Mobile marketing is a key component of your overall marketing strategy because mobile is often preferred by business professionals for research and interaction, according to the Boston Consulting Group. If you can develop and implement an effective and comprehensive mobile marketing strategy, then you are more likely to optimize your results with your target audience.
However, you can’t just transfer over the same tactics from your digital marketing strategy, including your website, and assume that’s all you need for a successful mobile strategy. If you do that, then you are missing some critical components like these:
A Frictionless User Experience (UX)
While you believe that your mobile offering hits the mark with your target audience, in reality, you may not be delivering on their expectations. That’s because your customers and prospects may be getting stuck somewhere along the way in the mobile experience you provide for them on your mobile website or app. This friction may be the reason why they aren’t converting like you thought they would.
Test all your mobile marketing experiences and interactions with user testing to pinpoint and solve the issues causing the friction. User testing can uncover problems with a certain page, load time, registration issue, or anything else standing in the way of a conversion.
Also, don’t assume your audience is mostly using one kind of mobile device and plan your UX around that. Instead, take an intuitive approach to UX, planning for different platforms, browsers, and screen sizes. While it may seem like a small thing, many brands miss the mobile mark.
Consistency
Because many companies are still wrapping their heads around the idea of how to incorporate mobile marketing, mobile strategies tend to be “hit and miss.” The mobile effort comes across as random because there is no specific plan that states measurable mobile goals, targets, and messaging nor is there a timeline with frequency of tactics testing, delivery, or measurement.
Rather than take this random approach that includes one tactic here and another one six months later, create a detailed mobile strategy. While it can align with the larger marketing strategy, it should have its own goals, tactics, and content to drive a consistent approach to mobile.
A Local Presence
It’s easy to think globally with marketing, but you are missing out on a local presence that can be more easily captured through location services and GPS-enabled mobile devices. You want your business prospects and customers to know that they can reach out at a local level, if necessary, for everything from product or service purchases to support to learning opportunities.
Personalization
Just like your other interactions, the mobile environment should include personalized messages, not generic content that could apply to any company or client. Instead, use those personas you’ve developed to customize messaging, offers, updates, and individual recognition and accolades for the mobile platform. This should be integrated with the local presence and recognition of where each customer or prospect is geographically located. I personally like doing this with video. It makes the experience more personal.
SMS
Text campaigns and interactions seem obvious, but that hasn’t been the case for B2B marketers who may be more accustomed to email, direct mail, and social media tactics.
However, SMS can drive immediate engagement because of the frequent use of SMS in both business and personal communications. A text message may be opened within seconds of receipt while an email might take hours to open. Also, text messages tend to be opened at a much higher rate while many email messages are deleted without even opening them.
Text messages are ideal for follow-up with prospects as well as for remarketing purposes, including using a link as a call to action to move the prospect to your mobile website or a landing page.
Engagement Tools
Beyond just a mobile app or website, you want to offer other engaging features to keep you at the top of prospects’ minds. This includes adding some missing engagement tools like loyalty programs, usability testing, coupons, and mobile wallet capability. These type of engagement tools can keep the prospect and existing client in the life cycle for a much longer time.
Analytics
While your marketing strategy uses analytics for other channels, you may not be tracking metrics specifically related to your audience’s mobile behavior and the impact your mobile tactics are having on their purchase decisions. For example, with Calendar we give calendar analytics for all customers. If you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, how are you going to make the necessary changes to move forward.
Immediately add mobile analytics tools that can identify usage and response metrics. This intelligence is critical to making the right decisions about tactics, UX, messaging and content campaigns, and more.
Data Integration
Rather than bringing your various marketing platform together to review for other insights, you might think it’s better to silo the mobile data you collect. However, you may miss out on some key findings that could inform your individual channel marketing along with your overall understanding of customers and prospects. Consider creating a Unified ID for customers across online and mobile data collection tactics.
Time to Act
There’s no time like the present to make the necessary changes to your mobile strategy to start incorporating these key mobile marketing pieces for better business results.
Are your emails optimized for mobile? See how you can make sure they are with this “Mobile Email Guide.”