What springs to your mind when we think of effective marketing channels these days? There are several that we can think of, but one of the most popular that’s gaining momentum year on year is mobile marketing. Why? Because mobiles are highly personal and lets brands communicate directly with customers as well. The power of on-the-go connectivity is on an all-time high and smartphones can’t go unnoticed because people are glued to their gadgets more often than not. Several businesses are waking up to the fact that mobile marketing is the future and the future is NOW!
According to reports, Amazon has spent two-thirds of its digital ad budget solely on mobile phones. And more than 65% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy. This only shows that mobile marketing is gaining ground and companies need to find out ways to make the most of it. Customer behaviour is evolving and they don’t just want to shop, they want personalized attention and a memorable experience that creates stickiness. Modern customers expect brands to anticipate their needs and offer proactive customer experience, better engagement, and of course high-quality products. Keeping this in mind, brands are using mobile marketing in various ways basis customer preferences and sales objectives.
Case in point, Bihar, a ‘media dark’ state in India is a key market for Unilever Hindustan. It was a challenge to market in this region, so Unilever had to be innovative in its approach to communicate with its population. The state has a huge population and 86% of the population in the region owns mobile phones. So, Unilever thought of a mobile strategy and created mobile radio station called Kan Khajura Tesanoffering mobile users free entertainment and a platform to advertise Unilever Hindustan products. Unilever reached 8 million people in only 6 months and its advertisements are heard for over 70 million times.
Mobile Order & Pay, a new feature of the Starbucks app, lets iPhone users (and later this year, Android) to create and pay for their orders even before they reach their favorite store.
It’s clear, that to stay ahead of the competition, specialized mobile marketing strategies should be employed to lift ROI to new levels.
Here are some crucial mobile marketing best practices employed by companies from across the globe:
- SMS messaging is usually an underutilized channel and hence there’s huge potential for mobile marketing to reach its audience. It’s a widely accepted mobile marketing strategy that’s popular with brands.
- The growth of conversational chatbots on Facebook Messenger cannot be ignored. Brands should create chatbots to gather customer service inquiries and help people shop, share feedback, among other things. Branded Chatbots are also a great tool for effective data mining and collecting important customer data that can later be used for mobile marketing. Facebook Messenger chatbot, for example, helps you get the contact information of every user who interacts with the bot, which can be used to remarket to them using Facebook ads.
- Full screen mobile ads are popups which are incredibly appealing to advertisers and are created by using Google Ads or another third-party advertising network. Full screen mobile ads also have higher engagement rates because they outperform small banner ads and are much better at grabbing attention. Just ensure your full screen ads don’t come in the way of people’s ongoing tasks. Data from comScore found that 91% of users enjoy interacting with rich media ads.
- QR codes have an element of surprise and are labelled as one of the best mobile marketing practices. They make the user curious about scanning it (and thus, land exactly where the marketer wanted them to. In fact, Paytm, India’s biggest digital payments system, touts of a QR Code scanner that can scan any QR Code.
Mobile is fast becoming the preferred marketing strategy of several businesses but a successful mobile marketing tactic requires time to create, design and implement. Make sure you have factored in the mobile best practices; by doing so, your marketing efforts are going to be exponentially more effective.
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