What Is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy that focuses on reaching a target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, email, websites, SMS, MMS, social media, and other mobile applications.

As a business owner, you may be asking yourself, “Do we need to focus on mobile marketing?” The answer is a BIG yes! During the past decade, we’ve seen a huge shift of customers focusing their attention and advertising dollars to mobile. Because of this, marketers are doing the same in order to create true omnichannel engagement. As technology becomes more diverse, so does digital marketing. If you want to stay active and keep your prospect’s attention, you better make sure your content is specific, strategic, and highly personalized.

Marketing always must keep device types in mind when creating campaigns. When it comes to mobile marketing, there’s a lot that you have to stay mindful of, such as leveraging mobile apps, SMS, and MMS marketing.

Mobile marketing should play a key role when it comes to building out any short-term or long-term marketing plan. How are you going to reach your mobile users?

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Email marketing

• Content marketing

• Google Adwords (PPC)

• Display advertising

• Social media marketing

• Affiliate marketing

All six of these marketing strategies give you direct access to mobile users, giving you multiple channels to reach your target prospect. Targeting all of these digital marketing components allows you to reach your audience where they are most comfortable. For mobile marketing to be effective, you need to curate a cohesive experience that customers expect — and that can be a real challenge as you work to acquire, engage, and retain users across a variety of platforms.

Mobile marketing can do wonders for driving brand value and demand for your products or services by leveraging mobile devices to connect with more consumers in real time at any point in the customer’s journey. Mobile is also growing steadily.

Mobile vs. Desktop in 2021

According to TechJury, over the course of one year, shares of mobile users have increased by more than 10 percent. That’s not all — they found a lot of interesting insights:

• Mobile vs. desktop usage stats in 2021 reveal 50 percent of B2B inquiries were made on mobile last year.

• Social media takes 25 percent of all digital media consumption, and it is mainly accessed on mobile.

• In 2020, US adults spent four hours per day on their mobile phones.

• In 2021, mobile phones generated 54.3 percent of traffic (vs. desktops at 42.9 percent).

• 55 percent of page views in 2021 come from mobile phones.

• More than half of all video views come from mobile devices.

• Phone-based CPCs cost 24 percent less than desktop and have a 40-percent higher CTR.

• Mobile apps have higher engagement rates than mobile-optimized websites or desktop web viewing.

These mobile marketing insights show you why more companies are focusing on mobile marketing. Everyone uses their mobile phones, adults in the U.S. alone are averaging four hours a day on their mobile devices. Mobile marketing is becoming more effective because that is where you can find your target audience.

Adweek estimates that 79 percent of smartphone users have their phones on or near them all but two hours a day. Today, there are more mobile devices in the world (8.7 billion) than people (7.1 billion), due largely in part to our voracious appetite for new technology.

U.N. data analysts have found that in the United States, 71.5 percent of citizens over the age of 13 have a smartphone, and 66.5 percent have smartphones globally (WorldoMeters U.N. data, GSMA Intelligence). To harness the growing power of mobile marketing, you must focus on creating the seamless experience that your audience expects.

While it may sound like we’re pushing mobile marketing only, that’s not the case. In fact, mobile marketing works great with traditional marketing and media. While mobile is a powerful tool, don’t underestimate the value of combining it with offline marketing strategies.

What Problems Can Mobile Marketing Solve for You

The big key for mobile marketing is the fact that it allows you to reach people in real-time, no matter where they are. We’ve seen mobile sales trending during the past decade. Mobile commerce sales are projected to reach $3.56 trillion in 2021 — that’s a jump of 22.3 percent versus 2020 at $2.91 trillion. More so, mobile sales show no sign of slowing down anytime soon.

With more and more sales being initiated from mobile, it's extremely important that it becomes a focus point in your marketing strategy.

Here are a few common questions we've been asked about mobile marketing.

• Question #1: I’m not sure if my audience is a mobile audience or not. What should I do? As we head into 2022, mobile users can range from ages four to 90 years old. Just in case you didn’t get it, this pretty much includes everyone. Really, you should be asking a different question. It’s not about the age necessarily, but rather, the key is knowing how and when they use their mobile devices. This is why we always recommend developing buyer personas, and you’ll be able to reach your audience anywhere.

• Question #2: My website and content is not mobile responsive. What can I do to fix it? One of the very first steps to creating a mobile marketing campaign is ensuring you have a responsive mobile design: that should include your website, emails, platforms, profiles, and landing pages. There are so many platforms you can use to build responsive designs. For instance, Elementor is a good one for those of you that need a WordPress solution. Before you ever launch a mobile campaign, you better make sure your designs are responsive.

• Question #3: I have great mobile traffic, but am not seeing good conversions. What should I do? This is a tough question to answer because this problem can point to a lot of different things. Is there a problem with your mobile design? Can users easily access your mobile website? Have you evaluated your mobile checkout or lead generation process? If mobile design is not a problem, it could point to your marketing, such as the language you're using.

• Question #4: How do I integrate a mobile strategy into my marketing plan? The key to defining any effective strategy is to first decide what does a successful campaign looks like. Get the key stakeholders together to map your mobile marketing strategy, determine how current efforts are performing (if you have any in place), and identify what can be improved. As long as you're always launching, evaluating, and optimizing, you're going to ensure your campaign is always taking steps forward.

Key Elements of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing goes much deeper than just text messages and mobile apps. To ensure a complete marketing experience, you better consider responsive design across the board.

• Mobile-Friendly Websites: The good news here: most web builders online today do have mobile designs. Mobile-friendly content fits on the screen without side-to-side scrolling or zooming, it loads quickly, and it’s free of mobile errors. The most important reason to maintain a mobile-friendly site is to create a consistent and engaging user experience (UX). Mobile UX has a dramatic effect on every stage of the buying cycle.

• Mobile-Friendly SMS and MMS Messages: SMS (short message service) and MMS (multimedia message service) messaging are two direct methods you can use to send content to your customers, but it’s important to use these channels wisely. Gain knowledge of the best techniques to get your messaging to your customer fast, and go over the cardinal rules for an effective campaign, whether it be promos, videos, product alerts, or reminders.

• Mobile-Friendly Advertising and Landing Pages: Fifty-seven percent of email is opened on mobile platforms and 69 percent of mobile users delete email that isn’t optimized for mobile (Litmus). Because of this, it’s imperative that your emails employ responsive design — a strategy that automatically formats webpage content for optimal viewing on any device. And don’t forget about landing pages. If your email is mobile friendly, but the click-through goes to a landing page that isn’t optimized for mobile, that visitor will likely become frustrated and click away.

• Mobile-Friendly Apps: With the right strategy and road map, mobile apps can provide an opportunity to drive profound engagement with your customers. Explore the different types of apps — productivity, commerce, retained engagement, and mixed-use — and whether or not a mobile app is the right move to support your acquisition, engagement, or conversion business goals.

• Mobile-Friendly MarTech. Did you know that quarter of mobile apps are only used one time? First impressions matter a lot in many different things in life, but they certainly do on mobile apps. Since the average consumer has 70 apps on their mobile phones, how can you ensure that your company's mobile app stands out from the competition? That is a challenge you're going to face: you have to think about app downloads, app installs, and app usability improvements. Companies with mobile apps that have used marketing automation can better drive app downloads, user retention, engagement, and monetization.

Right now is the best time to start focusing on your mobile marketing campaigns. What can you do today to start optimizing your mobile campaigns? Start with this article!

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