Starting a business is a complicated adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. From the moment you start making plans, writing out strategies and allocating budgets, your business is growing. Part of your business plan will centre around how your company is going to expand. You will spend a lot of time strategizing to make sure that your expansion goes off without a hitch, regardless of how long it takes.
The most important strategy any company can run is their marketing strategy, and a marketing strategy can straddle many areas; print marketing, digital marketing and guerrilla marketing. Among these, digital marketing then separates into more defined areas; social media, email marketing and content marketing are three of those areas. The beauty within a digital marketing strategy is the sheer reach companies can have to the people they are marketing their products and services towards. Smart businesses are able to look ahead and see how their marketing strategycan impact the growth and future of their company, and if you are in tune with your audience, you will know that the smartest marketing plan should centre around mobile marketing.
Wherever you go, wherever you look, there are smartphones. Technology has developed in such a remarkable way that we are literally able to hold a computer in our hands at all time, accessing websites and social media sites any time of day. Although mobile marketing itself is only a few years old, it is advanced and growing in popularity with company websites increasingly optimised for mobile use. With the growth of mobile marketing comes a whole new job sector and a level of those who specialise purely in mobile marketing on the rise.
We now live in a mobile world, with people checking their social media and their emails up to ten times an hour. The power of a smartphone is undeniable, even if they do need charging on a very regular basis! Companies that tap into the world of mobile marketing are smart companies and if you take advantage of the level of screen time your customers will be getting on a daily basis, then you are tapping into a market where you will be constantly visible. The power of your company success is quite literally in the palm of your hand, simply by optimising your website to mobile use, checking Mobile Engagement – Plexure.
When you decide to expand your digital marketing strategy, you must do your research and know your audience. If you overlook the ways you could engage your customers, you will fall short and have wasted the money you could have spent elsewhere. For example, if your company sells products aimed at people of advanced age, you would likely be wasting cash optimising your website to mobile use due to the fact that those who are older tend not to have smartphones. The way to optimize a mobile marketing campaign is to concentrate on how you can use social media to your advantage. When you think about the number of apps that are out there and easily available to download, you could be in the pocket of every potential customer that you are aiming for. It’s important to understand the different mobile marketing strategies that you have in front of you, and we’ve put a few of these together to help you understand exactly how you can offer a flawless user experience to your customers.
- Cross-Channel Promotion. Mobile marketing offers opportunities that can help companies to increase the number of customers that subscribe to their website. Check out the study here to see how customer interactions with email marketing can increase your number of clicks through SMS marketing. With the number of people who sign up and subscribe to information through their marketing emails rising, SMS marketing rates are also rising as people share their telephone numbers. This type of cross-channel promotion is key for mobile success and you should utilize every channel you can.
- SMS Vouchers. You may be doing it yourself, but there is a lot of success in the use of smartphones to shop. If you are offering your potential customers coupons and vouchers via text, you are going to increase the number of customers who click through to your website via SMS. This provides value to your consumers and raise awareness for your brand, which is exactly what you want!
- QR Codes. You may have seen these dotted around your local town on bus shelters and on public adverts, but if you aren’t familiar with them, you can read about QR codes here. They’ve been around for a decade now, and yet they are on the increase with companies. People are using QR codes more and more for things like cinema tickets, making online payments and they provide a user experience that makes sense to a lot of customers. If you are using QR codes to market your products, you’ll find an increase in the way your customers use their smartphones to find you.
- Optimized Email. Did you know that more than half of all email campaigns are opened on a smartphone? It’s for this reason that you have to ensure that your emails are correctly laid out for mobile use. Make sure that you have the screen lined up and you run several tests before sending anything out for marketing purposes. Doing this can help you have greater success with your email marketing campaign. Don’t forget though, you need to have two emails: one mobile optimized and one ready for standard email.
Your company needs to quite literally get with the times when it comes to your marketing campaigns, and it’s plain to see that mobile marketing is booming. Customizing your marketing strategy to include mobile optimization can only serve to be popular for your business, and if you are harnessing the most popular way that people spend time online, you can’t miss. If you want to add something truly wonderful to your business website, offer the ability for mobile payments to be possible. If people can access your online shop via their smartphone, they can buy products without having to stop and log in to a desktop or laptop site.
People prefer to have smooth and easy transactions that make their life easy. We live in a world of instant gratification and if a customer has to wait to log into a website that is not mobile optimized, they simply will go elsewhere. It might sound lazy, but it’s the nature of the online industry; if you aren’t able to support a mobile website, then people won’t bother trying to access what you can offer. It’s in your best interests as a business to remain in the spotlight and remain relevant. You must set up services to be mobile optimized as soon as you make the transition for mobile usage.
While we are discussing your online strategies, making your presence known on the many mobile-only apps for social media is going to be profitable for your business. Not only are you keeping your presence online active, you are in the palm of every person who has a social media app! Establishing the message that you want your brand to project across all platforms is important and this includes social media. You won’t be able to post the same content across every platform due to the differences, but you can plan your whole marketing campaign with your social media team and have key people in your team on each app. No matter what you do, being mobile should be a top priority for your business!