The inventor of the first mobile phone once said:
“We knew that people didn’t want to talk to cars, or to houses, or to offices; they want to talk to other people. What we believed was that the telephone number should be a person rather than a location.”
Fast forward to the present day and the mobile phone has become so much more than a phone number. In fact, making and receiving phone calls is pretty far down the list of priorities for many smartphone users.
Users are far more likely to reach for their phone to access the internet, which is why mobile marketing presents such an interesting opportunity for marketers.
The way we reach customers is changing. Digital marketing allows us to take a multi channel approach to reaching our ideal target customers. But mobile marketing allows us to create a more tailored experience.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a term which is often thrown around without much thought or consideration for the true meaning. Digital marketing is emcompasses anything that involves using digital channels to send a marketing message. This includes:
Pay per click advertising
Pay per click advertising includes things like Adwords, display advertising and paid social media advertising. When you are bidding for clicks to your website, this is a form of pay per click advertising. Discover how PPC and SEO can work hand in hand for your business.
Website
Maintaining your company website is another form of marketing and allows customers to find out more about you. This is one section of digital marketing real estate that you have total control over.
Search engine optimisation
The practice of optimising your website to help it rank higher in search engines is known as search engine optimisation. If your competitors are always ranked above you, find out why here.
Social media marketing
When you post about your business on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, this is social media marketing. You can also pay to amplify your reach.
Email marketing
Those email blasts you send to your mailing list are all forms of email marketing. Email marketing also includes things like collecting email addresses and cold emailing prospects.
Content marketing
When you publish blogs, whitepapers or e-books in the hope of attracting more customers, this is known as content marketing.
What is mobile marketing?
Many people think that mobile marketing is another subsection of digital marketing. But really it’s just another way of approaching all of these tasks.
When we design campaigns, we design from a desktop-first mindset. The people making the websites and designing the campaigns are all using computers, so it makes sense to think about how these things will appear on a desktop or laptop computer.
When you take a step back from your campaigns, you soon realise that not everyone that you reach is using a desktop or laptop computer. In many cases, the vast majority are using a mobile device.
This is where mobile marketing comes in. It’s a distinct approach to all digital marketing channels which forces the marketer to ask: “how can I optimise this experience for a mobile device?”
Here are just some of the ways you can adopt your marketing for mobile:
- Implement a responsive website
- Adjust your CTAs for mobile devices (direct call, for example)
- Adjust your email templates to make them mobile friendly
- Develop a useful app
- Turn your ebooks into podcasts
- Turn your blog posts into videos
If you aren’t sure if you are properly addressing your customer’s needs on mobile, try searching for your brand online using a mobile device. Explore your social media, website, even your paid ads. Does the experience flow as you expect? Or are things broken and hard to read?
It may be a long time since the first smartphones arrived in our lives, but marketers still have a long way to go in making the most of mobile marketing opportunities.
If you need help with your mobile marketing strategy, get in touch with Auburn to discover how we can help.