Mobile marketing strategy 101: mobile marketing and its benefits

The number of mobile users has skyrocketed in recent years: according to DataReportal, there are more than 5.2 billion mobile internet users worldwide – that’s two thirds of the global population. Recent events have helped fuel the growth of mobile: during the pandemic, 70% of users said they used their devices more, while during the same period of 2020-2021, the number of unique mobile users grew by more than 90 million. The message to marketers is clear – if you want to reach consumers, do it through their phones.

But how? In this article, we’ll take you through some mobile marketing strategy fundamentals to get you started, so you can reach your target audience and grow your business. Because a conversion is only ever a tap away.

The importance of mobile marketing strategy

We take our phones everywhere – to the shops, to bed, and yes, even to the bathroom. This is an amazing opportunity for a business – how else can you instantly reach a consumer during 99% of their waking hours?

Add in all the tech tools that smartphones allow, and you’ve got the 21st century way to reach your customers.

What is mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing is promotional activity that leverages digital, social, and other channels to reach audiences on their smartphones or tablets. Mobile marketing not only helps businesses reach potential clients, it also provides a framework for valuable customer care interactions like chatbots, user feedback, after-sales care and user reviews.

What is a mobile marketing strategy?

A mobile marketing strategy is a cross-media, digital marketing strategy to reach users on their mobile phones or tablets. Which channels or types of content to use depends on the audiences you aim to target and your goal for targeting them.

Let’s take a look at different mobile marketing strategies you can use.

In-app advertising

When you unlock your phone, what is the first thing you load? That’s right, an app. According to TechCrunch, consumers spend 85% of their smartphone time in apps. And 77% spend most of their time in their top three apps (with messaging apps among them), which gives great insights as to where marketers should concentrate their marketing budget with in-app advertising.

In-app advertising comes in a variety of formats:

• Display advertising: banners / MPUs
• Native advertising: promotions customized to look like the app in which they appear
• Video ads – instream/outstream video, or rewarded video (where watching the video ‘rewards’ the user, say with an extra life in an app game)

In-app advertising is a great mobile marketing strategy to reach target audiences and capture their attention.

Social media marketing

Social media is one of the most popular uses of a smartphone – social network platforms almost tripled their total user base in the last decade, from 970 million in 2010 to over 3.81 billion users in 2020. Hence social media should be high on your priority list when devising a mobile marketing strategy.

But it’s not just about sheer reach. The nature of social media – with comments and direct messages (DMs) – makes it easy to create an intimate, personal connection with your customers, and you can show your customer referrals and recommendations to advance your business image Whether someone has had a good or bad customer experience, they are sure to share it on social media!

Though some companies choose to focus on organic social media posts, it’s increasingly common to use social media advertising to reach the right customers. Some options include:

• Facebook ads, or boosted (i.e. promoted) posts
• Promoted tweets on Twitter
• Shoppable or promoted pins on Pinterest
• LinkedIn ads or promoted posts

This mobile marketing strategy lets you build an audience using demographic information, and define your campaign’s goals, budget and how long it will last.

SMS marketing

SMS or text marketing sends customers business-related messages via the medium of text message. This messaging can include promotional information about products or services.

Text messages don’t rely on mobile internet, so they can reach consumers in more far-flung locations. It also comes as default on all phones, so is easy to use with no software to install.

But SMS have a character limit, and come with a high cost, to both send and sometimes to receive. They also lack more advanced features like multimedia and rich text. For those, you need SMS’s natural evolution, which is messaging apps…

Messenger marketing

Messenger marketing is similar to text marketing, but uses mobile chat apps instead of SMS to connect with customers. It leverages mobile messaging platforms such as Viber, Facebook, WhatsApp, or WeChat to create a seamless, native experience that is often no different to messaging a friend. Depending on the messaging app capabilities, this can be, for example, business messages with personalised offerings to your existing customers or chatbots that help you to attract and grow a new audience.  

Connecting with customers through a messaging app is cheaper, as it avoids the maintenance costs of using your own app. And it’s more effective, as you’re meeting customers on a platform where they are already active.

Email marketing

Half of all email opens happen on mobile devices, so if you’re pursuing an email marketing strategy, your emails need to be optimised for mobile. Emails not optimised for mobile (i.e. not incorporated into your mobile marketing strategy) will be harder to read on a mobile device, and can sacrifice functionality like gifs and web links.

Mobile search

Mobile search refers to searching for information using search engines accessed through a mobile device. As more people access Google on their phone than their desktop (61%, according to Statista), you’ll need to optimize your Google Ads for mobile search. This will help you reach the majority of searchers who aren’t using a desktop computer.

Benefits of Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing has many benefits, including its sheer scale and reach, and measurable results that tell you more about your audience.

1. Takes your brand truly global

Not only does mobile marketing let you reach customers all over the world, you can choose exactly who to reach based on demographic preferences for your ideal audience (think age, income, location, and so on).

You can even target users based on more sophisticated metrics like interests, hobbies, purchasing behaviour, and more. That way, you can really laser in on your target audience.

If you don’t know exactly who your customers are, mobile marketing will help you find out – just start with a broad brush mobile marketing strategy and refine it as you go. Once you have found your audience, focus on them to maximise your return on investment (ROI). But don’t stop testing and optimising your mobile marketing campaigns for better results – the job is never quite done!

2. Mobile in-app advertising has better performance than other platforms

Mobile click-through rates are usually higher compared to tablets and desktop computers. And the more clicks an ad gets, the greater the chance of making a sale.

3. Easy to track results

Mobile marketing lets you track a campaign’s performance to quantify how successful your mobile marketing strategy was and refine it to make it more accurate, relevant and adaptive. This lets your business react instantly to trends and events.

4. More personalized communications

People check their phones constantly, generating lots of user data which allows marketers to serve their customers with personalized content designed to appeal to their tastes. This feeds back into creating an even more intimate experience, as customers feel like the brands really understand what they want.

5. Cost-effective

A mobile marketing strategy is actually cheaper than most traditional marketing techniques. Optimizing your website for mobile use or sending marketing communications via messaging apps is a lot more affordable than you might think – good news for small businesses without big budgets.

Campaign elements for mobile also have to contain less information, forcing you to distill the content to its essential components. That makes your marketing simpler, to-the-point, and hence more effective.

6. Diversification of formats

As well as the classic formats there are more advanced ad formats available in mobile marketing, such as rewarded video, playable ads, in-play ads, and AR advertising. 

7. Location-based mobile marketing

Marketers can leverage the always-connected nature of smartphones to devise a mobile marketing strategy that targets customers based on their location, making the ads more relevant to the user. 

Imagine if you received a digital coupon for a clothes store that you had just walked past. Wouldn’t you be tempted to pop in?

Geofencing sets a virtual fence around your business, and triggers coupons or other offers when a device enters your predesignated area (a shopping mall, say). This is known as hyperlocal targeting. You can even set your virtual fence around a rival business to steer customers away from it and towards yours (what’s known as geo-conquesting). Sneaky.

8. Better tracking solutions available for marketers

Mobile marketing throws up all kinds of metrics to show how your campaigns are performing. The main ones are:

• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much it costs to acquire (or convert) a user into a paying customer
• Lifetime Value (LTV): Sometimes called Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), this is the amount of revenue created by a user over their lifetime
• Average Order Value (AOV): The amount a user spends per transaction
• User engagement: How active users are with your brand once they have downloaded your app or otherwise engaged with your business somehow

It is much cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones, so make sure your mobile marketing strategy looks after your customers and they will reward you by staying loyal.

Mobile Marketing Examples

You can learn from all sorts of brands how to create an effective mobile marketing campaign. Here are some examples.

Coca-Cola Easter messenger marketing campaign

On the eve of Easter in Eastern Europe, Coca-Cola decided to engage users in a fun and interactive way. It devised a lively animated game called Easter Egg Fighter within Viber messenger. It follows the Eastern European tradition: a coloured Easter egg fight, in which only the toughest eggs survive. Users could play with their family and friends no matter where they were.

To attract more people to the game launched within the Coca-Cola chatbot, they used a complex marketing campaign on Viber:

• creative Sticker pack with free downloading that led new users subscribe to the chatbot;
• promotion among members of the Coca-Cola Community on Viber to increase involvement;
• personalised outbound messages for existing chatbot subscribers to engage them in the game.

The campaign lasted three months. In only three weeks in Bulgaria, it saw impressive results: 350,000 user interactions, an average play time of over five-and-a-half minutes, and over 188,000 total played minutes. Chatbot subscribers also shot up by 30%, and there were over 63,000 sticker pack downloads. 

Coca-Cola Easter campaign in Bulgaria on Viber

Urban Outfitters party dresses location-based marketing campaign

Clothing retailer Urban Outfitters used mobile location data to gain incredibly valuable granular insights into its customers.Their party dress campaign is a great example of successful location-based marketing. By targeting women who had recently been to a nightclub or bar with in-app push notifications promoting party dresses, Urban Outfitters managed to increase conversions by 75%, and revenue by an astonishing 146%. Certainly worth getting dressed up for.

Enabling online purchases with Viber Business Messages

The Primer Group of Companies is a retailer in the Philippines that specializes in distributing consumer goods from different brands. With malls affected gravely due to pandemic quarantine restrictions, Primer turned to Viber Business Messages to establish their online footing.

Primer enabled online purchases with digital vouchers using codes with discounts sent through Viber Business Messages with the help of their messaging partner Infobip. The brand achieved a 53% code redemption conversion rate, and a 401% uptick in total sales.

Viber makes it simple to build personalised communication with your customers. We are ready to help you with your mobile marketing strategy: from an in-app advertisement to messenger marketing. Reach out to us and enjoy direct access to your preferred audience, better analytics and profitable campaigns.