How to Effectively Use Mobile Marketing for Your Small Business
Mobile marketing is becoming more important. A failure to understand how to implement an effective mobile marketing campaign can cost your business a loss of customers who now expect a mobile-ready experience. Mobile usage overtook desktop for the first time in 2016, and the reality is that more and more of us are browsing websites and making a purchase with our phones.
So what does this mean for you? It means that you need to add a top-notch mobile marketing strategy to your marketing efforts in order to a) acquire more customers and b) keep existing ones.
Here is how to do it:
Optimize for Customer’s Location
When a customer is out and about in the city, they don’t walk around with a laptop in their hands — they walk about with a mobile device between their fingers.
What’s the relevance of this? One word: geolocation. Geolocation pins down where your customer is at, which then gives you a chance to optimize their location. How?
Let’s take a look at an example. Airline KLM recently released a mobile game that lets its customers fly paper jets over virtual cities. Its intention is to promote customer loyalty via mobile data. The punchline is that the game lets users advance to another stage when they are ready to board their KLM flight.
This is an example of geolocation technology in action. If you know where your customers are, you can optimize their location by, for example, rewarding them with loyalty points.
Alternatively, you could use geolocation to point customers to your nearest store whenever they’re in the vicinity.
Double Down on Numerous Mobile Ad Networks
Most mobile ad networks can’t guarantee you a 100% fill rate. If you work with a single ad network for marketing purposes, a lot of impressions might be left unfulfilled. This means that you’re wasting ad revenue.
So what do you do?
The best thing to do is to use at least three networks for your mobile ads. This will increase both your revenue and your fill rate.
The top three mobile ad networks are:
1) AirPush
2) LeadBolt
3) AdMob
Create a Database
Lots of small businesses make it their mission to get their customer’s mobile numbers. This is a good idea because you can then send out direct messages, raising awareness of any promotions or discounts that you’re running.
However, what’s important here is that you don’t get carried away. While sending direct messages to your customers can be a good thing, it can also be a bad thing if your customers aren’t expecting to be messaged.
Each time you get a customer’s number, first ask for permission to send them direct messages. If someone says they don’t want to be directly messaged, don’t directly message them.
This sort of thing will improve your relationships with your customers.
Send the Right Messages
Direct messaging via mobile is very different from posting content on social media. More than anything else, it’s a lot more intrusive.
For this reason, you can’t message with the same frequency that you would post on Twitter. If you message your customers too often, you will quickly appear invasive and you could harm your brand.
Exercise a modicum of restraint and limit your messages. Since you have limited opportunities, you have to make every message count. When you do send a message, make sure it has a clear purpose, make sure your CTA is strong, and make sure it doesn’t take up too much of the recipient’s time.
Be Personal
We’re living on the edge of a new frontier, where artificial intelligence is informing our marketing efforts. AI can refine your mobile marketing in a number of ways, one of which is personalization.
Personalization means that you put the right content and the right offers in front of the right customers. For example, let’s imagine that I’m in Omaha and my phone pings. I check it and find that my favorite clothing company has just sent me a message to tell me that they’ve got a great deal today … in San Francisco.
This has no relevance to me.
Personalization allows you to use mobile data to learn more about your customers so that you send them content that is specific to them. This improves conversions and sales, and it shows the customer that you care about them and their specific needs.
Be Conversational in Your Content
Voice search is now a big thing, with 1 in 5 queries now coming from a user’s mouth. Because voice search is predominantly mobile-based, and because the way someone speaks into their mobile device is very conversational, you need to adopt a conversational style of writing with your content.
It’s also important that you start to optimize your website for SEO with conversational, long-tail keywords. Why? Because these are the keywords mobile users are employing when using voice search.
For example, instead of saying “pizza place Manhattan” into their mobile device, a person would say “Google, find me the best pizza place near me.”
Create a Mobile App
Studies show that, while mobile usage has finally overtaken desktop, more of us prefer mobile apps to mobile websites.
To boost your mobile marketing efforts, then, it makes a lot of sense that you’d create a mobile app.
Because a mobile app lets your customers set their preferences in the beginning, you’ll have lots of data to use for a more tailored marketing campaign. This means you can start to offer specific, customized recommendations.
Moreover, a mobile app makes it so much easier for you to communicate with your customers with notifications. These can be super effective, with studies showing that a push notification sent from a mobile app can boost click-through rates by as much as 40%.
These are 7 ways to effectively use mobile marketing for your small business. Switch on geolocation, send messages and notifications to your customers, and personalize their experience. Whatever you do, though, remember to ask for permission first — be a good human!
About the author:
Aljaz Fajmut is a digital marketer, internet entrepreneur, and the founder of and Nightwatch— a search visibility tool of the next generation. Check out the Nightwatch blog and follow him on Twitter: @aljazfajmut
