It’s no secret that mobile phones have become ubiquitous today.
After all, these are highly powerful, useful, and most importantly- easily affordable electronic devices that offer on-the-fly Internet access and a variety of utility apps (most of which are free to use).
It’s no surprise that as many as 95% of Americans use a cell phone, out of which 77% are smartphone users. The impressive figure also hints at a huge potential for marketing.
Today, marketing has largely to do with digital marketing, which is why smartphones naturally become a priority for the target audience.
You will find that all the major e-commerce stores have a huge presence on the mobile platforms. They all have their apps through which they try to get their customers shop on the go.
One of the earlier adapters of a mobile first approach was gambling, sports betting and casino industry. Major players in the gambling and casino industries were quick to realize the potential of the mobile platform- especially the mobile casino segment. The same is true for traditional video gaming which was quick to move from consoles to mobile.
The following are the top reasons why you absolutely need to focus on the mobile platform and learn how to set up a mobile marketing campaign irrespective of the business sector your company belongs to and its size:
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Social Media
Social Media is one of the most important channels of digital media marketing and is best addressed on the mobile platform. This is because a mobile is all about virtual socialization and connecting with friends and family on the go.
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Google Update
You don’t need a better reason to focus on mobile marketing than this: the world’s most powerful and popular search engine, i.e. Google is now penalizing websites that aren’t mobile-friendly.
After Google’s Mobilegeddon update, websites that aren’t easy to navigate on mobile phones and don’t display well will get poor rankings when compared to those that are able to adapt to mobile displays.
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Valuable Insights
Mobile apps allow you to track your customer activities, like the number of hours they spend on your app per week, the types of products/services they check out more often than others, they spending patterns, and a lot more.
This information when collected through Big Data, and fed into an analytics engine, can deliver invaluable insights that can be used by you to grow your business and make the right decisions for it.
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Better ROI
It’s one of the main goals of every marketer to get the best Return on Investment (ROI) possible. While internet marketing used to provide a satisfactory ROI on advertisements that are displayed on desktop websites, this trend is now changing as the mobile platforms are able to provide a much better ROI.
This is mainly because the majority of people around the world consume the most of their digital content on the mobile phones. Even the people who have both a mobile phone and a decent desktop are spending more time on their phones than their desktops.
So, in other words you are more likely to convert a lead into a customer on their phone than their desktop.
Massive Size
As mentioned earlier, the mobile platform is quite big when compared to desktops. The majority your customers are using one kind of smartphone or another. Thus, you can cover the majority of your target audience on their handheld devices easily.
How to Get Started?
Mobile marketing is a vast subject and there are too many angles to it that could be covered. However, there is no “one size fits all” system that could work for every business.
You need to experiment on your own and see which methods are working out for you. That said, there are a few things that are common to every mobile marketing campaign and must be included in yours too. These are:
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Set up a Mobile Website
It goes without saying that to tap into the true potential of mobile marketing, you need to create a mobile-friendly website first.
If you already have a website that’s designed for large displays like desktops and laptops then you can get it redesigned so that it can automatically adapt according to the smaller displays.
You can also check the variety of plug-ins that are available online (or the one that’s offered by your website service provider) that allow you to make your website mobile-friendly without a lot of work.
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Develop an App
People love apps. They are convenient, easy to use, and easily accessible.
From a marketer’s point of view, there are many benefits to developing and launching a business app. These are:
- You can put all kinds of information in the app for your customers to learn from. This improves the brand value.
- You can monitor your customers’ activities and learn about their habits through a variety of data points.
- You can offer customer services through the app which can improve the overall quality of your customer support and thus increase brand engagement and brand reputation.
- You can cross-sell and up-sell easily by promoting new products.
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Consider Mobile Advertising and Location Based Advertising
Advertising on the mobile platform has its advantages. However, you should also look into location-based advertising, especially when your services or goods are available to select locations or are customized according to different locations.
Since people carry their mobiles everywhere they go, they can be easily tracked and provided services that are in line with their current location. This makes targeting easier and more accurate.
Mobile marketing is something you can’t afford to overlook. If you don’t have a mobile marketing campaign just yet, then now is as good a time as any.