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Out of all the internet users, 80% own a smartphone.
Smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices are completely changing the way customers interact with brands. Now, everything that could have been done on a desktop or a laptop can be done on a mobile device. This ranges from checking your mail to reading content to buying products. This is why having an effective mobile marketing strategy is crucial. Understanding your mobile audience and designing your content around it makes sure that your strategy reaps most of its marketing budget.
What is Mobile Marketing?
Mobile marketing is a part of the umbrella which is nothing but the digital marketing strategy. It is specifically aimed at reaching a target audience on their mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and so on by using different approaches such as your company’s website, email, SMS, MMS, social media and your brand’s application.
Why do Mobile Marketers Need to Measure ROI?
It was more than a decade ago when mobile applications were used by the public. During this time, mobile marketing was in its infant stage and all the metrics that existed to measure the effectiveness of the marketing strategies was measuring the app downloads and the number of new users.
But now with more than 4 million apps in existence, just measuring the downloads is not enough. Mobile engagement includes retention, which is suffering because of the vast majority of options available and measuring the monetization is becoming increasingly difficult. Currently, many marketers have reached to the conclusion that a download is nothing more than a stage in the marketing funnel and that it does not guarantee a healthy revenue stream. Using various platforms such as email, SMS and social media to effectively brand your company is the way things are leaning towards.
Obviously, these methods are not going to be cheap, and with the increasing number of mobile users, the importance of investing in these practices is eminent. This is why measuring the returns you get on your investment on mobile marketing becomes crucial.
What KPIs can you use to Measure Performance?
Below is a list of a few indicators and metrics that can help marketers determine the effectiveness of their mobile marketing strategy:
- User requirements
- User pain points
- User engagement
- User retention patterns
Ways You Can Build Your Mobile Marketing Strategy
Below is a list of a few simple ways you can start building a mobile marketing strategy that will help your business grow:
- Make your brand easy to discover using targeted advertisements, easy to discover mobile applications, and so on
- Use mobile engagement to direct your potential users to your website and/or online store if available
- Use consistent and recognizable branding across all mobile marketing platforms to leave an impression among your potential customers
- Use the information that mobile users offer to create customized and targeted strategies
- Take any and all interaction with your users seriously and work on customer engagement to improve retention
- Track engagement with various offers available on your website, application and so on
SEE ALSO:Â What is Digital Transformation? A Necessary Change
How can you Increase your ROI Using Mobile Marketing?
Once your mobile marketing strategy has been effectively implemented, now it is time to track the returns made on your investment. It is obvious now that if your mobile marketing strategy has been optimized, then it is possible to raise your business’s conversion rates drastically.
Below are a few ways you can increase the ROI on your mobile marketing strategy:
- Think about the context for your keyword search. When people look for things on the internet using a mobile device, chances are they already have a pretty good idea of what they want. The words or phrases they will use will be more specific when they search. Therefore the content on your web pages should not just be optimized for web use, but also mobile.
- Mobile friendly sites are a must! Google has started to rank websites that are mobile friendly higher due to the increasing number of mobile usage and the users are more likely to stay on the site if it is easy to navigate.
- SMS marketing may seem outdated with the heavy internet usage, but it is still a very effective method of mobile marketing when used correctly. Nearly everyone with a phone uses the text messaging application so it is a good way to get your message across.
- Track your results by focusing on the conversions through all your paid advertisements across different platforms when compared to unpaid traffic. If the conversion rate for paid ads is lower than organic, then there is a problem with the target audience and keywords, which makes it easier for marketers to remedy.
- Develop an application for your business, especially if it is in the retail sector. Applications can be more effective in creating user engagement and encouraging them to take action. This also helps businesses gather more consumer data, which can help companies tailor their marketing campaigns to suit the consumers’ needs.
- Businesses can also send out push notifications to their customers. This allows marketers especially in the retail sector to provide current and relevant information directly. This leads to generating interest in the users and creating a call to action where they make spur decisions or product purchases. The push notifications have to be personalized messages sent out to the users which are created based on the actions that the user has taken while using your mobile application.
- Measure each customer acquisition so that you can find out as a marketer the impressions and ad clicks that resulted in someone taking action on your website or downloading an app. This will help in determining the most effective channels to the marketers and will help them understand where to spend ad budgets more effectively. Once a company has a new user, it is very important to know what factors exist that drive the activity within the app or in-app events.
- Master your acquisition and retention with the app store optimization after you analyze what the factors are that drive app downloads or website visits. After the paid parts are done and analyzed, it is time to analyze the organic traffic. What is it that drives users to your website or application, through millions of already existing ones? What is the motivation? You need to focus on that and see what it is that makes your app discoverable using A/B testing, customer surveys, and mainly monitoring behavioral data.
Ways to Maximize your Mobile Advertising Spend
Mobile marketing is a vast field and the budget comes at a high price. It becomes imperative to monitor the money allocated and the returns on the investment as well as finding a way to optimize the budget and the company’s strategy.
Select the Best Pricing Method
There are various pricing methods that you can use to customize your mobile marketing campaign. The options include Cost Per Mile, Cost Per Click, Cost Per Install and Cost Per Action. These methods available will help your business easily monitor and control the reach of your ad campaigns, while checking in on the cost.
Control Fraud Activity
There are different types of fraudulent activities that happen while you run your company’s mobile marketing ads. The two main types that need to be kept in check are technical fraud and compliance fraud. Technical fraud includes ad stacking, click stuffing and faked postbacks, whereas compliance fraud includes poor viewability of ads, misusing deceptive creatives as clickbait and undisclosed rebrokering.
There are also other methods you can implement such as using different advertising networks, measuring the quality of traffic by monitoring your website or application’s daily active users and the organic uplift. Companies and marketers should also ideally have a blacklist and a whitelist of publishing platforms and they should also regularly update and modify their ad campaigns based on the strategy, target audience and so on.
SEE ALSO:Â Digital Transformation Strategies: Key To Changing Business Dynamics
Conclusion: Additional Tips to Maximize Mobile Marketing ROI
There are a lot of websites and applications and there is no one way to create an online presence among your potential customers and target audience. Retention of existing users is also a priority, and with the high usage of mobile devices, mobile marketing automatically becomes a priority as well. Lastly, here are a few additional tips to help businesses maximize their mobile marketing ROI:
- Analyze and examine the data available on your customers and use only verified data for your campaigns
- Segment your customer base appropriately to help you identify the needs of your customers better
- Personalize your messages to your audience to create engagement
- Use analytics and attribution platforms to evaluate the performance of your campaign and measure impacts of all the touch points across the customer’s journey