What is Mobile Marketing and Its Strategies?

Imagine you spending an entire day without your smartphone!

Smartphones are friendly gadgets that have, thanks to technological innovations, become pocket-friendly convenient devices. One’s that assists individuals in most of their daily activities. Becoming an integral part of our daily lives. Today we run our business, meetings, and calls via them. We stay updated on news, and weather forecasts, play interactive and immersive games, browse social media content, and more. Our smartphones are hubs for our financial investment, our banking services, our healthcare checks, our gym sessions, and much more.

Wondering how? The answer is the multiple mobile applications we use to access our banking records, order groceries, book a vehicle for traveling, book courier services, etc. The rise of applications and their usage has offered businesses a new way of outreach and lead generation: Mobile Marketing.

Basis an article published by India TV news in 2023, an average Indian spends around 4.9 hours daily on their mobile phones. They also report that India stands in the 8th position with the highest average hours spent on their smartphones and handsets daily.

Reflecting on the significance of marketing efforts on mobile devices to deliver relevant and personalized content. With many leading innovations, we have seamless integration of order placements and payment processes on mobile devices today. Necessitating the need for mobile marketing efforts in our current digital landscape.

What is Mobile Marketing?

Mobile marketing is the series of digital activities, actions, and strategies that help to promote products, services, or a brand to its audience via mobile devices. Both smartphones and tablets are ideal examples of devices used in mobile marketing. If a user is always on their phone, mobile marketing becomes a significant contributor to promoting a brand’s service. In mobile marketing, digital assets come into play. This implies that a digital marketer must understand the audience to launch a good strategy for mobile marketing. They should understand user buying behaviour, time spent on applications, interests in social media networking apps, demographics, etc.

Here are some essential elements mobile marketing professionals must consider:

a.Researching the target demographic. Build a buyer persona.
b.Paying attention to the psychographics. This means demographics values, belief systems, personalities, interests, etc.
c.Analysing behavioural patterns. This means how does a user group use their mobile devices. Do they use it often for commuting, finding restaurants, and browsing products online?
d.Learning device type. This means understanding what device style and type a consumer is using. It is a tablet or a smartphone. It helps marketers to optimize their marketing campaigns.
e.Segmentation of like-minded audience. This means the information collected about the audience can help marketers to group them into audience groups that have similar characteristics.
f.Personalization. This means using the information collected to target said user group with personalized content to increase engagement, gain a higher rate of conversions, and build customer loyalty.

What are Mobile Marketing Strategies?

It is a Strat experiences and reach a larger audience, increase application downloads, deliver personalized experiences, and maximize user engagement on mobile devices. It has a specific focus and priority on mobile-enabled versions of the website, a mobile application, and social networking applications. Here are a few of the most effective mobile marketing strategies:

1. SMS Marketing

As the names suggested, this is a text-based marketing strategy. Under this strategy, a business sends promotional texts, deals, coupons, and other alerts to its target consumers and existing ones. The messages have a limit of 160 characters or less. It has proven to the one of the most used and successful tools in mobile marketing since its inception. A key reason for that is their high deliverability, openness, and engagement rate. Some studies have shown how SMS click-through rates at times have been double that of email marketing.

Digital marketers believe that since messages are short with crisp information or a discount code, users tend to click through more often. It is most useful for time-sensitive promotions.

2. App-based marketing

A growing app market is not to miss. Smart marketing managers would never ignore the significant role of in-app marketing efforts. Hundreds and thousands of apps are available at a finger touch today to the users. Making App-based/ in-app marketing a key mobile marketing strategy. There are several types of app-based marketing:

i.Video-based ads
ii.Display ads with a banner placement on top or bottom of mobile screens
iii.Native ads, which are placed in a promotional style suitable and adaptive to the app environment.
iv.Interstitial ads, which appear between app actions. Often seen when gamers move from one level to another in app-based games.
v.Partnership incentives, in this category, brands often partner with each other to offer users incentives to engage with another brand.

For instance: Many Instagram reel-making-based applications offering tools to make videos often have video-based ads for the free use of their application.

3. Location-based marketing

In this strategy, digital marketing professionals often take advantage of a user’s location. Making use of the GPS function on smartphones helps marketers send consumers promotions with relevant content. It is also often called geotargeting or geolocation marketing.

A great example of this is the high-end brand Coach, which used location-targeting marketing to drive its customers nearby to visit its stores. Increasing the foot traffic and driving sales.

Food and Beverage brands often use location-based marketing to send promotions and deals to consumers in the area, encouraging users to buy a meal from the nearby location.

4. Proximity Marketing

While this is another subset of location-based marketing, proximity marketing has become a rising star in mobile marketing. In location-based marketing, the focus is on a larger geographical area. In proximity marketing the focus is on users in a said proximity to a point of interest like a shopping mall, an airport, a store, or a restaurant.

It is a unique marketing strategy where digital marketing teams utilize technology to send permission-based push notifications to users when they enter a specific area. How?

The proximity is facilitated with the use of technology like Bluetooth beacons, signing into public WiFi systems, NFCs, and QR codes.

Brands like Coca-Cola, Ola, Big Bazaar, Amazon, etc. often use this mobile marketing strategy. For instance, Ola sends targeted notifications on its ride discounts and promotions when a user closes in on popular pick-up points.

Other strategies include push notifications, in-game mobile marketing, MMS marketing, search advertisements, etc.

Mobile Marketing Strategies Aim

a.increase lead generation and conversions.
b.enhance user engagement with the brand and its products.
c.reach a wider audience
d.increase brand visibility
e.promote new products/ services.

Leveraging the featured capabilities of smart devices, marketers can connect in real-time with their users. Delivering to them relevant content at the right time to drive conversions and business growth.

Interested in learning more about digital marketing strategies?

Stay tuned to the Hetic, India blog. We post weekly on global digital topics with unique articles that share tips on how to enhance your digital skills. Including learning digital business management from Hetic, India, with their exclusive MBA in Digital Business.

Learn more about the MBA in Digital Business program here.