The main elements of Mobile Marketing Strategy are: Design and Usability, Traffic Funnels, Content, Advertising, Local Opportunities, and Social Media.
Design and Usability
Design and Usability go hand in hand when thinking about building an effective mobile strategy. Good Design alone is not enough, and a good usable app with no design is not good either.
Design, or the User Interface (UI), is associated with the style, colors, images, and anything that attracts the user to use the mobile app/site. While usability, or the User Experience (UX), deals with how the user interacts with those elements on the screen, how they’re placed, sizes of the buttons, even what each button’s title should be. Designing a successful UX/UI for mobile is not quite the same as designing for web. Many designers make the mistake of trying to apply the web design concepts on mobile websites and apps, which causes a lot of confusion to the end customer and leads to a bad user experience and the possibility of user’s abandonment.
For example, some of the things that applies to web, such as the mouse cursor, do not exist on mobile, where mobile uses swipe gestures. Also, mobile devices have smaller screens, and therefore the space available must be used conservatively to display the most important content. In addition to the differences between mobile and web, designers should be aware of the differences between the mobile operating systems. For instance, designing an app for the iPhone should use different design components than the same app designed for Android phones since the users’ experience is different on the two systems. More on the differences between the two systems can be found here: https://medium.com/@vedantha/interaction-design-patterns-ios-vs-android-111055f8a9b7
Traffic Funnels
Traffic funnels are not to be confused with users’ traffic to be app itself, but rather the induvial users flow while they’re using the app or the mobile site. Having fluid funnels allows the users to engage easily with the app/mobile site and achieve the tasks they’re looking to do.
For example, a retail app/mobile site should have a funnel to direct users from the product page to the checkout process in the easiest, fastest, and most fluid way possible rather than slowing down the process or complicating it. In this case, the user’s traffic funnel from the product page to placing an order would look the following:
Product Page >
Cart >
Checkout >
Shipping/Billing Info >
Payment Info >
Order Confirmation
Designing a successful traffic funnel is one of the key elements of a successful mobile marketing strategy, as it not only help the users to achieve their goals, but also helps the business in maintaining those users and guaranteeing that they will come back to the app/mobile site.
Content
As mentioned earlier in the Design and Usability section, mobile devices have smaller screens compared to the web. Therefore, there are things that designers as well as content creators need to take into consideration when creating content for mobile. One of the most important things to consider is the length of the content displayed on the screen. It is very important to keep the messages displayed to the users as concise as possible to make sure users are able to read it and comprehend it quickly. Having too much text can discourage the user from reading it. In addition to that, font size is another important factor when displaying content on the smaller screen where it has to be bigger than the font used for web, otherwise it will be hard for the users to read it. Finally, when displaying visual contents, it is important to consider the size of those files to prevent any possible delays when the page or app loads, especially that users might not connected to a Wi-Fi network and they’re relying on their phone carriers for their internet connection.
Advertising
Similar to web advertising, mobile advertising has a lot of different types and styles that can be used to target users while they’re browsing a mobile website or while they’re using a native app. There are few different formats of mobile ads that can be displayed to the user’s based on the content they’re browsing or the activities they’re doing. For instance, Google AdMob, https://developers.google.com/admob/, one of the largest Ad Serving companies in the world, provides app developers with the following ad formats that can be integrated within their apps:
- Banner Ads: Which are rectangular images or text usually placed at the bottom of the screen.
- Interstitial Ads: Which are full-screen ads that can be static content such as images and text, or can be videos. This kind of ads are to be displayed to the users between activities, and the user can either interact with or dismiss them.
Mobile ads have the ability to target users based on many factors, such as the content their browsing or the geographical location based the users’ location services or IP address. This provides a great value for creating a successful mobile marketing strategy that aims to target users with specific ads based on where they are located.
Local Opportunities
One of the most important factors when thinking about building a successful mobile marketing strategy is to keep in mind that mobile users are always on the go. In fact, many users, if not all, would’ve leave their homes without their mobile device. This presents a great opportunity for businesses to gain customers while they’re using their mobile devices. This can be done by using the users’ location and targeting them with ads that can offer them coupons or discounts to local business and shops.
Social Media
Based on Apple’s iTunes chart for the current top free apps, https://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/free-apps/, Instagram, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger are among the top 10 free apps downloaded by iPhone users. These social media apps provide a great opportunity for business to reach many potential customers or users from all over the world. Ads can be served on those social media platforms, mobile and web, and can be used to target users based on their interests, likes, locations, and many more factors. Social media is, and will be, the core of building a successful mobile marketing strategy.
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