US consumers are relying on mobile more than ever before to go about their day-to-day lives. From laptops to tablets to smartphones to wearable tech like smartwatches, this is a mobile age and business owners who ignore or underutilize mobile channels in their marketing efforts will have a harder and harder time competing with each passing year. Here are five tips that businesses can follow to find mobile marketing success.
Mobile friendly website
It’s absolutely essential to have a mobile-friendly business website. With each year the percentage of people accessing the site through a mobile site increases and sites that aren’t optimized for mobile display poorly on tablets and especially smartphones. Metrics show that mobile users accessing desktop versions of websites don’t stay on them very long. They have to pinch and zoom and squint to see what’s on the page and the likelihood of filling out information to complete a purchase on a site not optimized for mobile is very slim.
Mobile coupons
Coupons are one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book but it can be adapted for the mobile age. Mobile offers like coupons that are texted to loyal customers can be a powerful marketing tool. In fact, mobile coupons are far more successful than print ones that are mailed out or placed in magazines. Mobile coupons are more than ten times as likely to be redeemed as print coupons.
Mobile payments
As mobile payment solutions become more prominent, more and more customers are getting in the habit of leaving their credit and debit cards at home instead opting to use their smartphones’ built-in pay features like Android Pay or Apple Pay. Brick and mortar locations that don’t have the capability of accepting these kinds of transactions may miss out on a sizable amount of business. Similarly, websites should accept these payments because they’re more convenient for customers who don’t want to spend time filling out card information but would prefer to just authorize a payment with stored card information and their fingerprint.
Mobile-only social network platforms
Social networking platforms like Facebook or Twitter can be powerful indeed but many businesses are starting to recognize the advantage of branching out into mobile-only social network platforms like Snapchat or Instagram, especially if your target consumer is younger. To be successful with these platforms, it’s important to understand that different rules apply to mobile-only platforms than apply to sites like Facebook. In fact, each social network varies from every other platform so it’s important for business owners or social media marketers to know the ins and outs of a new platform before launching marketing efforts utilizing them.
SMS marketing
Finally, small businesses absolutely must adopt SMS marketing in addition to their email marketing. The open rate for email advertisements is around 20% while the open rate for business text messages is about 98%. Today’s consumers practically live on their mobile devices and the best way to get a message to them is through those devices in the form of text messages.
