Right now your brand has an extensive digital presence that stretches across its website, blog and social media channels. But there’s one part of the digital puzzle you are missing: a comprehensive, content-driven mobile marketing strategy.
Content marketing, after all, is a critical component of for any marketing initiative. It translates to all marketing channels, including mobile and is the bottom line for developing a strong brand image and customer trust.
What is mobile marketing? It’s the practice of using a mobile device like a smartphone, tablet or phablet to deliver personalized, location-driven content to customers. Mobile marketing typically takes place using applications (and accompanying push notifications), mobile websites and text messages.
Why mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing makes a lot of sense when considering how often consumers check their phones. Research shows that the average person actually picks up a mobile device more than 1,500 times in a single week. Mobile devices are often the first thing that a person sees in the morning and the last thing they see before they go to bed at night. They travel with consumers just about everywhere during the day, too. For marketing purposes, therefore, mobile messaging has become vital for best results.
You can use mobile marketing to do the following:
Build brand awareness: Brand awareness is a fancy term for how familiar customers are with your brand, and how much they trust it. The basic concept behind creating brand awareness is that by regularly sharing targeted information pertaining to your company or industry with consumers, you will build rapport with them. In effect, this bond will differentiate your brand from the competition. According to a survey conducted by Regalix, 67 percent of organizations claim that increased brand awareness is their key motivation for engaging in mobile marketing.
Engage with your customers: How do you build rapport with customers? You need to engage with them. A customer relationship, like any other relationship, is built through a steady stream of two-way interactions. It’s the opposite of what marketing used to be, where customers were talked to via billboards, magazine articles and television commercials. Now, you can use mobile marketing to start conversations with your customers and invite them to interact with your brand by commenting on and sharing your digital assets. The same Regalix survey indicates that customer engagement is the most important mobile objective for 62 percent of respondents.
How can you maximize your mobile marketing?
Once you decide to build a comprehensive, multichannel mobile marketing strategy, there are a few things to consider to drive the best results, as follows:
Create mobile-friendly content: Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the content you see on your website—that is your articles, pictures and videos—will look much different on a mobile device. Be careful when using photos, for instance, because they can have both positive and negative effects on the end-user experience. This is due to the fact that mobile devices have greater pixel densities than they’ve ever had before. So blemishes that you would be invisible on your website could show up on a mobile interface. At the same time, higher-quality photos can cause mobile Web pages to load slower, which can negatively impact SEO and lead to higher exit rates. Work closely with your Web engineers to make sure your content integrates seamlessly across a wide array of devices.
Understand your customers’ mobile preferences: Don’t rely on guesswork when devising a mobile strategy. You need to collect your customers’ mobile usage data to gain a clear indication of how your customers are using mobile devices if you want to create highly targeted content that drives sales. For instance, you’ll want to determine the best time of day to send push notifications or text messages. Regalix shows that just 33 percent of companies collect this type of information, while 62 percent rely on third-party research providers to create mobile strategies.
