Creatively Connect to Consumers With Mobile Marketing

For marketers, this is a golden age of media delivery, where connecting a wide range of consumers is merely a click away. Billions of people use smartphones worldwide and nearly 60 percent of Americans owned one at the beginning of 2014, according to the Pew Research Internet Project. But in spite of those numbers, there’s no catch-all approach to capturing the attention of all those users. Mobile marketing requires a strong strategy based on your target audience and the product or services you hope to share with the world.

Consider Creative Structure

An obviously outdated or navigationally limited mobile app or mobile version of a company’s website is a big invitation for a user to click away from your content, or the next entry on a page of Google search results.

Loolwa Khazzoom of the Huffington Post says that consumers are waiting to be invited to a call to action through their mobile devices. But many companies still struggle with some of those basics. Khazzoom cites the need to make your content and site responsive to people's mobile devices and to create a simple and accessible way for users to view your information and call you “with the click of a button.”

All of that is great, but you still need to find the room to be creative, synchronize mobile messages with overall brand management and keep the content on mobile-specific pages consistent with marketing campaigns.

In designing mobile versions of sites or mobile apps, it’s also important to consider how to reward brand loyalty for returning customers, since smart phones are no longer exciting new ways to search or shop. With new technological capabilities, users have rising expectations and companies are forced to keep pace by finding creative ways to capture viewers’ attention, according to Marketing Land.

Technology Options

Understanding the mobile medium and how your audience uses mobile devices is critical to your company’s evolution with digital marketing.

First of all, you might consider your company’s wireless plans. Mobile internet is more affordable and more competitive now. For example, T-Mobile offers free data plans to compete with other mobile giants. To understand the medium, you have to play with the medium. Get a flexible plan that allows you to explore what your competitors produce, and potential customers crave, with mobile content.

Mashable lists MailChimp and Swipely among the hottest tools for mobile marketing. MailChimp, for example, allows companies to view email campaign statistics and follow tweets about you. You can also manage lists and subscribers from any mobile device. Swipely provides loyalty program solutions and built-in analytical measures to see how customers respond by texting and clicking to prompts.

Tracking your campaign is key, and it’s important to separate mobile users from traditional web users in your analytics. They have different behaviors. We all read, shop and share content on the go. Understanding those habits and tapping into them for marketing purposes is something many companies are doing now, while others are just beginning to explore.

There’s still time to learn. but don’t wait too long. Your products or services shouldn’t be limited to traditional websites.