You may want to read this before you allocate your next marketing budget. Advertising on social media channels may still be the best way to get your products or services in front of the audience that you’re looking for, but your emphasis almost certainly needs to change.
If you think the majority of the people who are likely to interact with your adverts are using their desktop computers, laptops, or tablets to do so, you’re almost certainly wrong. The majority of people who encounter digital advertising as part of their day to day life – possibly even including you as you’re reading this right now – do so using their mobile phone. That’s why mobile marketing has never been more important than it is right now.
The march to mobile won’t have come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the way money moves online for the past several years. Look at anyone who makes big money on the internet, and look at how they interact with customers.
We’re rapidly approaching the point where eBay and Amazon will make more money from their dedicated apps than through their standard websites. The market for online slots has wreaked havoc among the traditional casino industry. For every customer walking into a physical casino to gamble, there are a dozen – and possibly even more than that – using online slots websites like Rose Slots, through their mobile phones.
Some online slots have even been redesigned so that they should more accurately be described as mobile slots. The small screen in the future – and it’s high time that fact started being reflected in your advertising methods.
How should you go about that task, though? Are there differences in strategy between marketing for mobiles and marketing for the internet? If you pay for an advert on Facebook, for example, won’t the advert the customer sees look the same on both mobile phones and computer screens? The answer to that question is probably yes, but you may not want it to. Let’s go into a little more specific detail.
Pay Per Click Works Better On Mobiles
The “Pay Per Click vs. SEO” argument has been raging for decades when it comes to the standard method of digital advertising. There are definite pros and cons to both sides of the debate, but if you’ve been on the fence about using pay per click in the past, it’s time to get off it. Research indicates that pay per click works better on mobiles than it does on laptops or desktops.
For whatever reason, the psychological barrier that prevents people from clicking on an obvious advert when they see it on a large screen doesn’t exist when all they have to do is a press with their thumb on a touchscreen. We’re not psychologists, so we can’t offer an explanation as to why this happens, but statistics back up the fact that it happens, and that’s a good reason to approach your mobile marketing a different way.
Time To Rewrite Your Site
We sincerely hope that when your website was launched, or when it was last renovated, it was coded from top to bottom in HTML5. If it was, the way it looks on your computer screen should be exactly the same as the way it looks on the screen of a mobile device. If it wasn’t, there will be some disparity – and the disparity isn’t good.
If your page is image-heavy, or written using language and content that can’t or won’t load on a mobile device, your potential customers are going to quit your site before you even have the chance to show them what you’re selling. Cut down on videos, cut down on large images, and kill off any Flash content or anything else an iPhone or Android device doesn’t like. Simplicity is your friend, as is uniformity.
Geolocation Marketing Is Great
Here’s something you can do with mobile phones that you generally can’t with laptops or desktops – market based on geolocation data. There are a few ways that this can benefit you. Firstly, it allows you to ‘hyper-target’ customers or potential customers who are based very close to either your store or to the physical location of whatever you’re trying to sell.
Secondly, you can acquire more information about your potential customers and use that information to create personalized adverts that appeal directly to them. This can be as basic as gleaning the name of someone who might be interested in buying from you, or as advanced as marketing to them based on something that they’ve purchased in the past – even if that purchase wasn’t made through you.
Mobile phones are location trackers, and if you know where people are and what they’re doing, you know a lot more about what they’re interested in and how to sell to them.
Keep It Snappy
The place for long-form adverts is either in email marketing – which there is still some value to if you work with it correctly – and in web-based marketing. When you’re trying to grab the attention of someone on their phone, you have to be short and to the point.
Remember, you’re up against the constant scroll effect – something we’re all guilty of as we swipe our way endlessly down social media feeds waiting for the next thing to catch our eye. You don’t have much time or space to get your message across, so condense everything you need to say into one single headline. You should also back up that headline with a suitably attractive image.
With mobile marketing, the advert you come up with should be thought of like a book cover – its job is to get whoever’s looking at it to open the book. All the really important information can be hidden behind the link and delivered to the potential customer when they tap on it.
In some ways, the thinking that goes into mobile marketing is a return to marketing in its most basic form. Don’t overthink it, and don’t go too heavy with content. Forget videos, and forget blocks of text.
At the same time, ensure that the appearance of the advert on a mobile screen is exactly the same as the appearance of the advert on a larger screen. HTML5 coding will help you make things fast and uniform, clever headlines and well-selected images will draw customers in. Good luck!
