3 Simple Strategies to Fix Your Mobile Marketing Campaign

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If you are a marketing or advertising company, then you probably spend a lot of time trying to answer this question; how can we increase sales? However, if you’ve never asked yourself that question, odds are your company is probably a fossilized after-thought, struggling to out run the giant meteor of extinction. Regardless, for those companies who ARE interested in increasing sales, the answer is EMBRACE MOBILE MARKETING!

A recent Pew Internet Study found that more than 50% of Americans own a smartphone and more than 30% own a tablet. Further research from Canalys shows that these numbers will only continue to increase.

Meaning, if you want TO INCREASE SALES, it is more important than ever to PERFECT YOUR MOBILE MARKETING STRATEGY!

The following are 3 strategies to save your mobile marketing campaign.

1. Do you know how your audience is using their mobile devices? If not, LEARN.

As a marketer, it is crucial to understand how people are using their mobile devices.

The best way to succeed at mobile marketing is to recognize that the “on the go” audience and the “at home” audience have different needs. Therefore, it is important to establish and implement different tactics for each.

2. An Apple is not an Orange, and a Tablet is NOT a Smart Phone. TREAT THEM DIFFERENTLY. 

According to Pew, the demographic for tablet users includes:

  • Higher income households (Roughly $75,000 and upwards).
  • Adults in their late 30’s to early 40’s.
  • Individuals who have attained higher education (i.e college graduates).

Now, stop and consider the demographic for smart phone users. Chances are the word “everyone” just popped into your head. Just about every individual, ages 10 to 80, uses a smart phone.

Looking at that demographic. It is clear that reaching a tablet owner will require a different approach than that used to reach a smart phone owner. When it comes to advertising and marketing, it is important to steer away from the “one size fits all” mentality.

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3. Not all advertising tactics are created equal.

Choose your advertising tactic based on the mobile device you are trying to reach.

The age-old idea of using broadcasting to PUSH your advertising messages onto the audience is dying out. Rather, companies need to embrace the PULL method; the idea that effective micro-target campaigns will result in the audience wanting to accept your message, yielding better results.

Marketers who ARE succeeding on the mobile front are learning their clients’ preferences, using information gained in real time, and producing authentic sales. The result is a much better, overall relationship with the client.

Use these tips to save your mobile marketing campaign. We promise you will not be sorry.

Blending Mobile Marketing With Social Media

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Before you and your business can fully take advantage of mobile marketing and all of its benefits, you first need to optimize your marketing endeavors to reach customers who are on the move. When you integrate your mobile marketing strategy, you should be able to easily flow between social media and your SMS campaign. In fact, using both of them to your advantage will only multiply your success. If you know how to properly do this, your customers should be able to easily share and interact with your brand experience, therefore spreading the word about your brand. Remember, mobile marketing is the best way to keep your relationships with your customers alive well after their real-world interactions with your company. Not only will your customers appreciate you more, it will also naturally boost sales.

Starting out, you want to learn how to effectively integrate your mobile campaign into your marketing strategy. This means learning how to blend mobile and social media. Here are a few quick tips to help you get started.

Simplicity Is Golden

Social content and web content are NOT the same. This also goes for mobile content. For example, don’t just link your QR code to your Facebook fan page or your company’s home website. Even if you already optimized those pages for mobile, your content probably isn’t. Any mobile content you create needs to be easily accessible and easily shareable. If your content is not simple enough for the user, or good enough, you will not create the reaction you want from the customer. Remember, any mobile content needs to be SIMPLE, or else it will not work.

Remember That Your Customers Are MOBILE

If you forget this, you will LOSE the mobile marketing game. This is the single most important thing to remember when putting together a mobile marketing campaign. For this reason, mobile marketing experts are big on QR codes because of their quickness and efficiency. It’s a simple fact that taking a picture of something, or scanning something, is much quicker than looking up a Twitter handle, searching for a webpage, or finding a venue to check into on a location-based social network. Technology in the future will no doubt provide users with even faster ways to make their mobile devices interact with their surroundings, but for now at least, QR codes are the fastest and easiest way for on-the-go users to connect with you and your company.

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Your Context MUST Determine Your Content

You want to ensure that your mobile content is useful to customers where they are. For example, you don’t want to offer a video in a location where customers can’t open and view it right away. However, you can modify your content to make it more applicable to your customers. An example would be offering location-specific coupons to customers to go with their purchases at the grocery store. So your coupons would be based on the region’s tastes and ingredients.

This Is Just The Beginning

You aren’t going to capture a customer simply because they bought something from you or they filled out one of your forms. Now you must interactwith the customer. Your mobile site is just one touch point in what should be a long line of interactions with the customer. Great mobile sites give users an enticing piece of content, then creates an opportunity for them to connect with the brand in a much more significant way through a different channel at another time. In Tim Hayden’s words, Chief Marketing Officer and founder of 44Doors, “Wow the hell out of them, then get them to take action.”

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Blending your mobile marketing campaign with social media can be tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. The key is to keep it simple, follow these simple steps, and you should be fine. A lot of the failures in mobile marketing do NOT happen because of the method. The method has worked for THOUSANDS of companies in EVERY industry you can think of. Failures happen because people try to do too much, not realizing that the best thing you can do is keep it simple and straightforward so your customers can easily understand you, as well as easily interact with you.

SMS Marketing Tips & Ideas

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With the continuous improvements and rampant use of mobile technologies such as the smartphone and the tablet, SMS marketing has surged to the forefront of any and all types of mobile marketing campaigns. The fact that 98% of all text messages are opened and read, and the fact that these messages are read within mere minutes of their arrival, should tell you that mobile marketing is not just the future of marketing, it is the NOW of marketing. However, efficiently managing your mobile marketing campaign can be tricky. Simply having an SMS mobile marketing strategy is not good enough, you want to be smart about it; but no worries, we’re here to help! We’ve compiled a list of ten things that are important to remember when constructing your SMS mobile marketing campaign.

Conduct an SMS Poll

Sometimes simply orchestrating an SMS poll, whether it be a multiple choice poll or an open vote poll, can be much more effective than you think. An SMS poll doesn’t just engage your SMS subscribers by asking their opinion on something, but it allows them to let their voices be heard and gives them a sense of power and control when it comes to your product or service; subscribers love this. If you feel like you’re not getting enough participation, offer a coupon or reward to subscribers to entice them into participating in your poll. There are also platforms where you can post the poll results live on your website or blog so subscribers can get more immediate feedback. SMS polls are generally great ways to increase brand recognition with your customers, get feedback from them, and generate excitement and interest around your product or brand.

Attach Media to Your Texts

If you want to increase the odds of people engaging in your text, you will want to attach media links to them. This can be a simple photo to spice up your text, or it can be something more sophisticated such as a link to a landing page with more information, or a video explaining how to do something. Sometimes, just posting some fun media that’s related to your business will generate buzz around your company or product, even if it isn’t necessarily directly related.

Create a Social Media Widget

Integrating your texts with social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, is probably one of the best things you can do for your SMS campaign. A lot of SMS marketing platforms offer easy-to-use social networking widgets that you can simply copy and paste into your texts, as well as your website’s HTML code. Adding a widget like this will allow your SMS subscribers to easily access your social networking pages, announces any poll you conduct on the social network as well as through text, and makes it much easier to add more people to your customer database.

Keep the Texting Lingo for High Schoolers

Sometimes conductors of SMS marketing campaigns fool themselves into believing that if they text their subscribers in the modern day lingo that is common with text messaging, they will connect more with their subscribers. This is not true! Most of the people you will be reaching out to are not teenagers (unless you are directly marketing to that demographic, then this is appropriate), but they are adults with cash to spend. Today’s text lingo such as “OMG”, “TTYL”, and “BRB” will come across as childish and immature to adults, and will most likely end up hurting you more than you think it will help you. You will have time to construct your text messages before sending them out, make it sound like you took the time.

Keep Your Message Simple and Singular

It can be tempting to mention several different promotions, sales, or offers in one message, but this can confuse your customers. Remember, you only have 160 characters to work with (140 if you’re posting through Twitter); don’t try to cram too much into one message. Keep your scope limited to one central idea per text. If you want to mention 3 different sales that your company has going this week, then construct 3 different text messages, one for each sale. This will make things much simpler for your subscribers and you will be much less likely to lose customers through either sheer confusion or just annoyance.

Efficiently Time Your Text Messages

Just blasting subscribers with a plethora of text messages at all times of the day and night is a recipe for disaster. You want to make sure you time your messages effectively so that you can get more people reading and responding to them. Traditionally, it has been found that SMS messages get the most responses when they are sent in the late afternoon, early evening, or any time during the day on weekends.

Keep Purchasing Simple and Easy

This is probably the most important thing to remember when constructing an SMS message. Make sure it is easy for customers to make purchases using your texts! If the buying process become too complicated, or is too many steps, most potential customers will just give up and leave you hanging without making the sale. Also, when making promotional codes, make sure they are easy to remember. Remembering the code “SHOE25” is much easier than remembering “SHOE85763652”. Using a simple code like “SHOE25” is especially effective if you are offering 25% off of shoes for any customer that shows the text to participating retailers. It’s easier to remember and reminds customers of the deal they are getting.

Begin Messages With Action Words

Beginning your text with an action word, or verb, is a great way to get customers moving while also livening up your text messages. Action words generate action on the part of the consumer and also help shorten what would otherwise be long and lengthy sentence that can put you over the 140 or 160 character limit. Words like “buy”, “sell”, “jump”, “run”, “save”, “spend”, “purchase”, and “stop” are all great action words to start your messages with. Rule of thumb: whatever you want your customers to do as a result of your text, start with that word.

Use Short Sentences

Writing long, lengthy, and descriptive sentences will not only cause you to go over your character limit, but it will also bore subscribers before they bother finishing reading your message. Short sentences allow your subscribers to forward your messages to other people; they cannot do this if your long sentences take up the entire 140-160 character limit. Short sentences also improve your writing and force you to cut to the chase much quicker and more efficiently. Not only will this make constructing SMS messages easier for you, but your customers will have a much easier time reading them.

Don’t Overdo Capitalization

This rule goes hand in hand with text lingo, but there are instances where capitalization is important. Using it in text lingo, such as “UR”, is a no-no. But if you’re trying to emphasize an event like a sale or promotion, using capitalization is a great way to ensure your customers see the event in the message, as well asremember it. But keep your capitalization to a minimum; overdoing it will confuse your customers, or just make them look down on you.

Using these ten tips will dramatically help your SMS mobile marketing campaign and make it more efficient. A lot of companies have already jumped on the SMS marketing campaign train, so when you do, you want to make sure that you stand out from the crowd. Using these tips will help you do just that!