Mobile marketing is all the rage right now in the marketing world. And it’s not just a fad. Mobile marketing is the present and foreseeable future of marketing and each day more and more businesses are getting on board with it. With all the positive things you’ve heard about it, you may be wondering “what gives?” if it isn’t working for your small business. Here are four possible reasons it may not be working in your case.
You don’t have one
Okay so on the surface this one seems obvious. Of course, your mobile marketing strategy isn’t effective if you aren’t doing mobile marketing. And there are a surprising number of businesses that aren’t. An estimated two-thirds of businesses don’t really invest in mobile marketing and 70% don’t do any SMS marketing—the foundation of any great mobile marketing strategy.
But even if your business is dabbling in mobile marketing, that doesn’t constitute a mobile marketing strategy. Having a strategy means having a clear objective or purpose behind your mobile marketing efforts. If you don’t have an objective and if you aren’t looking at metrics, then you don’t have a strategy and there’s no way your efforts can be effective because you don’t have a way to measure success.
It’s not integrated
Mobile marketing works best when it is integrated with other marketing channels and efforts. Approximately 95% of text messages sent by businesses to consumers don’t include a link to a mobile optimized website. Of the texts that do contain a link, 72% of them are links to websites that aren’t optimized for mobile. Information isn’t displayed correctly on smaller screens and they usually have slower load times which is problematic since mobile users have much less patience and will usually wait just five second for a page to load before giving up. Your text messages should be steering customers to your website and to your social media pages. They should be converting into sales. Similarly, your print mailers, emails, and social media posts should be directing customers to opt in to receive your text messages.
You gave up too quickly
Like all advertising, mobile marketing won’t produce earth-shattering results over night. It will take considerable time and effort to get your mobile marketing strategy to produce results consistently. It’s a different channel than all the others and tips and tricks that work for other kinds of advertising may not transfer well to mobile. There’s a learning curve and there’s lots of fine tuning before you begin to see the results. If you give up after the first text message you send doesn’t result in a huge boost in sales, you’re quitting before you can reap the benefits of this powerful marketing channel.
It’s one-dimensional
When most people think of mobile marketing, they think of SMS marketing. But mobile is about so much more than sending texts. Think of texting as the foundational piece that the rest of the strategy is built on. Social media is inseparably connected to mobile. A mobile website is also crucial for the success of any SMS marketing campaign. In-app advertising and mobile optimized emails are also key components. So if you’re spending all your mobile marketing dollars on SMS, you won’t be maximizing the results.
