5 Mobile Marketing Tips to Reach Your Customers During Summertime?

Smartphones have opened entirely new ways for marketers to promote their products and reach interested audiences. Mobile marketing has given the marketers the power to reach people directly and at all times, offering them personalized experience at the right time. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? With the right tools and the right strategy, you too can harness the benefits of mobile marketing for your business.

However, many companies don’t know how to do it. Which channels to use, which strategies work better, how to do it without being too invasive? These, and many more, are important questions that need answering, to use mobile marketing for your benefit. To help you with this, we’ve gathered 5 mobile marketing tips and strategies that you can use this summer to grow your sales. Read on to take a look at them, as well as understand better what mobile marketing is.

What is mobile marketing?

The simplest definition of mobile marketing would be the marketing strategy, where the main channel is the mobile phone. And it wouldn’t be wrong! Mobile marketing is an omni-channel digital marketing strategy that aims to reach its audience on their smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices. It’s not a single channel, like email, for example, but a combination of different channels and platforms that work together as part of an overall strategy. From social media marketing to in-app ads, mobile marketing can be as versatile as your creativity and resources allow, bringing in great results (when done correctly.)

As people use their smartphones more, the importance of mobile marketing is growing, and professionals around the world are thinking of more ways to create an engaging omnichannel experience for their customers and direct their attention towards their product.

5 mobile marketing strategies for summer

Now that you hopefully have a clearer idea of what mobile marketing is, let’s take a look at a few tried and tested strategies that’ll help you boost your business and get sales this summer.

Use SMS Marketing

SMS marketing, known also as text marketing, has been around for a while now. Being forgotten for some time, this channel of marketing has been making a big comeback recently, and here's why: 98% of people read all the text messages they get. This makes SMS the marketing channel that has one of the biggest reach rates, as well as a marketing strategy that works. It allows you to reach your customers directly with your discounts, important announcements, or any other promotional or otherwise the information you may have for them.

SMS is a great mobile marketing channel, but as with anything, to succeed, you need a clear and actionable strategy, otherwise you'll be shooting in the dark trying to get lucky. To avoid this, here are a few things to consider:

• Text marketing is permission-based, and you can send texts only to the people who've agreed to receive them from you, similar to emails.
• You need to understand your customers. Segment them into groups, do A/B testing of your messages, and understand what they respond to and what they don't like.
• Make your messages short and clean: SMS are typically up to 160 symbols, so there won't be any space to beat around the bush.
• Include a call to action, and a clickable link when applicable.
• Measure your campaign results, and adjust them in an ongoing manner.
  

SMS marketing, if done correctly, can become one of your mobile marketing channels. It's affordable, to-the-point, effective, and can help you reach your customers anywhere through tools like Viber to SMS. However, avoid sending them too often, so as not to come across as spammy.

Social Media eCommerce

Talking about the importance of social media is almost a waste of words—they’ve become an inseparable part of our daily lives. This was done, among other things, through innovation, with big social media platforms trying to understand what solutions can make our experiences better. This is how social media eCommerce came into our lives, and it’s not going away. The most popular example of social media eCommerce is Instagram, allowing users to buy directly on the platform. Users no longer need to go to the website of the company to research the product and purchase it: the entire circle, from seeing the product to checking the price, and full check out, can be done on the app with a few finger taps.

As you’ve probably guessed, social media eCommerce is also a mobile marketing strategy, and one that shouldn’t be neglected. If you have an online store selling physical products, adding social media eCommerce to the list of solutions you offer can go a long way in helping you to grow business. The available  targeting tools allow you to promote your offers and reach the intended audience, after which the simplified purchase and checkout process make the chance of sale more possible.

Leverage Push Notifications

We’ve all received them: a notification from YouTube about our favorite vlogger uploading a new video, a short text reminding us to take that language class on DuoLingo, you name it.

These short texts appearing on our smartphone screens are push notifications, and they are another mobile marketing strategy that shouldn’t be neglected. Similar to SMS, they have very high open rates, which makes them a great tool for reaching your audience. Another opt-in channel, push notifications also ensure that you reach only the people who are interested in the brand, saving you resources you can use on your campaigns.

Much like SMS again, push notifications offer powerful statistics you can closely study to understand the behavior and needs of your audience and reach them with the most relevant offers, increasing trust towards the brand.

A common misconception about push notifications is that you need to have an app to be able to send them. What you do need is a website. Once you have your website set up, and people have opted-in, your push notifications will reach them on their mobile phones, through their phone browser.

Location-based marketing

Have you ever received an Instagram ad from a restaurant or a store not far away from where you live? If yes, then you've found yourself in the world of location-based marketing. As the name suggests, this type of marketing uses location as a targeting factor to reach the right people. This is an opt-in, compliance-based strategy, and is equally beneficial both for large brands with international presence, and small local businesses trying to attract people living nearby.

Location-based marketing has three components worth knowing:

• Geotargeting - creating audiences based on their location (e.g. choosing to target Berlin)
• Geofencing - Drawing an area around a location and targeting everyone in that location (e.g. serving relevant ads to the people in a mall)
• Geoconquesting - Creating audiences based on the location of the competitors to target their clients (e.g. sending ads to the visitors of the competing cinema)
  

Location-based marketing allows for greater precision and offers important analytical data that can be analyzed and used to improve future campaigns and marketing efforts.

Mobile-friendly website and content

In 2020, Google switched to mobile-first indexing. This means that when you build your website, treating the mobile version as a back though won't do anymore. To ensure that your website is favored by Google, the mobile version of your website must ensure a good experience for the viewers. Here are a few reasons why investing in the mobile version of your website is important:

1. Mobile-friendly websites rank higher - Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly websites since it knows that people spend most of their time browsing with their phones. Websites that are slow on mobile, aren't designed conveniently, or have little content will rank lower.
2. They let you connect with the audience easier - With mobile-optimized websites, you are only a few taps away from your client, and they can reach you anytime from anywhere.
3. Stay in competition - Brands understand the importance of mobile experience, so there is a good chance your competition is switching to mobile-first. Doing the same will allow you to stay competitive.
   

Here are several tips you can use to make your website mobile-friendly.

• Make your website responsive
• Decrease loading times as much as possible
• Pay attention to the design: the size of the buttons, the shape, the color. Ensure a comfortable experience.
• Size matters: people shouldn't have to zoom in to navigate your website.
• Use legible fonts that'll be easy to read on a small screen.
  

Ensuring that you have a mobile-friendly website is a sure way to ensure a pleasant customer experience for your target audience, show that you are professional at what you do, and ensure that they come back.

Wrapping up

As more and more people choose to browse the Internet on their phones, mobile marketing becomes a strategy you can't afford to miss out on. It's an effective way to reach your customers through a variety of highly-targeted creative campaigns, ensuring that your efforts are laser-focused and that you are not shooting in the dark. Start with the strategies above to promote your business, drive traffic to your website, and ultimately improve sales.