Mobile Marketing - Quick Guide

Mobile Marketing - Overview

Mobile Marketing is a next generation trend of marketing products and services. Today, the strategy of mobile marketing is being practiced by most of the traders and businessmen across the globe through which they communicate or engage with their potential audiences/customers in an interactive and relevant manner. The companies create short, but interactive messages (to promote their business) specifically to deliver on mobile devices.

In this tutorial, we will explore the importance and structure of a mobile marketing strategy; ways to create different types of mobile marketing campaigns; and finally understand how to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) of a campaign. Further, we will also cover other aspects such as mobile technology, web-resources, and the behavior of mobile users.

By 2017, U.S. customers' mobile engagement behavior will drive mobile commerce revenue to 50 percent of U.S. digital commerce revenue − Gartner

Why Mobile Marketing?

Mobiles have gained unprecedented importance in our lives, today. People around the world choose mobile devices as their preferred medium to connect with other people, gather information or even do business. As a result, many businesses are actively devising new mobile marketing strategies to reach out to their audience.
In the present world, mobile marketing is a common technique that almost every company, irrespective of the business it is into, is pursuing some kind of mobile marketing campaign. Whether it’s an E-commerce giant such as Amazon or a manufacturing juggernaut such as General Motors, everyone is following a “mobile first” approach, when it comes to creating a marketing strategy for their businesses.
Businesses are also aware that the use and influence of mobile phones today have gone up since the days of the simple text & voice messages. People order meals from a restaurant, buy & read a book/magazine/news, and find a childhood friend all with a single tap on their smartphones. Keeping this fact in mind, this tutorial describes various kinds of mobile marketing campaign, adopted by the companies, important of them are −

• SMS Campaign
• Mobile Website Campaign
• Mobile Apps Campaign
• Mobile Advertising Campaign
• Mobile Social Media Marketing Campaign
• Mobile Email-Marketing Campaign
• M-Commerce Campaign

Mobile Marketing - Technology & Reach

Mobile technology has grown leaps and bounds over the last few decades. The journey from the clunky wireless phone to sleek smartphone has been peppered by a number of amazing innovations and discoveries.
With the 3G mobiles available today, users can do a lot more with their smartphones than just sending a voicemail or SMS. They can browse the web, check the weather, read a book, prepare a to-do-list, carry their favorite music around, find their way around a new city with GPRS, and do much more.

Mobile Marketing Technology & Reach

In such a scenario, every business person willing to practice the mobile marketing technique has to be aware about the following top 5 ways in which mobile technologies have changed the way users interact with mobile devices −

Anywhere anytime access

Unlike laptops and desktops, tablet and mobile devices are easy to carry around. Users can access the internet in their mobile devices at anytime and anywhere and it has decreased use of the laptops.

Mobile Apps are easier than websites

Companies that have an online customer base for instance e-commerce portals have noticed that the sales and subscriptions they get from their apps are higher in comparison to that of their websites. This means, online purchasing from the mobile phones are easier.

Advertisements should be personalized

Most of the users feel that the mobile are more personal device than say a laptop or a desktop. Therefore, they expect that the content they receive on their mobile phones must be personalized as well.

Social media is a prime channel

Whether your customers are business professionals, students, home-makers, teenagers etc., commonly, they spend more than 3 hours a week on social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook etc. Surprisingly, most of these customers access these channels on their smartphones.

Mobiles are turning into mini-computers

Slowly but surely technicians and developers are packing the mobile phones with computer-like features. With bigger screens, faster performance, optimum storage capacity, longer battery life, and a ton of productivity booster applications. The evolution of phones from a simple calling device to multi-tasking-pocket-size computers has revolutionized the world.

Mobile Marketing - Strategies

People use their mobile phones to not only remain in contact, but also for reading the review of the products, knowing about the new products in the market, and of course online purchasing. In such a condition, developing a masterly designed mobile marketing strategy is significant for your business.

What is Mobile Marketing Strategy?

Before you begin developing a mobile marketing strategy, you should figure out how it will fit with your other marketing plans. It will help you to find out what is important to your business. Is product branding a current goal? Or is customer acquisition and lead generation a priority task? Maybe it’s none of these and more about social media engagement and viral marketing. Whatever it is, you have to synergize your marketing strategy with the current priorities of your company.
That being said, let’s look at how you can go about developing a mobile marketing strategy.

Research for Information

Market research related to your business is the first step. Here are some tips on what kinds of research you should be doing −

• Research how mobile marketing is done in your industry, you can join online forums or partner with someone;
• Gather data relevant to your product or service such as case studies, research analysis reports, whitepapers, etc.; and
• Do a comparative analysis by surfing their websites, press releases, online campaign, etc.

Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience and their choices will help you to take better decisions and develop successful marketing campaign. Following are the three important steps that you need to follow while identifying your target audience −

• Make a detailed list of potential customers and give them actual names and identities;
• Conduct online surveys, emails of customers etc. to understand what questions they have;
• Create customer personas by visualizing specific attributes such as their age, profession, task they perform etc.

Define the Value of Your Offerings

One of the most significant steps before designing a mobile campaign is to have the answers ready for the following questions −

• How is your product/service beneficial to your customers?
• What are the additional benefits you are offering in comparison to your competitors?
• How is it going to fulfill their needs?
• How will it fit their budget?

Understanding the value or unique selling proposition (USP) of your product or service helps you to engage your customers better right from the time you first communicate with them to the time they become repeat customers. Once you define the value offering in your marketing strategy, the task of making new customers and maintaining the existing ones become much easier.

Outline Your Goals & Objectives

What you want to achieve with your marketing efforts is one of the most important questions. It determines the budget you allocate towards marketing and the channels you choose to market your product and services. You have to define it clearly what you want to accomplish. Is it more sales? Or is it more brand awareness? The outlining of your goals and objectives is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy.

Mobile Marketing - Policies

For smooth running of your mobile marketing campaign, you need to define well-accepted policies and then strategize your campaign based on the defined policies.

What is Mobile Marketing Policy?

Mobile Marketing policy is – maintaining the consumer privacy standards, which is necessary for the smooth running of a marketing campaign. It is done by guarding mobile users from undesirable communications on their mobile phones.
First thing to make sure is negating ‘Spamming.’ Mobile content should be as original and unique as desktop content and your mobile marketing campaign should always be on board. To ensure the rewards, use right policy and channels for marketing.
While defining mobile marketing strategies, you need to focus and plan a number of points; important of them are −

• Set a predefined goal. You need to plan what you want to achieve. Make your goals measureable, realistic, timely, and quantifiable.
• Research the market trends. Market understanding is what every marketing person anticipates for. Ensure you draw near the right.
• Decide medium you will be using. Plot where you would like to shine. Say social media platforms, mobile websites, etc.
• Identify your target audience.
• Phrase your message. Write down, how will you make your audience hear it?
• Prepare invitees list, whom you want to share your content.
• Track and analyze how well are you going.
• Optimize/identify the areas where you lack.

Mobile Marketing - SMS Campaign

SMS Campaign is a popular technique of present day business world practiced by most of the companies. To promote products and services, it is the simplest, fastest, and the most economical technique.

What is SMS Campaign?

The SMS is simply text-message consisting of 160-alphanumeric characters that you send out to your customers. It is one of the oldest forms of direct message marketing. It is the one form of commutation which is enabled on almost all kinds of phones. SMS can be sent not only on mobile phones, but also on digital display devices, social networking sites such as Twitter etc.
Likewise, text-messaging is one of the easiest methods to deliver content to your consumers, whether it is news, banking details, polling programs, coupon deliveries, order updates, and so on and so forth.