Digital Marketing Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing: Are your customers spending their digital minutes on you?

by Nicole Michaelis

Did you know that 71% of the total digital minutes the average American spends online are spent on a mobile device? Numbers look similar across the globe. Mobile usage is continuing to rise with retail predicting to make over half of all sales via a mobile device by 2020. That’s basically now in tech development time, so you better make sure you have a proper mobile marketing (and sales) strategy in place.

Mobile marketing is a whole new field of potential for marketing. It presents new opportunities to engage audiences, create dialogues, generate content and nourish relationships. When you tailor your marketing efforts to mobile usage, your customers literally carry your ads around with them all day, every day. A dream come true for every marketing professional, isn’t it?

The best part of the mobile development are the other developments that come with it (and make it possible). One big one is big data. In fact, it’s so big, it may be too big for you to grasp it without some help.

How can you leverage big data to develop awesome marketing campaigns? We’ve answered that and other pressing mobile trend questions.

Big Data redefines your mobile marketing

If you’re aware of it or not, you’ve probably already started working with big data. While big data sounds awfully scary, it actually stands for something good: helping businesses become more customer-centered.

Big data is a name for all the insights a company has gathered directly from their customers (feedback, surveys, ratings etc.) and through the performance of marketing activities (analytics, newsletters, Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Referral Value etc.). Big data combines these insights with predictive values that are based on previous and current customer behaviours. If you’re looking to optimize marketing efforts, big data is your bff. You can use the insights to optimize marketing and production efforts as well as create valuable interactions with current and potential customers.

Especially when it comes to audience targeting, big data is incredibly valuable. It can tell you how much your target audience uses mobile devices and help you draw conclusions on channels, design, and user experience for mobile development. For example, if your audience consists mainly of tech-savvy professionals in their late 20s, it’s likely you’ll have to focus on optimizing the mobile efforts of your marketing. Tayloring your marketing strategy to fit mobile could be key to gaining new customers in this audience.

When it comes to mobile marketing, location data can be essential to maximize presence. You may assume your target audience is mainly local, but the data could show the opposite.

You can not only use the data to redefine marketing efforts but also adjust targeting, change languages and maximize presence in a specific location - when a potential customer reaches that location, he or she will see your ads exactly where they’re relevant. Pretty neat, ain’t it?

Be seen in a mobile world

Big players like google, facebook and twitter are constantly adjusting algorithms when it comes to displaying ads. Specifically when it comes to search, algorithms change so quickly, it’s almost impossible to keep up.

Don’t be surprised to see big shifts in mobile search this and the coming years. UX specialists are still learning how mobile devices are used and are continuously developing new search interfaces optimized for typing and scrolling. In addition to the technological development of the devices, the growing amount of user data ensures that coming up with a page full of results is no longer going to cut it when it comes to ranking on search engines.

With mobile minutes increasing every day, search engines as well as ads will soon be precisely optimized for their busy users. Ads will be more and more tailored to those users’ needs, meaning you must ensure you’ve researched your target audience as much as possible to stay visible.

Not targeting the right audience and not offering a top-notch mobile experience are the new marketing killers.

Integrating with apps and social media

We will continue to see growth in the way mobile apps function. The integrations between apps, social media, and ads will become easier and smoother.

One of the most prominent examples of what this development means is the now shoppable instagram. With ecommerce being able to smoothly connect products with the social platform, customers are provided with an even easier, faster, and mobile-optimized shopping experience. Customers can get inspired, discover a product they like, and shop it within seconds and while on the go. Marketers are expecting to see even more developments like this in the next years.

As with all other mobile developments, when it comes to choosing the right app integrations, knowing your target audience is key. Ads and social posts need to be tailored to the taste and needs of the audience you’re trying to attract.

The key to mobile marketing: be ready to change!

The year 2018 is bursting at the seams with mobile marketing potential, and that’s not even taking into account things like wearable technology, the Internet of things (IoT), and mobile automation systems like Alexa, Cortana and Siri.

Next year we’ll take a look back at 2018 and see how all the trendy mobile developments played out. Did they catch on or disperge? Did something unexpected happen? Did our predictions come true?

Either way, you can’t afford to sit on the sidelines when it comes to mobile marketing, because one certainty is that mobile use as compared to desktop use will continue to grow.