The comprehensive guide to mobile marketing

Mobile Marketing is a marketing method based on the promotion of products, brands and projects by targeting owners of mobile phones and tablets through phone applications, social networks, responsive sites and ads targeted to the phone.

Mobile marketing is one of the major digital marketing trends, and it should be at the heart of your marketing strategy. In this article, we will review the most important elements of mobile marketing to help you build an effective and fruitful strategy to take advantage of the capabilities and features that mobile offers to promote your products, increase your sales and accelerate the growth of your business.

The importance of mobile marketing;

Phones have changed the way people interact with the Internet, with brands and social networks, and have revolutionized the world of e-commerce and digital marketing.

Mobile Marketing has become a necessity for companies and small and large projects alike, companies have increased dependence on it to communicate with customers and interact with them, and to attract new customers, so more than 68% of companies have become dependent on mobile marketing in their marketing policy

This growing trend of companies and projects towards mobile marketing has many reasons, the most important of which are:

• Phones are personal devices: Unlike computers, TVs, e-mail, and the rest of the marketing channels, phones are personal devices, because people carry them with them wherever they go, and they spend a long time on their phones, whether to communicate, surf the Internet, work, play and other activities, as it has become Mobile is a major part of people's daily routine, so mobile marketing provides direct and immediate access to potential customers.
• Phones provide suitable tools for marketing: Phones provide marketers with many tools that enable quick communication and interaction with potential customers, such as applications, SMS and MMS.
• Prevalence of the use of phones: The rate of use of phones increased in surfing the Internet, as 80% of Internet users own 2 phones, and about 51% of the time spent on the Internet is via phones
• Purchase by phone: More than a third of e-commerce takes place via phone, and this proportion is expected to increase in the coming years
• Low cost: On the whole, mobile marketing is less expensive than marketing through other marketing channels.
• User signatures: Today, customers expect their corporate sites to be responsive to phones. Also, 44% of Millennial want their favorite brands to interact with them on the phone 5. Therefore, mobile marketing is no longer just a marketing method, but rather a need that customers expect.

These statistics clearly show that mobile marketing is an indispensable necessity for entrepreneurs and companies. In the next paragraph we will talk about how to build a mobile marketing strategy.

How to Building a mobile marketing strategy

1. Define the objectives of the marketing strategy

The first step in designing any strategy is to set the desired goals. In this case, you have to define the goals you want to achieve from the mobile marketing plan.
There are many possible goals in mobile marketing, and you have to choose what suits your project, budget and products you want to promote. For example, do you want to increase your conversion rate? Or do you want to attract new clients from a certain segment? Or do you want to use phones to communicate with your customers, and strengthen relationships with them through messages and notifications? Or do you want to use geo location to reach customers in a specific geographic region? All of these and other goals can be achieved through mobile marketing.
The goals should be clear and realistic. Many entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs make the mistake of exaggerating the desired goals, especially at the beginning of the project. They set unrealistic goals that exceed their capabilities and resources, and when they are unable to achieve them, they are frustrated, and they may cancel the project from the ground up. So it is important to be balanced, and set ambitious, realistic and feasible targets.

One of the popular goal-setting technologies is smart, which means that the goals you set should be:

*Specific: The objectives should be specific and clear.
*Measurable: You should be able to measure your success in achieving these goals in a concrete, scientific way.
*Acceptable: Your goals should be acceptable in terms of values, social and economic terms.
*Realistic: Goals should be realistic and possible within the possibilities and budget they possess.
*Time: You should set the timetable for achieving these goals accurately.

2. Determine the target segment

In order to rationalize your marketing efforts, it is important to focus on the most susceptible and needy segment of your products. Use Google Analytics to learn about the characteristics of your potential customers, such as age, gender, content they prefer, the social networks they are active in and the things they are looking for. This will help you know how to target your messages, the marketing channels closest to your potential customers, and how to tailor your marketing messages. 
For example, if you see that your customers are very active on Instagram, you can direct your efforts to your Instagram account, and marketing from there on the popular platform to your customers, whether through content, ads or customer support.

3. Create a responsive site:

The first thing you should think about to attract customers over the phone is to prepare your website to suit the privacy of the phone, the site should be responsive to all screen sizes, especially the screens of phones and tablets.
Response to phones has become one of the main factors that are used by search engines to rank sites, as some statistics 6 indicate that the conversion rate in responsive commercial sites is about 160% greater than with unresponsive sites, so making your site responsive should be your top priority.
There are several factors that you should take care to ensure that the experience of the phone owners on your site is smooth, such as fast download, easy browsing, easy logging, and taking into consideration that the text and image sizes are appropriate for small screens.
Make sure that your website is responsive and appropriate to all screen sizes, otherwise you will lose a lot of customers, and your site’s ranking will decrease in search results pages on Google and the rest of the search engines, if you have an unresponsive site, one of the best and cheapest ways to make it responsive is through an independent recruitment to modify
Website design and make it suitable for phones.

4. Create an application

People spend 90% of their time on phones using apps 7, so companies are accelerating the creation of applications for their brands, because it is an excellent tool for increasing interaction with users, and instant communication with them through messages and push notifications, which open a direct and immediate communication channel with users, , So that your messages reach the customer as soon as they are sent, which is almost impossible in other marketing channels, such as email or ads.
In recent years, with the development of the self-employment market, the cost of developing a professional application has decreased, and small business owners can build an application at an affordable cost.
One of the best places to find professional freelancers to develop a custom application for your project is an independent website, the largest Arab platform for freelance work.

5. The use of social network

Most social networking pioneers use phones, especially media networks and photos like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. So you should direct your marketing efforts to those networks, by creating accounts on them, buying ads, or cooperating with influencers your customers follow on those networks.

6. Facilitate telephone payment

If you want to sell to your customers who use the phone, you should make this possible by making the payment process over the phone easy on your site or application.

Phone users are always in a hurry, and they will not spend long time filling in the fields and going from page to page to complete the purchase process, this will make a large percentage of them back down from the purchase. So you have to make it easier for them, and allow them to purchase by adding a "BUY NOW" button to the site or application, as this will increase the conversion rate, increase sales, and improve the customer experience.

7. Use of messages

One of the most important features of the phone is that it is a personal device, which makes it ideal for marketing. Phones offer many advantages that can make mobile marketing fruitful and have a great return on investment. On top of these features is the ability to send personal messages (SMS).

Statistics indicate that the rate of opening phone messages reaches 98%, and that 90% of phone messages open within three minutes of sending them . This is a very high rate, especially when compared to e-mail messages that do not exceed 22% open.
Phone messaging is one of the best channels of communication between brands and customers, due to its personal and immediate nature.

However, some marketers fear the use of SMS messages for fear that customers feel annoyed or have a negative perception of the brand, and the truth is that the numbers and statistics say the opposite, since 50% of users (in the United States) bought a product after they received a promotional SMS 10 of course this does not It means that you exaggerate the use of messages, because this may lead to counterproductive results, when your brand is stigmatized as a source of spam, and this may have negative effects on your brand's reputation, and in some countries this may have legal ramifications.

Here are some tips that can help you make the most of SMS messages:

*SMS messages are only sent after permission is obtained from the user.
*The letter should offer the customer something useful, such as an opponent, important information or an enticing offer.
*Keep the message text as short as possible
*Use MMS as much as possible. This type of message allows the sending of non-textual content, such as pictures and audio files.
*Observe the laws in force in the country in which you are active. Marketing SMS messages are automated, and some countries place restrictions on this type of message. So you need to study carefully the laws in force in the country in which you work. If you want to avoid the hassle of searching, the best solution to verify the legal aspect is to purchase a legal advisory service. Find a legal expert familiar with the laws of the country in which you are active, and look for it on this issue.

8. Email Marketing

About 57% of e-mail messages are opened from phones, so you must modify the e-mail marketing strategy to take into account this fact, the contents of the messages should be appropriate for mobile screens, because more than two-thirds of phone users will delete the message if they find that it is not suitable for the phone
Make sure the photos, buttons, and forms that you place in the emails are suitable for phones. The best way to do this is by experimenting, try reading your messages on multiple screens before sending them to verify that they are a good fit for different screen sizes.

9. Mobile advertising

Mobile ads are the shortest way to reach new customers and increase sales. But it is more expensive as well.
Thanks to services like Google AdWords, which enable you to reach customers who use mobile as they browse the Internet, or while using apps, entrepreneurs can buy ads targeted exclusively to phone owners, whether on sites, in search results, or in apps.
It is important that mobile-targeted ads are tailored to fit small screens and the habits of phone users. The images should be carefully selected, and they should be designed specifically to be responsive to the screens of phones and tablets, and the advertising videos should be short, and not exceed 20 seconds, and the advertising texts should be short and accommodate to the mobile screen without the user having to scroll down.

There are several types of mobile ads, including:

*Advertising via applications: Applications should be the basis of all mobile marketing strategies, as mobile users spend 87% of their time using applications, compared to only 13% on the Internet 11.So you have to devote a significant portion of the mobile advertising budget to advertising on the applications your potential customers use.
There are a lot of services that enable marketers to show their ads on applications, and the most famous of them is the Google Ad Mob service, which enables you to display your ads inside the applications, in the form of promotional texts, pictures, special offers or videos.
There are other options for advertising via applications, such as Facebook App Ads, which allows you to advertise through the Facebook application, this option is excellent if your target audience is active on this social network.

*Mobile games ads: Mobile games are very popular, especially among young people, and it is estimated that the number of mobile players in the year 2020 will reach about 2.4 billion, and the number will increase in the coming years. Moreover, about a third of the downloaded applications are games applications.
Mobile game ads may not be suitable for everyone. You have to study your target audience first, and if you find that they fall into the segment that spends a lot of time on mobile games (especially young people), then you can buy this type of ads.

*Local ads: Local ads are ads targeted to potential customers in a specific geographical area, this type of ads has gained great popularity in mobile marketing in recent years, because it depends on the geolocation feature that has become available in all modern smartphones. Local ads are suitable for projects that are active in a specific geographic region, or that provide services to residents of a particular region. For example, if you own an online store that sells its products exclusively to residents of a specific city, for example, to transport the city of Riyadh, you can buy ads targeted exclusively to the phone users living in the city of Riyadh. It can also be more specific, and instead of directing your ads to users based on their residence, you can direct your ads to people located near a certain area, for example, if you run a pizza store, you can target your ads to people located within a kilometre of the pizza store thy.

*Mobile search ads: This type is similar to the ads that Google places in search results when a user searches for a specific keyword, but it is intended only for mobile owners.

10. Measuring results

In the goal setting paragraph, we said that the goals that you set should meet the criteria for the smart approach, and one of its most important conditions is that the goals be measurable. Because if you are not able to measure these goals, you will not be able to know how much you have progressed towards them, and therefore you will not be able to assess the success of mobile marketing strategy or not.
Google Analytics is the main tool for measuring the results of the mobile marketing strategy, as it provides a lot of important information such as the number of people entering your site via mobile, the number of users of the application, the things that users do when using it, the profits and revenues of the application, in addition to providing comprehensive and comprehensive reports. This tool is free and available to everyone.

There are many metrics that you can adopt to evaluate the success of a mobile marketing strategy, and here are the most important:

*Mobile polarization rate: This means the number of people who entered your landing page, or to your commercial website on the phone, most likely you have a lot of marketing channels, such as social networks, or the app or ads and messages. You should specify the traffic sources to the landing page, and if you notice that one of the sources attracts more customers than the average, then you can raise your investment in it, and, in return, if you notice that one of the sources does not perform well, you can stop your investment in it. For example, if you notice that a large percentage of visits to the landing page on mobile come from email campaigns, this is a positive indication, and you can increase investment in email marketing, in return, if you notice that the ads that you bought on Facebook did not pay off, then this may be an indication that the advertising content is inappropriate, or that your target audience is not very active on this social network. In any case, you will have to review the Facebook marketing strategy.

*Number of app downloads: If you created an app, the first measure of how successful that app is is the number of downloads or installs. This is a clear indication of how well people accept your application.

*User activity on the app: The number of app downloads is not a sufficient measure, because many people can download your app, yet they only use it rarely, so marketers view another important measure, which is user activity, which measures certain things, such as the number of times , Entering your application, the average time that users spend in each session, the number of users who open it daily, weekly, or monthly, the activities they do, and the features of the most used application. You can get all of these metrics with free Google Analytics.

There are a lot of other metrics possible, and you should choose what suits your goals previously set. Accordingly, you will amend your mobile marketing strategy to increase effectiveness, rationalize expenditures and accelerate the growth of your business. You can also use A / B tests to try new marketing approaches, or to rationalize and improve your landing page, ads, and marketing messages.