivered on mobile-optimized pages help businesses hone their promotions to target specific users.
Data makes the marketing world go 'round in 2021, and these kinds of opportunities are too good to miss.
Which mobile marketing best practices do you need to incorporate into your strategy? Learn more about a few of the most important options for your brand.
This one has already been covered above, but it is crucial to your mobile marketing moving forward: make sure all of your pages are mobile-optimized. If they are not, they may not be indexed, and your site's SEO performance will suffer.
When crafting content, always act with a mobile audience in mind.
What problems are your audience members facing? What solutions does your business offer? How can you deliver this in the form of a well-crafted mobile application?
Keep these questions at the heart of the process as you develop apps for your brand. Many businesses rush this part of the process and end up with an application that is not fit for anything other than vaguely advertising a brand. Avoid this problem by making sure your software is improving the lives of your users.
Mobile app marketing is a changeable landscape. Lots of users like the look of an app, download it, then hardly use it. Around 20% of mobile apps are only used once by the downloader, and the average consumer will have between 50 and 100 apps on their phones.
While achieving a download is still a win in some cases, you need to think about how you can ensure your customers are using the software in the long term. Tying the app into specific deals or service levels can help ensure this connection.
We've talked about how mobile marketing will provide you with data, but you also need a good level of data to base your strategy on from the outset. You need to know how to reach your customers via their mobile devices. For example, which social platforms are they using, will they respond well to SMS marketing outreach, and what do they want to see from content? Getting to know your customers and using this knowledge to build your user profiles are critical to optimizing marketing results.
As your data resources grow, your marketing capabilities will grow along with it. With this data, you can raise the level of knowledge you have and target your marketing with better accuracy.
You need the right selection of mobile marketing solutions and tools behind you to achieve success. Every aspect of mobile marketing depends on this — from the publishing software you are using to create content through to the content management systems you use to keep on top of this and the analytics solutions you use to track engagement.
Software like the engage™ app and platform can help you achieve this. engage™ gives you a means of gathering, managing, and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from your customers and your leads.
To learn more about how engage™ can fit into your mobile marketing strategy, reach out. Try our engage™ app and platform for free and start getting more from mobile marketing.
10 Things We All Hate About Brand Marketing
The 5 Stages of Customer Loyalty and Retention: What You Should Know
How to Leverage Technology to Create Powerful Experiential Marketing Campaigns
9 Innovative Uses of QR Codes, and How You Can Use Them to Your Advantage
Why remarketing should be an integral part of your digital/product marketing strategy
8 myths about product marketing, debunked
