5 Critical Areas Missing from Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Smartphones play a vital role in the daily lives of billions of people around the world.

The latest statistics show:

• There are 5.29 billion unique mobile phone users worldwide
• This number is growing at a rate of 1.9% per year
• The number of smartphones in use is increasing by 5.6% per year
• Nearly one million new smartphones come into use every day, on average

From a marketing perspective, it's no longer enough to look at the mobile segment as a component of your broader digital marketing strategy. You need to take a bespoke approach that focuses purely on mobile and sets out the actions you want to take and the returns you expect to achieve.

Here are some of the essential ingredients you need to include in your mobile marketing plan to get the best results.

1. Comprehensive optimization

If your mobile marketing content is still not up to scratch as far as optimization is concerned, you're putting yourself at a serious disadvantage. Users spend so much time on their phones and mobile devices that they now expect a certain level of quality in everything they see and read.

Crucially, you should be optimizing every element of your mobile campaigns. Every marketer knows that core assets like webpages and social media content need to look good and be easy to navigate on handheld devices, but are you paying the same attention to other areas, such as paid advertising?

There are a number of simple steps you can take to optimize your advertising for mobile, such as using specific extensions that let you include extra business information and make your ads more prominent for mobile users.

2. Bespoke buyer personas

So you already have buyer personas in place that outline your ideal customer's various characteristics, demographic details and goals, but do you have personas dedicated to mobile activity and preferences?

This could help you take a more personalized approach, based on an understanding of factors such as:

• What mobile devices are most popular with your target audience
• How much time your typical customer spends on their phone every day
• The activities and tasks people are most likely to complete on mobile, as opposed to desktop or in person

This knowledge could prove crucial if you want to create the most detailed and extensive profiles of your audience, which will help you deliver truly relevant and useful experiences.

3. Powerful apps

Much like consumers who rely on mobile tools and applications to make their lives easier, businesses can use apps to drive their mobile marketing. If you're concerned about poor mobile campaign performance, finding the right apps for you and your team can make a big difference by raising your efficiency and responsiveness.

There are many apps to choose from, such as:

• Buffer: A popular social media scheduling and management tool
• Planoly: A visual planner for Instagram
• Tweetbot: Helps you organize your Twitter feeds and tweet directly from the app
• Mention: A social listening app that helps you monitor conversations about your brand
• YouTube Studio: A dedicated app to manage your YouTube activity, with features that let you run analytics, reply to comments and more

4. Localization

One of the most compelling and attractive aspects of mobile marketing is the power it gives you to connect with your customers while they're out in the world, going about their everyday activities and living their lives.

This is also why you should be making a special effort to localize your content, so you can engage your audience with offers and opportunities that are relevant to their physical location.

One approach that can deliver strong results is geofencing, whereby you send targeted messages and notifications to customers when they enter a specific geographic area. This can serve a range of uses, such as recommending services to people who are attending events that reflect their interests or priorities, or even luring customers away from your competitors.

5. SMS messages

Sending SMS messages to your customers might seem like one of the most basic and obvious approaches to mobile marketing, but it's something that's easy to overlook when so much of your time is dedicated to priorities like building social media engagement and managing email marketing campaigns.

Text messaging is a simple but effective form of communication that offers some powerful advantages, including a higher open rate than emails and a strong chance that the customer will look at the message within seconds of receiving it.

It can be particularly useful when you have a clear goal you want to achieve with a specific set of customers, such as following up on a recent purchase or retargeting people who’ve shown an interest in your products but haven't converted.

SMS messages might be one of the most traditional forms of mobile communication, but if you can get your communication strategy right, they could make a big difference to your marketing performance.