Developing an effective mobile marketing strategy will help in optimising and personalising content in such a way that the target audience is able to resonate with it. With the advent of technology, the dependence on smartphones has increased tremendously, especially in the past few years. Research shows that 56% of B2B buyers frequently use smartphones to access vendors’ content and 95% of adults primarily use their smartphones to access content/information.
According to Steve Olenski, an expert in this field, “Among all interactive marketing platforms, mobile marketing is expected to grow 38% over the next five years with an estimated $8.2 billion being allocated to it by 2016.” Thus if you are a brand manager or a brand marketer, ‘mobile shift’ is something that you are probably witnessing now.
Millions of people all across the globe access retail content through their smartphones. One of the leading companies that have leveraged this to the greatest potential is Amazon. Their sites have managed to top the retailer game with an audience base of 49.6 million smartphone visitors.
Creating Buyer Personas
The first step is creating buyer personas to help you understand your audience better and weave a marketing strategy around their likes and interests. It builds imaginary representations of different kinds of customers describing their backgrounds, goals, challenges, preferred type of content, purchasing behaviour etc. When it comes to mobile marketing, this can be done by conducting surveys on existing customers, charting out the mobile habits of your potential customers, monitoring google analytic numbers of your website’s mobile traffic etc. that help you in analysing distinctive elements. Once you shortlist your approaches, the A/B testing method can be used to find out which method is feasible and which isn’t among the two finalized options.
Defining Strategy
Identifying your brand’s goals and the main objectives will help in setting your starting point, finding out what initiatives worked previously, spotting your key audiences, engaging your audiences across various channels, and fixing on goals of the overall strategy & expected results, to formulate your strategy. In addition to these, deriving insights from your key performance indicators (KPIs) will help in determining if your strategy is feasible and if your results are going to be measurable. A few examples of deriving KPIs for marketing are finding out the number of qualified leads, conversion rates for CTAs, the number of campaigns that have gone live within a month, etc.
Monitoring Mobile Metrics
In most cases, mobile behaviour data reveals how effective your content is and how well it engages your audiences. Mobile conversion data will indicate whether or not some of your key landing pages still need to be optimized for mobile browsing. Also, assessing the mobile-friendliness of your website from time to time will help improve the user experience. For instance, research shows that 64% of mobile web users abandon pages if they don’t load within 10 seconds and 35% of executives could not make an intended purchase because the website they visited wasn’t mobile-friendly. The CTA placements, ease of navigation and vertical visualisation have also proved to be effective when it comes to a mobile audience.
Marketers have realized that CTAs are effective when they are ‘above the fold’ on landing pages. Other options that have proven effective for placing CTA buttons are at the top of a webpage, at the end of short blog posts, in the middle of long blog posts, in a welcome pop-up message and along with email marketing content.
The ease of navigation depends on a very simple psychological fact, that if situations get really complex, people tend to give up soon. Hence, if your page is easy to navigate on a mobile device, the reader is likely to get to the end of it.
Vertical visualisation is the vertical placement of posters, banners etc, thereby optimizing them for mobile accessibility. This also creates more visual impact by making your brand image look appealing to the users. It also stands for the effort put in by a brand to go the extra mile on the customer satisfaction scale.
Making It Personal
The area where SMS and MMS channels have proved their expertise is sending a message directly to a customer, or a potential customer’s personal device. If your content is personal, respectful and offering the recipient something of value, customers are likely to share it on social media networks. Your message could be a text, photo, video, audio or a GIF with a clear and well-crafted CTA. Striking a sweet spot with your customer by building real conversations with them, addressing issues that they are experiencing, taking their happiness into account while optimizing results, valuing their feedback, notifying them about their upcoming appointments and wishing them on their birthdays & anniversaries can go a long way in establishing goodwill and loyalty for your brand.
UGC Strategies
Boiled down to its essence, user-generated content is a vote of confidence. Crafting creative ways to interact with your audience is key to coming up with effective user-generated content that can increase your brand’s public visibility. Every brand’s audience wants to be heard — a Bazaarvoice study showed that 64% of millennials and 53% of baby boomers want more ways to share their opinions about brands. When marketers encourage customers to share UGC, it provides another forum for customers to share their authentic experience with the brand. In doing so, brands come off as accountable, open, and authentic.
The idea here is to set up a variety of contests, incentives, online games, challenges, influencer engagement programmes etc. and drive engagement by involving the users who are willing to participate. In these cases, the participants become content creators who play a significant role in bringing visibility to the brand’s initiatives. These campaigns work really well on a mobile audience as the users can write, post photos or film videos instantly using their devices. You can also use vertical videos and animations, specifically designed to work on mobile screens so that people can access them from anywhere.
The Takeaway
Mobile marketing is something that is not going to be out-of-date any time soon. Upping your mobile game will give your brand an edge in the current scenario. All you need to do is:
Create strong buyer personas that will help you understand and scale your business.
Define a clear cut strategy with the necessary KPIs.
While crafting your content, take into account factors such as CTA placements, ease of navigation and vertical visualisation.
Direct your content straight to the hearts of customers and personalize the information and approaches as much as possible.
Work on unique UGC strategies that will bring your brand to the forefront.
These are a few inputs from us to help you stay in the game when it comes to mobile marketing. Feel free to contact us to know more!
