Mobile marketing
What is mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing involves specific actions and techniques designed to interact with, influence, and connect with a targeted group of users through mobile devices, typically smartphones and tablets.
1. Benefits of mobile marketing
Mobile marketing offers advantages when reaching out to customers and boosting the results of your campaigns. Some of these benefits include:
- Reach. Nearly all potential customers have a mobile phone and/or tablet, giving you access to your entire target audience.
- Proximity and personalization. It enables highly targeted advertising, and since users always have their mobile devices nearby, we can reach them at the perfect moment.
- Impulse buying. When users search for a product or service on a mobile device, they’re usually in the final stage of the buying process—and often make impulse purchases.
- Immediacy. It lets messages and campaigns reach users almost instantly, in real time. Users always have their mobile devices ready to use.
- Measurable. Mobile campaigns provide accurate data to analyze campaign reach and effectiveness.
- Augmented Reality and QR codes. Using Augmented Reality along with geolocation enhances the user experience and increases the chances of purchasing goods and services.
- Segmentation. It’s easy to target a highly specific audience, whether to retain existing customers or attract new ones.
2. Formats in mobile marketing
The formats we can use to communicate and advertise to mobile device users are varied, and many of them work well together.
The choice of format depends on specific needs and available resources. Here are the most commonly used ones:
- Advergaming. This word might not be familiar, but that’s easy to change. When you download a free game or app to your mobile device, you’re often asked for permission to receive ads from its sponsors. Well, by becoming a sponsor, you can get your ads directly onto those mobile devices.
- Apps. Mobile applications are essential for enhancing the user experience and play a major role in supporting your branding efforts. They serve as a key differentiator from competitors who don’t have one.
- QR Code. Their use became widespread during the pandemic. These codes, when scanned with a mobile device camera, direct you to a website or app. It’s an increasingly popular tool in mobile marketing.
- Emails. Data plans and Wi-Fi go hand in hand with smartphones, which makes email marketing campaigns very valuable in any mobile marketing strategy, since we all check our email from our mobile phone and tablet.
- In-app Ads. Adding ads in apps and games allows you to reach a segmented audience directly. Their mobile-friendly formats give advertisers a wide range of possibilities.
- SMS. Short Message Service (SMS, or text messaging) might seem a somewhat archaic system, but in some sectors, using SMS within mobile marketing is super effective despite the costs involved.
- SOLOMO. The acronym for (Social – Local – Mobile). By using mobile phone geolocation, search results become more accurate and locally relevant—for example, when looking for a place to eat. This helps improve the ROI of marketing efforts.