5 Ways to Master Mobile Marketing in 2015

We're nearly a month into the new year, which means many of you may, or may not be, following through with your New Year's Resolutions. One resolution you need to follow through with, however; as a business owner, a CMO, Marketing Director, or anyone whose part of the Marketing Team -- is to continue to implement & test fresh new marketing strategies for 2015.

This year's upcoming marketing plan should undoubtedly include making better use of local and mobile marketing platforms.

As consumers are being exposed to new products and innovative services each and every year, the tools and tactics that businesses use to attract those consumers has to adapt to the changes as well.

That's the name of the game.

In 2014, we as marketers should have learned what things worked, what things did not work, and what things showed promise but may simply need a bit of fine tuning. Now it is time to apply everything we've learned from our past success & mistakes to enhance our marketing efforts for the year ahead.

Whether you’re involved with eCommerce or you own a brick-and-mortar store, the power of mobile marketing is something you have to utilize. If not, your competition is going to have the clear advantage.

Just take into account, the growing marketing spend on mobile devices. According to eMarketer, in 2010, a mere "2.1% of all digital search ad dollars were spent on mobile devices.”

That figure had increased to 22.1% within the next 3 years, and advertising forecasts suggest that figure will grow to surpass 59% by 2017.

During the past five years, mobile usage has nearly increased exponentially– As of January 2014, more than 90% of Americans own a cell phone – and 58% of those Americans own a smart phone. If that is not enough, there have also been studies ( Hubspot) showing that more people in the world own a cell phone than a toothbrush! Pretty disgusting, I agree; but pretty telling of the power of mobile marketing, right?

Here are 5 tips that will help you master mobile marketing.

1. Be Responsive

If you haven't already heard, responsive web design is definitely a big deal, and it has been one within marketing circles for years now, since before 2010 (Remember, That year mobile marketing only accounted for a measly 2.1% of all digital search ad revenue).

So, just how does responsive web design help you master mobile marketing?

According to comScore, 4 out of 5 consumers use their smartphone to shop. This means that if you don’t have a mobile friendly site, you’ll be missing out on a huge pool of potential customers. And, there’s plenty of data to support this claim. It’s been found that 85% of smartphone users strongly believe that a mobile site should provide an experience as good, if not better, than the desktop site.

2. Click-To-Call Functionality

Calls-to-action (CTA's) are potentially the MOST important conversion tool available. Google determined that more than 61% of mobile users called after performing a local business search. However, not all CTA’s are created equal.

HubSpot compiled a very useful list of 20 Critical Do’s and Don’ts for Clickable Calls-to-Action that you should definitely pay close attention to. This includes focusing on

3. Adwords Call Extensions

If you haven't already used Google's Call Extensions in Adwords, you should -- now. Like, right now. I give you permission to stop reading this article and open your Adwords account. Or else, you're missing out on a significant Adwords feature.

Why, you might ask?

Because this is an amazing feature for any local business, especially since people can search for something like a pizza shop on their mobile phones to find the number and place a take-out order. When it comes to local and mobile search, often times the user's sole intent is to find a phone number to call.

Per Google, These phone calls are considered as conversions and can increase your click through rates by 6-8%.

You know mobile marketing strategies are the future, when the Internet's behemoth, Google has developed, defined, and implemented their own Mobile Marketing Strategy to capitalize on Mobile Market-Share & Create additional Revenue channels via Mobile.

Thanks to my good friends at Wordstream for this wonderful info graphic on Google's Mobile Strategy, summed up by their mobile apps & user-oriented platforms.

4. Easy to Read Mobile Emails

Studies have found that more than 50% of all emails are opened on mobile device, and I would easily say that number is conservative (VentureBeat has that number being as high as 65% in 2014).

Despite the fact that more than half of all emails are opened on a smartphone or tablet, research has also shown that a staggering 89% of emails are not optimized for mobile devices. This means that marketers aren't taking advantage of vital leads and opportunities.

When it comes to mobile-optimized emails, here are a few bullet points on the best practices.

• The Subject Line + Preheader - Are extremely important, If you want to engage your potential customers and increase your email leads and email list building, then you need to make the overall experience better for your audience. For example, you should reduce the size of file images for better deliverability rates, resize images by proportion to make use of those clickable CTA buttons will help drive user-actions from your emails, and we all know conversions are everything.

• Don't Just Have Your Entire Mailing List In Mind, Be Personable - Again, your email lives in the same inbox as emails from family, friends, business associates, and bulk-mailing solicitors. The inbox is a space for humans and their different personalities. So be personable, and be a consistent source of engaging content that helps address your readers' most common pain points. Make sure to add social-sharing widgets in every email you or your team creates. Do just that, and your subscribers will keep following along not only with your updates but they will also go-so-far as to share your engaging content via social media or word-of-mouth.

• Don't Be Afraid To Share Content That Doesn't Directly Help You - Our team at LeadsMarket.com curates relevant stories in affiliate maketing from around the web, and readers really appreciate that approach. Sharing only LeadsMarket.com content would drive more clicks to our multiple websites in the short run, but this strategy has created a much more educational approach to engaging our audience so that we are widely-regarded as industry thought leaders in the Affiliate Marketing space and our readership and subscribers will only continue to grow.

• Embrace the Power of the GIF - You should try to use GIFS in your emails to attract the attention of your on-the-go audience, and to stand out from the other mobile-optimized emails your consumers may be receive hundreds of daily. We don't include one GIF in each and every single email campaign. But if there's a really amazing GIF pertaining to the subject matter, usually when it comes to B2C, we will always try to feature it — and obviously, they look great on mobile devices!

• Mobile Is What Truly Matters - If you're not building your emails with mobile readers in mind, you're losing more than half your opt-in audience. Try to keep the content easy to scroll through on your phone, and make your newsletters fluid-width, which means that they'll be responsive & look visually appealing on mobile — and of course, they will also look very good on a desktop, as well.

Buzzfeed, a strong proponent of embracing the GIF, has seen their email program grow from a single newsletter in 2012 to 14 different newsletters at the end of 2013.

5. Retargeting for Multiple Devices

We live in a world where we’re not only constantly connected, but also switching between devices. People are becoming savvier consumers who can interact with a product or service on-the-go and across multiple devices, making decisions wherever and whenever they want. In fact, it’s become such a common occurrence that both Google and Facebook have conducted their own research on the topic of multi-device use.

Google’s study dating back to 2012 found that “90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal,” while Facebook found in 2014 that more than “60% of online adults in the US use at least two devices everyday.”

Regardless of the exact numbers, it’s a pretty safe assumption to make that most people are using both desktops and laptops in combination with smartphones and tablets, daily.

Why is this important?

Because you could could be taking advantage of full-circle marketing approach by utilizing multi-channel marketing campaigns. You need to be in front of your consumer in every possible way, on every possible device.

This means that you should retarget with Google and their display network, and your ads will appear to the users who have visited your website or abandoned your shopping cart, and try segmenting your campaigns between all devices -- This will give you very useful data regarding where those abandoned users really are; are your users consistently seeing your retargeting ads on their mobile phones, or tablets?

Capitalize on that, and go a step further and run a social retargeting campaign at the same time, where your customers are more likely to see your paid ads on mobile devices and tablets as they are combing through their social feeds, which we do A LOT (according to a recent study, most of us view our Newsfeeds an average of 5,110 times a year -- which is insane if you think about how many days are actually in one calendar year. We check our Newsfeeds on average, 14 times in a single day).

The Takeaway?

Mobile Most Certainly Matters.

Experiment with the every aspect of your website, including responsive design, producing interactive content, emails optimized for mobile, and taking advantage of all the multi-device ad platforms you have at your disposal; to see how you can best generate greater engagement between your consumers and your business.

Offer polls to drive consumer interaction, share infographics pertinent to your industry, or create videos that introduce or better explain your products.

Feel free to experiment with new things when it comes to your mobile strategy, and focus on driving mobile calls to your business via Mobile usage amongst consumers.

Segment your audiences based on different consumer demographics and different devices, while launching your mobile campaigns, then continuously split A/B test the campaigns. Once you have a large enough sample size, distinguish your Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) and proceed to analyze that performance data. Next, begin to form a hypothesis on what steps you could take to make the campaign more successful and continue to make improvements upon your last campaigns, based on what the most recent data suggests; this will always be the key to any & all marketing success, this marketing strategy is an evergreen premise that will always be effective, no matter what new year it may be.

"I am interested to hear your take on these developments and what implications they might have for the Local & Mobile Marketing Space going forward. Don't be scared to get the conversation going, and of course - Feel free to show some love by liking or sharing this article.. Because I happen to like all of you, AND your lovely articles." ??

You can find more marketing insights by connecting with me, here & following me on other platforms.

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