Create a Successful Mobile Marketing Strategy with Ease

For everyone worldwide, smartphones have become a significant part of their lives. And as technology has spread wider and more quickly, many companies have seen big opportunities ahead with everything that comes with mobile marketing.    

Today, out of 5.3 billion Internet users, almost 93.39% are mobile users, meaning 4.95 billion. Nearly 60% of the global online traffic comes from mobile devices. So, if you haven’t got a mobile marketing strategy by now, use our framework to make one.    

But before proceeding, you should first have a better understanding of how mobile marketing works and some important notions regarding this topic.   

What is Mobile Marketing? 

Mobile marketing is an approach that focuses primarily on drawing sales from mobile device users. It can also be viewed as a way in which technology concentrates the personalized promotion of goods and services to users constantly connected to the Internet.   

Mobile marketing took a turn in 2007 when Apple launched the iPhone in the US and UK. Since then, smartphone technologies have developed even further, and many mobile apps have emerged.  

Since then, web developers have started structuring their designs by considering the most used screen sizes. And the paradigm changes also influenced how the new software interfaces were thought out.  

Considering the mobile marketing focus points, it didn’t become unusual for computer programs and cloud-based software to offer lightweight mobile applications that allow users to access the same functionality from the desktop interface directly on their mobile devices.  

Also, in 2007, advertisers spent $61 million on mobile ads – 0.04% of the $148.99 billion global advertising spend. The global mobile ad spending has been estimated at around $360.334 billion – 57.48% of the $601.87 billion global ad spending.

What Does Mobile Marketing Consist Of? 

Even though Internet ads were initially designed for desktops, the growing Internet usage through mobile devices forced the digital advertising industry to adapt. 

Mobile advertising is a mobile marketing tool that delivers ads to the audience that uses those products. In more detail, mobile advertising is a part of mobile marketing that implies the delivery of commercial messages directly to the target audience’s phone in the form of text, image, or video through SMS/MMS, notifications, social media, search engines, or mobile apps. 

Unlike years before, mobile marketing has moved more towards web and display mobile advertising. Reaching out to your target has never been easier; today, there are plenty of dedicated ad network services, tracking solutions, and formats to deliver your ad. There are even ad network services that specifically target smartphones. 

Now, mobile advertising is mainly based on several technologies and types of data, such as: 

• Cookies;   
• Keywords;   
• Retargeting;   
• User profile;   
• Demographics;    
• Topics;    
• Interests. 

Trends in 2024

Since GDPR became mandatory in the EU, advertisers and companies providing advertising tools have been continuously required to ensure more data privacy and protection. Ad tech companies have prepared for the changes in data privacy and protection in contextual and anonymized data.  

Facebook (now Meta) has also been working on this trend to find new ways to deliver highly relevant ads without using too much of users’ personal data.  

Ad quality and creative control will be the focus for future years. Mobile marketing trends will also focus more on mobile streaming, highlighting mobile e-commerce, video content, personalization of ad messages, 5G mobile standards, and mobile games as the next social network.  

5G wireless technology brings new capabilities and opens the road for new technologies. In addition to an even more potent mobile network, 5G is expected to be used to interconnect and control machines, objects, and devices. Rich media ads bring better results than static banners, and that’s a given.  

However, banner blindness is worsening yearly, and engaging with your audience with display ads is becoming harder.  

Interactive ads are not new, but they’re a continuously evolving concept that has been the top marketing trend. Polls, quizzes, and such will prove reliable, but mini-games shown in apps will do wonders in mobile advertising.  

5 Steps to Create a Mobile Marketing Strategy with Ease

1. Understand Your Audience

To get the most out of your website on mobile, you first need to learn who your mobile audience is. Your mobile marketing strategy should be developed based on a buyer persona. The best way to do this is by checking your Google Analytics reports.

Check the Devices

Since Google Analytics recently switched to GA4, the options and processes changed slightly. Thus, to find insights about users’ devices, you must go to Reports > User > Tech > Tech Details. Then, you can filter the report by using the “Device” category.    

This report will help you understand how many of your users actually visit your site from mobile. Select the data from the beginning of the year up until now, and you may find out you get most of your users from mobile or, on the contrary, you get only a few mobile users.  

Check Your Analytics Conversions 

During UA (Universal Analytics) times, we used “Goals.” Once GA4 stole the spotlight, Goals changed to “Conversions.” Furthermore, the metrics changed, too. Thus, only the Destination and Event types of UA Goals can be tracked as Conversions in GA4.   

If you were using UA Goals, you can migrate them to GA4 and continue to measure how your leads get in touch with you, how many of them sent you contact forms or called directly from the website, and how many customers reached the thank you page using their phones.  

You can migrate UA Goals by going to Admin > Property > Setup Assistant > Set up conversions, then click on the Actions icon and on “Import from Universal Analytics.”  

Learn More Details About Your Audience 

After discovering how many mobile users your website gets, go deeper.  

Go to Reports > User Attributes and check the Demographics submenu to find out more info about the age, gender, location, language, and interests of your audience. Then, you can go to Tech > Tech details to find your audience’s App version, Browser, Device category, Device model, Operating system, OS version, platform, or screen resolution. 

2. Check Your Website’s Mobile Performance 

By now, you know who your audience is. The next step for efficient mobile marketing is to verify if your website is mobile-friendly.   

Test Your Website Responsiveness 

The fastest way to test it is to access your website from your mobile phone and see if it shows as it should.  

To be accurate, check if your website is mobile-friendly by testing it with Chrome Lighthouse (as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test was retired on December 1, 2023). 

Moreover, you can go into more in-depth testing with a Lighthouse audit. You can run it through Chrome DevTools by accessing the Audits tab. The report offers a detailed audit of Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO, and Progressive Web Apps. Lighthouse also provides improvement suggestions on the issues it identifies.  

Check The Metrics 

Go to the Mobile reports and check how your website performs on mobile.  

Correlate bounce rate with pages/session and average session duration. If your website isn’t a blog, a high bounce rate is the first bad omen, especially if you have a low page/session and average session duration.  

For blogs and websites where most of the organic traffic comes through the website’s blog, a high bounce rate (70-80%) is normal, but only if the average time on the page is high enough for a user to read an article.  

SIDENOTE. Bounce rate stands for single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.  

Test The Mobile Page Speed 

Page speed is crucial. Even if you come up with an Oscar-winning mobile strategy, your conversions will be down in the sink if the website takes ages to load.  

The quick way to check your mobile page speed is with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This test will also show you suggestions for page speed improvement.  

Check How Your Conversion Pages Are Performing  

The conversion pages for a website are usually the contact pages, checkout pages, and campaign landing pages. There, users can perform specific actions that, when completed, will bring you a conversion. These are the pages where you especially want the lowest bounce and exit rates.  

Check Your Mobile Web Design 

Poor design is the most common issue with low-converting websites. If your website looks crowded and chaotic on small screens, mobile users will have a negative user experience. For your mobile strategy to work, your website needs to be user-friendly on any screen it is shown on.  

Make sure to position and size every element in a clear and aesthetic hierarchy, from logo to menu to texts and headings. 

3. Develop Your Mobile Strategy 

After you ensure your website is doing well on mobile, develop your goals and strategy.  

Set Comprehensible Goals 

First, you need to aim to achieve results with your mobile website. You won’t be doing that with a sniper rifle but with goals—SMART goals.  

For a goal to be smart, it has to be:   

• Specific (use well-defined and focused, specific actions);  
• Measurable (put concrete numbers in your goals);  
• Attainable (make them realistic and achievable);  
• Relevant (set goals based on your business realities and needs);  
• Time-Based (every goal you have needs a deadline).  

Let’s take some fictional goals, for example:  

1. Grow the number of mobile website users by 60% in the next 3 months; 
2. Acquire 10,000 new accounts through the mobile website in the next 3 months;  
3. Gain $700,000 in revenue through your mobile website in 3 months.  

Outline Your Mobile Marketing Strategy 

I. Brand Communication Analysis

• What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? 
• What benefits do you give? 
• What are your values, concepts, and ideas? 
• How does your brand help customers? 

II. Competitors’ Brand Communication Analysis 

At this stage, you must identify your direct competitors and analyze their brands by answering the same questions from above, just as you did for your own brand.  

III. Marketing Strategy

• Come up with the main message for your ads. Make sure to include the USP; 
• Choose the communication channels and touchpoints (Organic, Ads, Social media, In-apps, etc.); 
• Plan messages delivery (Especially for ads – When will they be delivered? How often? For how long?); 
• Establish the budget (For every activity). 

4. Plan and Execute Your Mobile Strategy 

Communication Analyses 

After outlining the activities you are about to work on, you need to determine the resources you will spend.   

Your brand and competitors’ analysis shouldn’t take more than one day. These two sections can be taken care of by one person. If you have the human resources and want to move faster, you can assign two people, one for each.  

The USP 

It’s important to remember that a USP is a unique advantage that only you provide to your customers. How are you better than your competition?  

For example, you have a cryptocurrency exchange. Your competitors offer online crypto-wallets inside their platforms. Your platform also provides that, but a good USP could be “Free crypto-wallet hardware for active traders.”  

Benefits 

When it comes to benefits, they can be common to your competitors. You also have to ensure you offer enough benefits so customers don’t consider your competitors a better alternative.  

For example, all your competitors have trading courses, a mobile app, 24/7 support, and direct exchange between some tokens. Make sure your exchange offers these benefits as well.   

Values, Concepts, and Ideas 

Values, concepts, and ideas refer to your brand ideology, affinities, how you treat your customers, and even your internal organization. People tend to stick with coherent and consequent brands that say what they do and do what they say.  

For instance, if you state that your cryptocurrency exchange wants to make tokens accessible worldwide but geographically blocks all of Asia, that is a massive inconsistency. Even something as simple as saying 24/7 support and being unable to meet the standard requests will be seen as an inconsistency.  

Help Your Customers 

How your brand helps a customer is one question that should have been answered even before the business started. It refers to the utility, the problem it solves, and the reason a human being would invest resources in a certain product or service.  

E.g., a crypto exchange allows customers to trade digital currencies for conventional fiat money or other digital currencies.  

Execution 

After you identify or develop the core message for your mobile marketing communication, prepare your ads and texts. There are lots of types and formats for mobile advertising, so you need to pay special attention here.  

Prepare Content 

To develop your mobile content, you should work with an agency and regularly develop new materials. If you don’t want to work with an agency and don’t have the internal resources to do that, you can always contact freelancers on dedicated platforms.   

A good copywriter, a talented designer, a skilled video maker, and maybe a decent animator should suffice.  

Whether you work with an agency or a few freelancers, your content should be ready in one or two weeks. Once delivered, the materials can be reused for a while. Remember to update your content because it will become less relevant over time, and constantly check the most essential content metrics. 

SIDENOTE. Besides your regular content, the best practice is to have dedicated content (articles, ads, media) for the main Holidays of your audience.  

It’s preferable to focus on evergreen content, content that remains relevant in time.   

Even a presentation video that you have used for years can lose its relevance if you have undergone a rebranding or your field of activity has undergone major transformations.   

Content Delivery 

For mobile organic traffic, hire a professional to target mobile users with SEO. This long process may take up to a year or even more.

Also, SEO is an activity you should constantly monitor. Once you get the rank you desire, don’t take that as a given. You can lose your position overnight due to algorithm updates or competition.  

Assign a person for your social media. Improve your social media presence because out of the 4.90 billion active social media users, 4.47 billion are active mobile social media users or 91.41%. Social media is a good medium for sharing content, and most platforms offer some advanced advertising tools dedicated to mobile.  

SIDENOTE. Focus only on social media platforms that are relevant to your business. LinkedIn is an appropriate platform for a cryptocurrency exchange because its users are there with professional or business-related interests. Instagram isn’t, for obvious reasons.  

Assign a person to manage the ad platforms. These platforms allow for search, display, in-app, push notifications, and even SMS ads. Schedule planning should take no more than one or two days.  

The budget is another one-man job. It is important to consider the maximum budget allocated for internal resources, external resources, professional services, advertising, and link building. 

5. Evaluate Your Mobile Marketing 

First and foremost, you need to review the SMART objectives. You set a deadline for your goals, so once you meet the due date, see how much you have reached the targets.  

1. Grow the number of mobile website users by 60% in the next 3 months 

At the end of 3 months, you will check if the number of website mobile users grew by 60%. If it did, congratulations. If it didn’t, you underachieved. If it grew from over 60% to 100% or even more, you did great.  

2. Acquire 10,000 new accounts through the mobile website in the next 3 months 

You do the same with the second goal. After 3 months, you will check the number of signups through your mobile website and see if you have gotten more or less than 10,000 new accounts.  

3. Gain $700,000 in revenue through your mobile website in 3 months

When measuring this goal, separate mobile revenue from the others. It’s important to be as accurate as possible here because you want to measure the results of your mobile marketing efforts.  

Secondly, check if your activities fit into the budget.  

You may have achieved your SMART goals and even got 700 grand. The allocated budget was $500,000. If you did achieve all your targets without surpassing your budget, you could throw a party. If you exceed your budget, you need to optimize your campaign.  

Also, always calculate your Return on Investment (ROI) to draw your final conclusions.

Final Thoughts

Since most online activity now occurs on mobile devices, businesses must adapt their marketing efforts to effectively reach and engage their target audience. Understanding the fundamentals of mobile marketing, including its history, key components, and recent trends, can help you create a comprehensive strategy that drives results.

But remember, mobile marketing is an ongoing process that requires continuous adaptation and optimization. So, stay informed about the latest trends and technologies to ensure your strategy remains relevant and effective in the ever-evolving digital landscape