Mobile Marketing Too Big To Ignor - 5 Crucial Tips To Success
We now live in a completely mobile world where fast-paced living means busy schedules both in our work and social lives. We don’t have ample time to interact with our family and friends let alone 'physically' visit shops and businesses to browse and gather information.
For those reasons, businesses are increasingly testing mobile marketing as an effective channel for reaching customers. It is an exponentially growing form of marketing and in many ways is only now just catching-up with customer behaviour!
Technological advancements often tend to be the precursor of creative marketing strategies and techniques. Now that Smart or ‘Internet connected’ mobile phones and devices like the iPad have penetrated the Australian and US markets so deeply (>50% of adults), innovative new mobile marketing campaigns are starting to appear. Businesses that haven’t yet looked closely at mobile marketing are getting left behind so now is the time to create and implement a good strategy to avoid losing touch and influence with your customers.
Rapid Growth of Mobile Marketing
According to my research into mobile marketing activity, this form of marketing really started building in 2000 with early attempts at SMS marketing. However, mobile marketing really came of age in 2004 with some larger-scale campaigns that started to have real impact. Most of the early development came from large corporates with big budgets and some of their successes paved the way for smaller businesses.Since then, mobile marketing has grown tremendously yet most businesses continue to greatly limit the benefits of being able to instantly connect with customers in any location and motivate action. A large part of the problem is the lack of detailed and specific understanding of their ideal customers along with poorly thought-out marketing strategy. So, here's five key tips to help ensure that your first foray into mobile marketing is a success:
Five Crucial Tips for Mobile Marketing Success
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Create detailed customer personas - if you and your staff can ‘walk a mile in your customer’s shoes and fully understand and appreciate their fears, concerns, needs wants and desires, all of your marketing (not just mobile!), becomes easier and cheaper
- Content really is King - think carefully about the type of content that a mobile customer would want to receive on their phone when they're out-and-about or on-the-run. Content such as the latest deals, news or information that is short and to-the-point are best
- Create a good, long-term strategy - don’t just ‘live for today’, instead think through a longer-lasting strategy that encourages mobile customers to interact with your business in a variety of other ways such as on their PC, on social media sites or by visiting your business in person
- Build a mobile Website - if you’ve tried to navigate a business’s regular, 'designed for PC' Website, you'll understand that it's not a user-friendly experience and just frustrates mobile users. You can build one yourself for as little as $50 dollars and purchase a .mobi domain extension for your regular domain name
- Format content for the mobile Internet - make sure that any content that you have already produced and that you will produce in the future can be opened and read on a Smart phone or tablet. For most businesses there will be plenty of their customers reading their company's communications on their mobile devices
Preparation and Planning
Success in mobile marketing comes down to good planning and preparation. Preparation primarily involves laying out clear objectives and coming up with appropriate strategies that provide customers something unique and of value. You'll only have a few seconds to make a good first impression so when customers receive your businesses mobile communications they need to hit the mark immediately.
With the many benefits and huge popularity of Internet connected mobile devices, it really is time to start taking a serious look at creating a good mobile marketing strategy for your business. Follow my five crucial tips and you'll be well on your way to mobile marketing success!
Make sure you have a look at some of the other articles on mobile marketing on this blog site and if you haven't already, watch the home page video on this site to test-out a powerful QR code/SMS direct response system yourself that you can connect to all of your existing, traditional marketing.
