Mobile Marketing Tips: Capture Your Mobile Audience
Mobile marketing is quickly becoming one of the biggest trends when it comes to engaging with your audience.
Numbers don’t lie. In the past year, we have seen the use of mobile devices when accessing the web and social media rise sharply. According to a recent report, consumers increased their use of social apps on mobile devices by 76% in 2012 compared to 2011. For some users, most of the time they spend on social networking sites now takes place on a mobile device. And the number of users of the mobile web nearly doubled in 2012 compared to the previous year. Taking these figures into account, it would be foolish for any marketer to ignore the power of mobile marketing.
With that in mind, we thought we would share a few helpful tips when it comes to optimizing your mobile marketing strategy. Have a look below to find out what you can be doing (and in some cases, for much less than what you might expect).
1. Mobile Site
Whether you are an e-commerce store or a restaurant, having a mobile website is going to be a crucial part of your mobile marketing. Simply having access to your website on the go can help users engage with your brand wherever they are and whenever they need to. Furthermore, this is not as complicated as it might seem. Today, there exists a number of services that help transform your site into a mobile-friendly one without much configuration. Nearly anyone can do it! Tools like Mobify or MobilePress (for WordPress sites) can help you transform your website. Furthermore, there exist numerous options in some of the more popular CMS platforms that automatically render your site for mobile devices. So when building your site, keep your mobile marketing strategy in mind, and be sure you are constructing a mobile-friendly one.
2. QR Codes
QR (Quick Response) Codes are a great way to engage with potential customers visually, and drive them to your mobile site or mobile landing page with an offer. Essentially, a QR Code is a pseudo call to action that leads people to find out more by scanning it. What a QR Code does is it sends data to your device and loads that information immediately on screen. This is growing in popularity in the real estate world, and is catching on elsewhere as well. The benefits of a QR Code lie in its mystery. People want to know more about enticing offers, and a QR Code allows them to do that right away. Furthermore, they are not all that expensive to incorporate into your mobile marketing strategy! There are even free services like Quikqr that you can use.
3. Geo-Targeted Mobile Marketing
This is where mobile marketing really pays off. Geo-targeting and location-based marketing are the real bread and butter of a mobile marketing strategy. These strategies give you the ability to directly target potential clients in your area and offer specials or promotions to users who visit your store, restaurant or location. Optimizing your social networks like Foursquare and creating deals therein are where you stand to reap the highest benefits.
A tool used by a popular shoe store in Europe to attract nearby patrons begins a countdown when a potential customer enters a competitor’s store. The countdown starts at 100 and works down to 0. Users who see this countdown must make it out of the competitor’s store and into the other shoe store as quickly as possible. As soon as they enter, the timer stops and the number on which it lands is the discount the customer can receive. This strategy is literally dragging clients out of a competitor’s store and having them run to yours!
4. Mobile Applications
This is where you can get very fancy – but for a price. Customized mobile apps might be the most expensive form of mobile marketing, but they certainly have the highest payoff. As we noted above, mobile app use has skyrocketed in the last year, and those numbers show no sign of slowing. Users like the idea of a customized mobile application that they can use to interact with your brand. Whether it is an app for an airline to book your seats, or an app like the TV series (The Walking Dead has created where users can “zombify” themselves) people like to have fun with their mobile devices. So, if you have the budget, consider spicing up your mobile marketing strategy with an app tailored to your brand.
What are your mobile marketing strategies? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!