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.

How does SMS Campaign Work?

As we discussed earlier, before launching your SMS campaign, you must have the marketing strategy in place. Once you have done the research, identified your audience, and defined your value offering and goals you get a context on which to work out your SMS campaign.

Following are the 5 basic requirements that you need to fulfill to get started with your SMS campaign −

A Text Messaging Platform

This is given as you need something, whether it be your website, your mobile application, IVR program and so on, where all the text-interactions between you and you subscribers can be recorded.

Creating a User Flow Diagram

A user flow diagram is a tool created either in Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint. It documents the entire interactions of a user with your marketing program. For instance, if a subscriber replied to a call to action in your message, all these can be documented and you can show it through a user-flow diagram.

Carrier Approval Certification

In every country, the messages that a business sends out to customers must be pre-approved by an agency. You need to submit a number of information about your business such as your contact, common short code owner, campaign, and billing details to your carrier. Once you have done this, you can start your campaign.

Common Short Codes

All commercial mobile campaigns need to be sent via Common Short Codes (CSC). A CSC is five or six digit phone numbers, which routs a text message..

An Opt-in Marketing Program

To send a message to the potential subscribers, you need to create an opt-in marketing program. An opt-in marketing program is a permission you take from a subscriber to send him/her messages. To do this, you can place a call-to –action; in your advertisements in the media, collect the opt-in on your website, collect via an email campaign etc. Once you get the permission from potential subscribers, you can send them the text-messages.

Benefits of SMS Campaign

Text-messaging is a very popular technique of campaign across the world. You can see it virtually used by every company, irrespective of type, size, and scale of its business; from Pizza Hut to Walmart everyone is practicing the SMS campaign. The benefits are quite obvious, more subscribers is directly related to increase in volume of the business.

Mobile Website Marketing Strategies

The increasing popularity of mobile phones has added another dimension to how companies market their products and services. Hence, many of the companies are developing mobile websites for their businesses. It facilitates users to browse, surf, and access the respective websites anytime & anywhere on their mobile devices.

What is Mobile Website?

The term mobile website is increasingly gaining acceptance as the number of mobile users is growing exponentially. Technologies such as HTML5 allow developers to create mobile responsive websites. It offers a clutter-free navigation features. The pages that get downloaded faster on mobile devices are intuitively designed.

For your business, you can design intuitive websites that offer users a one-on-one experience, while making it easy for them to find the information they need in a few clicks. These mobile websites can be separate from your primary website and be hosted under a different domain name. You can even design micro-mobile websites separately for each product or service you offer.

How does Mobile Website Work?

While creating a mobile website, your primary focus must be on allowing users to complete a task or find information in the quickest and easiest possible manner.

Unlike a traditional website, where you may have multiple products, features, and a ton of information, a mobile website focuses on facilitating users to complete a task easily, which can be placing an order to purchase, finding directions, checking out the weather and alike.

Before creating a mobile website, here are some points that one needs to keep in mind −

Developing Your Domain Strategy

The domain name becomes important, if you are not developing a mobile responsive website using HTML5 and instead you want to create separate mobile websites. While creating separate websites, you can choose to use a relevant sub-domain name. For instance, if your primary website’s domain is mywebsite.com then you can name the mobile website as mobile.mywebsite.com or m.mywebsite.com. Remember, your website’s name should not be too long for users to type.

Designing Your Mobile Website

When designing mobile websites, the main concern should be on helping users to find relevant pages, easily. To begin with, the header of your website should have clear branding and a succinct page title. The important content and call to action should be high up on the page so that it is seen in the first fold. Other important design elements are a clearly visible search function, easy-to-click slide-down menus, and navigation links.

Creating Mobile-friendly Content

Mobile friendly content is the whole gamut of content types such as webpage text, images, videos, blogposts, call to action, H1, H2, etc. However, there are basically four types of content that you can create −

• Static Content such as the information on you Contact us page, it never changes, but make sure that the text is readable on different devices.

• Dynamic Content which can be automatically pulled from content authoring tools such as contextual-help tips. It also need to be responsive.

• Downloadable Content such as PDF, audio, and video file that users can download on their mobile devices.

• Streaming Content such as audio and video file that users can listen and view on their mobile devices.

So, you need to ensure that all these four type of contents are viewable on all mobile devices.

Benefits of Mobile Website

Mobile websites are no longer exceptions, but rather the trend today. By making your website mobile responsive, you can push its ranking higher in Google searches. The benefits of micro-mobile websites also shine when your business offers multiple products and services. You can use separate mobile websites to market a particular product or service and get a ton of genuine leads and new subscribers in order to drive your business to new heights.

Mobile Apps Marketing Strategies

Mobile applications are in rage today and will be for a long time to come. The reason is simple – a mobile application is more personal than a website. Customers download an application if they like what it offers or if they have a need for it. That’s one of the reasons why a mobile application often brings in more revenue to a business than a website.

What is a Mobile App?

A mobile app is a computerized program developed especially to run on mobile devices including mobile phones, tablets, smartphones, etc. However inviting as it may sound, you should take a step backwards and carefully analyze — does your business need a mobile application? For instance, if you have an online website primarily delivering content to your customers, then you might want to go for a mobile website rather than an application. However, for certain businesses such as a game which requires the use of a camera or an e-commerce site that uses geo-location data might get benefited tremendously with a mobile app.

How does a Mobile App Work?

A mobile application can create wonders for your business, if you always keep the customers in focus. For instance, if your customers are primarily business professional who use a Blackberry phone, then a gaming application might not appeal to them. The bottom-line is that you have to carefully examine your customers’ uses/interests before designing a mobile application.

Once you’ve decided to develop a mobile application strategy, you need to take care of the following two important points −

Design Your App for Multiple Devices and Platforms

Two of the most popular mobile operation software are ‘the Apple OS’ and ‘Android OS’. However, Microsoft OS is also notable. . So, while designing your application, make sure that it runs on all these three top operating software. Once, you have done this, you need to pay attention to other design details such as the screen sizes of different mobile devices, the usability of the interface and so on.

Different Ways to Market Your Mobile Application

There are a number of ways to market your mobile application. The first one that comes to mind is of course the Apple App Store. There is also Android Marketplace. These stores are some of the best places to showcase your mobile apps. You can also market them on direct download sites such as download.com, getjar.com etc.

Benefits of Mobile App

The most powerful aspect of a mobile application is the idea of personalization. From being a mere website, you become a personal tool that helps your customers to do a number of activities ranging from online purchasing to playing a game. The whole process of sales is turned on its head and your company develops an intimate relationship with the customers who will keep paying you with in-app purchases, and also popularizing the name of your brand via word-of-mouth.

Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

The reach of mobile advertisement is growing much faster than any other mode of advertisement. Sending promotional text messages about different products and services is the simplest and the quickest way to reach a larger section of your customer base.

What is Mobile Advertisement Ecosystem?

Mobile advertisement is a technique to promote your product and services through mobile devices. You may call it as the communication made active to customers who use mobile devices. It includes simple text messaging to intelligent interactive ad messages.

Mobile advertising techniques include an advertiser who can advertise on mobile devices via a mobile ad network and mobile ad system machinists working on it.

How does Mobile Advertisement Work?

To extract the best out of a mobile advertisement, you need to use clear formatting, compelling ad banners, and keep the customers’ perspective in mind. Always try to make your customers’ experience simple, immediate, and actionable. Personalize your message.

To make your mobile advertisement efficient, make sure the following points are taken care of −

• Make interactive ads. Encourage audience for sign-ups and grab offers.

• Geo-target your mobile ad campaigns to make them more relevant and to convert every hit on your ad.

• Make it social. Add or refresh social sharing to make it viral, thus increasing conversion rate.

• Choose the right channels. Focus on trending channels and media that may give you higher yield.

• Keep performing micro-experiments to identify what are the critical factors affecting audience’s behavior?

Benefits of Mobile Advertisement

In the present world, mobile phones are easily accessible by every class and age-group of people; therefore, a mobile advertisement offers following advantages −

• Reach − Mobile phone is reaching people by 15% more than internet. Mobile marketing is drawing more clicks than internet marketing. Advertisers have high expectations with mobile advertising.

• Accessibility − Mobile comes handy to users. Mobile advertising follows people everywhere.

• Time factor − People are available on mobile round the clock, which may not be possible with desktops.

• Cost − Mobile advertising cost much lesser than other types of advertising. It is lighter on your pocket, thus allowing you to advertise more on the same expense.

• Personalized − You can tailor your ad in a message. People find messages more intimate than other internet marketing methods.

Mobile Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms play a vital role in today’s day and age. Chatting, tweeting, commenting, and liking other’s comments have become a routine exercise. Taking advantage of this, many businesses promoting their products and services using social media as a channel.

What is Mobile Social Media Marketing?

Mobile social media marketing is a technique of marketing via social media on mobile devices. It is researched that nearly 71% users access social media on mobile devices. Mobile devices are over taking desktops/laptops as they come handy to users; thus, making them a great channel for advertising and so are the social media get influenced by them. Advertisers find mobile devices more convincing ground than web and consider it as the perfect medium for marketing.

How does Mobile Social Media Marketing Work?

Create a great mobile social media policy by using the following points −

• Amaze your customers with a catchy heading, image, or a punchline.
• Share visual media like pictures and videos via social platforms.
• Engage social media users through your mobile app.

Benefits of Mobile Social Media Marketing

Social media is shining on every mobile device, regardless of their size and inherent technology. You can use the following aspects of social networking for reaching out to a larger customer base −

• Convenience − People find mobile social networks handy over the desktops. It has now become a trend to tweet or update status via smartphones.

• Intimacy − It offers customers a feel of personal touch. People find smartphones as personal assets.

• Wider Reach − Presence of mobile devices are much wider and remote than any other device of similar kind. Thus, providing you higher extent of exposure.

• Quick Response − Customers’ response is much faster.

• Well defined Strategy − Mobile marketing can be very well strategies via social media and targeted customers can be reached through demographic data. This may give you an idea of audience behavior.

• Real-time Action − You get real-time actions. This gives you an opportunity to focus high on certain factors and improve other aspects.

Mobile E-Mail Marketing

People normally take notice of an email or a promotional message when they receive it on their cellphone. Therefore mobile email marketing is a great way to promote your business, as you can receive immediate response from your potential customers.

What is Mobile Email Marketing?

Mobile emails are one of the best ways to get more subscribers and potential sales leads, as most of the users have a functional email. The emails can be delivered to many users in one click, while being customized and personalized for every user.

The rate of delivery is also very high, but some might fail owing to erroneous email addresses or spam. However, a mobile email marketing campaign is sure to work because a large number of users can be reached at once, while the emails themselves can be highly personalized and target a particular audience.

How does Mobile Email Marketing Work?

Mobile email marketing serves as a great tool for reaching out to a large number of users at one go. However, following are the certain technical and non-technical aspects that you need to double check −

Optimize for Devices and Browsers

The emails that you send whether it may be a newsletter or a confirmation email must have some elements, which are optimized for multiple devices. For instance, if you have added a link in your email, but it is very difficult for users to click on without a touch-screen enable phone. Then it is not worth of your interest.

Likewise, some users have browsers like Google Chrome pre-installed in the phones, while some don’t. Again, if the email you’re sending out is not optimized for other browsers than Chrome then it may not work for some users. When you create emails keep in mind that you are aiming for mass delivery, where the emails should be accessible across all kinds of devices and browsers.

Choose an E-mail Marketing Provider

A highly recommended policy is to choose an email marketing provider that can help you to create, design, and deliver emails to your subscribers. There are a number of choices, of which the popular ones are Mailchimp and Sendgrid. These providers can help you to optimize your emails for mobile devices by customizing 10. MOBILE E-MAIL MARKETING the design and content. You will also get powerful reports on subscriber information, email deliverability and more.

Designing the Email

To ensure that users view your emails on mobile phones or even their laptops or desktops, you need to follow certain design principles. By design principles, we mean certain convention such as the fact that your company’s logo must appear on the top-left hand corner or main headline of your email must fit all screen sizes. Additionally, for any call to action that you add to your emails makes sure they are clear and visible. Another tip would be to keep the navigation links bold so that viewers can easily see them.

Benefits of Mobile Email Marketing

Mobile emails are superb for capturing genuine sales leads or more subscribers. You can use these emails to do a number of things such as capturing users’ phone numbers, sending out coupon codes, driving traffic to your website, and a lot more.

Mobile Marketing - M-Commerce

Buying and selling products and services through mobile devices are the new trend. A housewife can purchase her kitchen appliances from the comfort of her living room, a busy person can order lunch from office, one can use mobile platforms to sell goods and services − all with a few clicks.

What is M-Commerce?

Mobile commerce or simply M-Commerce means engaging users in a buy or sell process via a mobile device. For instance, when someone buys an Android app or an iPhone app, that person is engaged in m-commerce. There are a number of content assets that can be bought and sold via a mobile device such as games, applications, ringtones, subscriptions etc.

How does M-Commerce Work?

Let’s look at some of the points that you need to remember as a business, while engaging in m-commerce −

Decide Where to Sell

Before you sell your products or services via m-commerce, you need to decide what type of outlets or stores suit your business best. Let us suppose you have created ringtones − you can sell them either at specific third-party outlets or to independent aggregators who charge you a commission for the service.

You can also sell your ringtones on mobile stores or app stores such as Android marketplace or App store (Apple). These stores are frequently visited by many buyers and hence ideal for making sales easily and efficiently. Finally, you can also sell via your own mobile store by creating a mobile website specifically for sales or as by setting-up an m-commerce page on your main website.

Set up Mobile Billing

Once you have decided where to sell, the next step is to set up your merchant account. For instance, you can use third-party services such as PayPal. This is ideal for small businesses or also large companies. A third-party application makes it really easy for you as well as your customers to make the payments, but then they do charge commission on the transaction.

You can also set-up your own billing and payment gateway, but make sure that you make it really easy for users. Mobile users do not use keyboards or a mouse so make sure that the design of your m-commerce site is intuitive, with easy navigation tools and the right display sizes. Basically, make your m-commerce site optimized for Smartphone users.

Benefits of M-Commerce

The major benefit of engaging in m-commerce is the sheer size of potential sales. The probability of your potential customers owning a Smartphone is very high, so you can safely assume that you will get much more positive response from mobile devices than your website. M-commerce is recommended for every business irrespective of its type, scale, and size.

Understanding Mobile Users

Mobile devices help users to navigate the world. Customers use mobile devices for all aspects of their needs. They act on the information they see. So advertisers need to extend online advertising and should strive to be seen on mobiles.

Mobile Users − Statistics

As per the survey carried out by Google in partnership with Ipsos OTX MediaCT on 5000+ users, 89% use smartphones throughout the day.

Out of this −

• 89% stay connected
• 82% research and read news
• 75% navigate
• 65% entertain
• 45% manage and plan
• 70% uses mobile devices to make purchase
• 82% notice ads on mobile devices of which around 42% go ahead and click on ads

Advertisers should use location-based services to be easily accessible. Owning a responsive website is a must now.

Ways to Know Your Mobile Audience

You can use the following methods to understand more about your mobile audience −

• Measure user recordings − Here every gesture of user is captured. This makes it easy to trap users’ behavior.

• Heat maps give you a breakdown of users’ action. You can see where they tap more and the need to change your UI.

• Real-time In-App analytics give you an insight into the user’s psyche and all the actions they do on their screens.

Mobile Marketing - ROI

Return on Investment or simply ROI is the calculation of the profit earned on investment. The formula to calculate ROI is as follows −

To understand the ROI from Mobile Marketing, let’s assume −

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

  CLV = Avg. Revenue per customer × Avg. No. of visits

  Say, $100 per customer × 10 visits = $1,000

• Calculate allowable Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA) as −

  COCA = CLV × (% allocated to new customer)

  Say, $1000 × 10% = $100

Now, reallocate your mobile marketing budget by dividing them into ‘Branding’ and ‘Direct Response’. For example, allocate 20% of your budget to direct response −

Say, direct response budget = $200,000

20% of $200,000 = $40,000

Hence, mobile marketing budget is $40,000.

Now, calculate the number of estimated customers from new mobile marketing campaign.

CLV= $1,000

Budget= $200,000

COCA= $100

Customers acquisition = budget ÷ COCA

Hence, $200,000 ÷ 100 = 2,000

Therefore, new customers = 2,000

Direct response (of new customers) = 2,000

Mobile marketing new customers = 400

Conclusion − On 20% investment, you will gain 20% new customers.