A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Marketing

People spend, on average, over four hours a day on their phones. So why not take advantage of that time with mobile marketing? People in every demographic, all over the world, are on their smartphones. In fact, in 2017, mobile traffic accounted for 52.64% of global online traffic. With that kind of audience and reach, your business needs to be capitalizing on mobile opportunities. Keep reading our beginner’s guide to mobile marketing to learn more about what mobile marketing is and how it can benefit you.

What is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is the interactive multichannel promotion of products or services for mobile phones and devices, smartphones and networks, according to techopedia.com. In other words, mobile marketing is a promotional activity usually delivered through smart phones, tablets, and other mobile components. This is usually part of a multi-channel campaign, but, with the increasing number of smartphones and other technology, this marketing tool is beginning to stand on its own.

How to Create a Mobile Marketing Strategy

A mobile marketing strategy is a lot like a social media strategy. The first steps are to identify your persona, set a goal, plan content, and establish key performance indicators (KPIs). There are a few things to remember when starting mobile marketing. When creating content, be sure it has a clear call to action (especially in email content). Another easy way to help your mobile audience is to create ways they can access high points in one click, such as a click-to-call button on the homepage of your site.

The Importance of a Mobile-Friendly Website

When running a mobile campaign, the content used should obviously be mobile friendly. But, all too often, people forget that mobile content is often created to lead to your website. One big mistake is forgetting to create a mobile-friendly website. Consumers should be able to access content and the web page easily on their mobile devices. Catalyst Collective has a tool to help you identify these problems! Try our Mobile Website Checker to see if your website is at its best for mobile visitors.

How to Optimize for Mobile

Content and web pages should be created to be successful on any device, anywhere. In order to generate mobile SEO, there are a few key factors that should help a site or content run better and easier. To help optimize a mobile site, try using these tips:

• Incorporate short paragraphs and use bulleted lists.
• Focus on scrolling rather than clicking.
• Keep in mind visitors will be using their thumbs and fingers (not a mouse).
• Offer auto-fill information wherever possible.

Why Does Mobile Marketing Matter?

Without a good mobile marketing strategy or an optimized mobile website, you could be losing customers and profit by the minute without even knowing it. Check out these mobile marketing statistics:

• 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site.
• Nearly 8 in 10 customers would stop engaging with content that doesn’t display well on their device.
• According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a site on mobile if they had trouble accessing it and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
• And all of that is the reason why 71% of marketers believe mobile marketing is core to their business.

When your mobile marketing isn’t at its peak, your profit isn’t either.

Mobile Marketing Tools to Benefit Your Business:

1. Short Message Service (SMS)

SMS marketing is one of the best platforms to use for mobile marketing today. There are over 3.6 billion non-smartphone users that can receive these messages and 90% of these messages are opened within 3 minutes of receiving them. To put this in perspective, it takes an average of two hours for a person to receive and open an email, if it makes it past spam filters. Text messages can be eight times more effective to get customers to actually engage.

2. Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)

Multimedia messages can be sent from a mobile messaging service provider or from a website to a mobile phone. They can include anything from regular text, pictures and videos, audios or even GIFs. These messages have higher customer engagement with a 15% average click through rate. They can also increase campaign opt-ins by 20% over SMS. These messages are more likely to be shared on social media, which will bring in even more mobile traffic.

3. Mobile Apps

Applications aren’t right for every business but, for the right industry, they can be extremely beneficial. Mobile apps are very helpful when trying to extend a product or product line, drive engagement, and support e-commerce. Again, people spend over four hours a day on their phones and having an app that sends notifications can drive that time to your business. 70% of smartphone users allow push notifications that could put your business or product into their thoughts in seconds.

Mobile marketing is has gained momentum to a point where it’s unavoidable. It’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to engage a customer and it’s easier to directly reach consumers on their mobile devices than any other way today. Increasing the amount of mobile marketing your company does can quickly improve sales and increase profit. Try these tips today and visit our website to see how we can help develop and execute your ideal mobile marketing strategy.