What is Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing generally refers to marketing on or with mobile devices. It can include any marketing activities though mobile whether it is an online shopping or sms notification for a product advertisement. According to Andreas Kaplan, a professor and specialist of marketing, defines mobile marketing as “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device”.
It is similar to internet marketing where marketers need user in order to provide services and advertising their products. Mobile marketing includes research to understand mobile user’s nature, designing according to mobile platform, and adopting various techniques of mobile marketing strategies. Make sure that people are continuously getting emails, sms, mms, and other means of advertisement in order to get connected with you.
Mobile marketing, Customers, and Business World
Mobile marketing is a revolutionary marketing tact in business world. It introduces easier and better way to communicate directly with customers and advertise products. Ecommerce business can be easily enhanced. Marketers now contact users according to their natures and requirements. They can research and find what kind of services or products are being searched by customers and notify them based on this research.
Customers can easily get what they are looking for, because marketers notify them with the best deals and services. Customers can buy and enjoy services with feedback and reviews. These feedback and reviews also seem helpful to other customers as well.
Importance of Mobile Marketing
Today, a large fraction of population access internet through mobile rather than laptop or desktop. Mobile’s portability feature enables a user to get in touch with world through internet from anywhere and anytime. Increasing number of internet and mobile user drags a revolutionary trend in marketing sector called Mobile marketing. Here are some reasons which can explain mobile marketing importance in these days:
- Availability of quick services anytime
People want good, easy and quick services. They are looking for a service provider which can fulfill their requirements anytime, anywhere, and can be easily reached. A company can contact a user via mobile marketing techniques. A customer can also send feedback easily.
- Mobile has become an undetachable part of life
Mobile is a necessary part of daily life. It can easily carried to anywhere and that’s why becomes a favorite device for e-shopping in leisure time.
- Mobile is not only used for e-shopping but also used in physical store
A physical store also uses mobile services for providing services and advertising. Many store will save your number to notify you about special products and discounts offers.
- SMS Marketing
SMS and MMS marketing bring a tremendous change in marketing. Now users are getting offers and discounts or get notified for sale via sms or mms.
- Mobile search index becomes primary contents for ranking
Google is going to make search index based on mobile search ranking rather than desktop search ranking. So your website search ranking will be based on mobile searching rather than desktop searching.
- Importance of Mobile advertisement
Advertising on mobile sites or directly to mobile seems more effective in marketing.
Mobile Marketing Strategies
These days, most of the people are investing time on internet via smart phones. They start and end their days with mobile. I think mobile is the first thing needed after waking up in the morning and last thing used before going to bed. It means your websites has been visited mostly via mobile in comparison of desktop. So you should follow a strategy in order to expand and enhance your business based on mobile marketing.
Now marketing strategies should be changed to attract mobile users via internet. This change forced people to follow mobile marketing strategy. Business should have an important place for mobile marketing otherwise it will definitely affect your business. You can improve your business by adopting trendy techniques of mobile marketing and advertising.
- SMS marketing: It is true that a SMS is checked by a user in less time. So, SMS is a perfect way to contact a customer for their requirement and for advertisement.
- MMS marketing: Text, video, audio, and image slideshow can be delivered via MMS to users for advertise your business or products. Mobile marketing helps you to understand nature of your customer. You can verify about service requirements of a user and you can help them via MMS.
- Push notification: It is a flash text to notify users to advertise products and services. It is easily visible to user instead of SMS.
- App-based marketing: Mobile platform based App of an ecommerce website can be effectively used in a business promotion. You just have to maintain search ranking of app in a store to make it visible.
- In-game mobile marketing: Marketers used to provide promoting messages within games. This is called mobile advergaming or ad-funded mobile game.
- QR codes: QR code is an alternative of URL typing. One can go to a page by scanning a 2D image instead of typing a URL.
- Bluetooth: Some marketers use hotspot to deliver Content Marketing. It is a permission based and a radio-based technology and free of cost. It is an effective way of advertising products. Greatly effective, in case user has activated DND for such advertisements. It works on fact that whenever a customer will comes in range with activated Bluetooth, starts getting notification and ads.
- Proximity service: Proximity systems or marketing based on GSM also called SMS-CB (Short message Service- Cell Broadcast. This will help in broadcast of messages to all users in a specific geographical area.
- Location-based services: Location based services are specially conducted through cell phone networks. It is used to send advertise or other messages to user based on location.
- Voice mail: Marketers can send a voice SMS or a prerecorded message without making any ring for advertising their business.
Effect of Mobile First Index Experiment on Mobile marketing
With respect to mobile marketing, you should specially take care of your mobile site’s search ranking. So you should take special care of your website’s behavior on mobile devices. It should be mobile friendly to keep whole content clearly visible. Make sure that your website is mobile friendly or launch a mobile version or app of your website.
Google is going to launch Mobile First Index based search engine. Now you have to make a website more friendly to mobile user rather than desktop user in order to achieve good search ranking. Your mobile friendly sites should have features of:
- Mobile as well as user friendly
- Good speed
- Perfect touch controls
Privacy and Security in Mobile Marketing
In mobile marketing, privacy and security cannot be ignored. Since details of a user like contact number and other details have to be maintained in mobile marketing, so marketers should take special care towards Privacy and security of these details. Some steps which should followed for mobile marketing are:
- Important details of customers should not be shared with anyone under any circumstances.
- Marketers should have permission for messaging to users. They should follow a proper process in which user can enable and block messages and other services.
While building your mobile App there are certain things that needs to be work out
- Growing your social media presence : Building a steady social media following on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr
- Driving engagement across the app: Focus your efforts on encouraging ongoing engagement and keep updating fresh content so to prevent users from losing interest in your app
- Increasing app store ratings : Try to improve rating of your app, this will drive a lot traffic to your app
- A steady rise in app downloads: There is always more revenue when there is more download of your App, so if you have a valuable product it automatically increase the download rate.
Promo video for mobile APP
As a part of viral marketing campaign, a promo video is quite essential.
- Create a promo videos which is short and informative.
- Highlight all your app’s key features and point out why your app is better than its competitors
- Also, include screen shot of your app as well
- Once the video is ready you have to be active in marketing or distributing that video over the web. Post it on forums, use social sites like Facebook and twitter to reach out maximum, upload it to youtube and so on.
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the study, analyses and reporting of a web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. This technique is useful to measure how many people have visited a site, and how frequent they have visited the site or what route they have opted to reach your site. Web analytics is very useful from the point of administrator as they can figure it out which area of the site is popular and which area is not.
Web analytics software can be used to monitor whether your site page are working properly or not. There are various web analytics software available in market, some of them are Google Analytics, Adobe site catalyst, IBM coremetrics web analytics, IBM’s Unica Netsight, yahoo marketing dashboard, Piwik, Moz and so on.
A good analytic tool should meet following criteria
- Can you re-analyze data if you decide to change something
- Can you re-analyze subsets of your logs for more focused views
- How many web pages does the solution track per month
- What is the total cost of ownership
- Does it integrate easily with other sources of data
