A Thorough Guide to Developing a High-Performance Mobile Marketing Strategy

There are 4 billion mobile internet users. With mobile devices increasingly filling our daily needs, it’s obvious that businesses need to find ways to market to devices over half the world’s population is using.

Marketers often use the same strategy for mobile and desktop marketing. But mobile devices have platforms and idiosyncrasies that differ from traditional digital marketing. They’re as different as on premises vs cloud ERP solutions.

By developing a separate mobile marketing strategy, you can capitalize on new touchpoints, reaching your customers where they spend their time.

Here, we’ll go over mobile marketing, the core concepts, steps, and tactics to developing a high-performing strategy.

What is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is the process of reaching your audience and promoting your brand via mobile devices. It can be thought of as taking a marketing strategy and optimizing the message, design, and delivery for smartphones and other handheld digital devices.

Why do you need a mobile marketing strategy?

Mobile phones and tablets have become ubiquitous, incorporating themselves into every aspect of daily life, like making purchases, socializing, playing video games, taking photos, and visiting websites.

Therefore, it makes business sense to aim marketing efforts to keep up with mobile trends and target customers where they spend their time. So, you need to develop a marketing strategy to take advantage of mobile-centric marketing channels to generate leads and connect with customers.

As well as putting you where your customers are, mobile marketing has several benefits:

• Provides multiple opportunities for one-to-one engagement
• Instant notifications, customized alerts, and text message autoresponders
• User location improves marketing personalization
• Mobile-friendly websites rank higher in searches
• Mobile has several sharing options, increasing virality
• Allows for mobile apps and gamification
• Increased analytics from mobile platforms

Core concepts of mobile marketing

Before we look at the steps or tactics to create a mobile marketing strategy, it’s crucial to consider the three core ideas that power mobile marketing strategies:

Speed

People want fast mobile experiences, whether it’s quickly checking social media or searching for opening times.

Consider your own mobile experience. Do you dally on slow-loading sites or give up and head to another? Speed and responsiveness are essential for a mobile marketing strategy.

Simplicity

Mobile devices have smaller screen real-estate. Therefore, effective messaging will be simple, relevant, and geared towards smaller displays.

Convenience

If customers can't find the little X to close your landing page or your sign-up form is three pages long, it could frustrate them and cause them to leave.

Your mobile marketing must be convenient for your users. Whether it’s navigating apps, submitting forms, or learning about your business, don’t hide behind several clicks. Make your strategy user-orientated from a practical perspective.

Creating an effective mobile marketing strategy

1. Create a mobile buyer persona

Marketing is reaching the right consumer with the right message. It means creating a buyer persona based on traditional segmentation categories, like age and location. But, you’re now targeting mobile users, adding more variables.

Identify your users and build personas using mobile usage patterns to segment them into mobile-focused groups, enabling you to find your product niche and sell to them better. In addition to standard demographics, look for other information, such as:

• Device types
• Frequently visited sites
• Time spent on mobile/apps
• Social media usage

2. Define your goals

Your marketing strategy needs well-defined, realistic, and measurable goals to succeed. Create attainable goals using the SMART acronym:

• Smart
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

Start by considering the purpose of your marketing campaign. For example, is the purpose increasing SMS contacts, increasing mobile site traffic, or boosting conversions?

For example, to increase SMS opt-ins, your goal might be to increase SMS opt-ins by 25% in the next three months.

3. Fine-tune your mobile experience

Consider the core concepts of speed, simplicity, and convenience. Analyze your mobile platforms. Begin fine-tuning to improve customer experiences of your brand, such as:

• Using bold headlines and brief content
• Creating short forms
• Using large call-to-action (CTA) and buttons
• Providing relevant and personalized content using mobile analytics
• Developing simple layouts and navigation
• Making your website responsive
• Replacing slow-loading images

Testing can guarantee changes lead to success. You can do it yourself, use A/B testing, or identify loyal customers to beta test your fine-tuning. It can iron out glitches and provide users with a seamless experience and buying journey they want.

4. Set KPIs

Setting KPIs and measuring metrics is the only way to see if your marketing tactics reach your goals.

Take the example of increasing SMS opt-ins by 25% in three months. If your current SMS opt-in is 100k users, boosting it by 25% gives you 125k users. So, your KPI would be reaching 125k SMS opt-in users in three months.

You can set KPIs for almost anything in your marketing strategy, and you should. The more hard data available to analyze, the better informed your mobile marketing strategies could be.

5. Optimize your mobile marketing strategy

Streamline your marketing processes by using mobile marketing tools, mobile CRMs, and analysis software. Along with monitoring your KPIs and mobile marketing performance, you can provide better-personalized content to your customers, boosting engagement and conversions.

For instance, analytics tools from Google provide a wealth of information about consumer demographics, interests, and beta testing rate. Likewise, integrating third-party mobile analytics software such as a Marketing Mix Partner (MMP) delivers precise and detailed data, aiding app marketers in budget allocation and optimizing overall app performance. Email marketing automation tools can automatically send relevant, personalized content to your customers, saving you time and money.

Carefully consider your strategy and the tools you can invest in to optimize your marketing campaign and implement successful strategies.

For example, in inventory tracking, choosing between LIFO vs FIFO is important, but having robust tools to manage inventory is vital.

Tactics for a successful mobile marketing strategy

Integrate with current marketing strategy

You may already have a flourishing marketing strategy. Developing one for mobile doesn’t mean writing it off and starting afresh.

By integrating your current and mobile marketing strategies, you can supercharge your efforts to reach your goals quicker and generate strong, consistent, and memorable messaging to target your consumers:

• Integrate mobile campaigns with your CRM to track and nurture mobile leads
• Tailor marketing processes for mobile, such as creating checkouts or registration forms geared to mobile users
• Adapt CTAs from your marketing campaign to be mobile-centric and ensure visibility on smaller screens
• Create new ad designs, keeping in mind the concepts of simplicity and speed

Create mobile-friendly emails

Marketing tools can create optimized emails, but following best practices ensure your newsletters and transactional emails are mobile-friendly:

• Smaller screens mean effective messages must be short, clear, and relevant
• Vague subject lines or senders will end up in the trash. Use clear subject lines and be identifiable to improve your open rates
• Every email must have a clear CTA to drive customer actions. Incorporate them with buttons and links to improve clickthrough rates
• Use analytics (open, clickthrough rates) from email management software to analyze high-performing emails and optimize your messaging tactics accordingly

Use mobile-optimized websites and apps

Your website is the center of your mobile marketing strategy. It’s where your ads, messaging, and marketing tactics send your customers to purchase products.

Similarly, a mobile app provides regular customers with immersive experiences and allows you to push personalized notifications and deals to individual users, improving engagement and boosting conversions.

While there’s some debate over which is best, using both is advantageous to widening and focusing your business needs. It’s vital to ensure they’re responsive and meet the three core concepts for marketing success:

• Speed - your site/app must load quickly to keep customer attention and rank higher in searches. Plus, search engines, like Google, favor fast-loading, mobile-friendly sites
• Simplicity - they must be easy to navigate, uncluttered, concise, and free from distractions
• Convenient - content should address the needs of mobile users, such as click-to-call functionality or easy email opt-ins

To guarantee your mobile site/app is optimized, test it with different browsers and devices to ensure your mobile campaigns provide a smooth and consistent experience. Consider beta testing your app with loyal users to identify glitches and UI improvements.

Leverage social media

Social media is an essential tool to socialize, access other mobile services, and use for work. Take advantage of this mobile marketing channel to keep up with trends and where your customers spend their time:

• Tailor ad design to specific social platforms to increase brand visibility
• Leverage social media for customer service, responding immediately to inquiries and signing messages with employee names to increase personability
• Allow account sign-ups with social media, letting you identify popular platforms
• I"Interact with customers, take part in social trends, and use options like Picsart to remove backgrounds in photos, enabling highly vibrant and focused visuals that can rocket your brand's virality and awareness."

Social media management tools can help with this.

Use SMS marketing

Like social media, SMS marketing is a vital customer engagement channel. By using an SMS opt-in form, you can reach out to customers individually, engage meaningfully, and collect a wealth of crucial data:

• Use SMS voting/polls to improve service offerings and identify customer pain points
• Create a “text to join” keyword to use in marketing campaigns
• Use SMS alerts to launch campaigns notifying customers of offers/products or upcoming events

Remember to get customer consent for SMS. Using incentives, like offering a free purchase order template for opt-ins, may help. Ensure your messages are:

• Short
• Introduce offer/value immediately
• Have clear CTAs and sender

Make the most out of mobile marketing

Consumers increasingly use mobile phones to shop, socialize, and go about their day. Therefore, developing a dedicated mobile marketing strategy is essential to reach them effectively on mobile devices.

By capitalizing on mobile trends and targeting consumers where they spend their time, businesses can build tailored, personalized, long-term mobile campaigns, boosting brand awareness, reputation, and sales.

Your strategy must have speed, simplicity, and convenience. The key to reaching people on mobile devices is to quickly and plainly provide them with what they want.

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Editor's note: some content has been modified from the author's original publication.

Bio:

Nick Shaw - Brightpearl

Nick Shaw has been Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Brightpearl, the number one retail-focused digital operations platform which encompasses sales and Warehouse Management Software, accounting, logistics, CRM and more, since July 2019 and is responsible for EMEA Sales, Global Marketing and Alliances. Before joining Brightpearl, Nick was GM and Vice President of the EMEA Consumer business at Symantec and was responsible for a $500m revenue business. He has written for domains such as BigCommerce and 3DCart. Here is Nick Shaw’s LinkedIn.