With the majority of consumers packing powerful Internet-enabled smartphones, it makes sense for a forward-thinking business owner to devote a little time to mobile marketing. If you’d like to learn how to boost your own business with this powerful new marketing field, here are some of the details you’ll need to know about.
While brevity is already highly valued in other forms of advertising, its place in mobile marketing approaches the position of religious doctrine. Keep your messages as short and direct as humanly possible. You’re aiming for a very limited amount of your viewer’s attention, so make the most of it.
With that being said, don’t succumb to the temptation to abbreviate or use SMS shorthand in your marketing messages. Brevity is not worth sacrificing your professional appearance. Stick to clear, grammatically-correct writing.
Link all of your marketing efforts together with the use of QR codes. These are the square, digital barcodes you may have already noticed on products and in stores. Consumers can use a camera-equipped device to pick up a link from a QR code. If you give your own customers this opportunity, they will definitely take advantage of it.
Cross-media links can go the other way, too. Don’t neglect your other marketing campaigns when you compose mobile messages. Make it as easy as possible for customers to reach you on your website or through social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.
Personalize your mobile marketing messages as much as possible. Merging your customer database with your outgoing emails and texts is a simple proposition with the right piece of software. There’s no reason that the first thing your customers read in your messages shouldn’t be their own names.
If you’re on top of your information-gathering game, you’ll also have plenty of data about your customers’ past behavior. Put this info to work by using it to identify customers who will be more likely to purchase a particular product. When you concentrate on offering up products similar to those a customer has purchased in the past, you’ll dramatically increase the odds of another sale.
Branding is important in mobile marketing, especially if you have competitors who sell the same products you do. It’s not enough to convince people to buy product X – you want them to buy it from you. This is why all of your messages should remind their recipients of your company name.
Even though a lot of smartphones look alike, be aware that they’re very different machines underneath the hood. You will be marketing to customers using a vast spread of phones, tablets, and other mobile devices, and your content needs to work for all of them. Use online tools to check your mobile content for device and software compatibility.
While you’re thinking about hardware, it’s also a good idea to be sensitive to your customers’ data subscriptions. While unlimited data plans are getting more and more popular, not everyone is on them. Exercise data discipline and keep your mobile marketing messages and files as small as possible.
The new world of mobile marketing is an exciting and promising one. If you take the necessary steps to educate yourself before jumping into this world, you’ll increase the odds of having a positive (and profitable!) experience in it.