Mobile Marketing Technology: Attracting the Next-Gen Audience

From teenagers to senior citizens, everyone these days has a mobile phone of their own. While some of them may need it for simply phone calls, others use it for everything they can. For example, communications, banking, entertainment, work, internet surfing, etc.

And no wonder mobile marketing is going places now! Marketers love reaching out to their audience over the most convenient and handy tools (molies and tablets) around the clock.

In this article, we will discuss everything about mobile marketing technology in detail. Keep reading.

A. Why mobile marketing technology has gained momentum

If you’re wondering what factors have fueled the adoption of mobile marketing, we have got the answer.

First, mobile penetration across the globe has soared immensely. It stood at 59.1% in the year 2017. Within a span of 3 years, it went up to a whopping 78.05% in 2020. And it has only been increasing ever since.

This translates to a huge user base of mobile users worldwide.

The second factor is the increase in high-speed internet accessibility. In Jun 2014, internet penetration was about 48.8%. And by Jan 2022, it increased to 65%. In fact, internet users grew by 4% from Jan 2021 to Jan 2022. Among these, mobile users alone accounted for 92% of the device ownership.

That means a major chunk of users access the internet using their mobile devices.

This throws the door open for marketers to tap this huge set of audiences. The personalized nature of mobile devices helps cultivate closer relationships with customers.

It helps marketers learn about their audience’s psychology. And as a result, they offer solutions and products that exactly that fit the customer’s needs.

The importance of mobile tech is so profound that even Google gives it huge importance. Since the majority of users use their phones to access the internet, Google penalizes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly.

After all, when most of the users are using mobiles, offering them a smooth experience is paramount.

B. Understand your audience before getting started

The concept of ‘One Size Fits All’ holds no significance anymore. Today, the most successful campaigns have one thing in common—highly personalized communication.

Amazon is the best example here. Whenever you open the Amazon app on your phone, it shows the homepage customized to your interests. This is based on the data of your recent search queries, order history, etc.

Hence, what you see on the homepage would greatly differ from that of your friend or family. Therefore, you’d be more likely to engage with the products being displayed.

Similarly, it is important for you to personalize your content to the audience. And to do that, here’s the checklist that you must follow:

1. Create buyer personas for your business

Buyer personas are the set of characteristics that depict your target audience. Curating buyer personas using templates helps ensure that your promotions are high-intent in nature. To get started, you can think of the following:

• The probable age group your audience is likely to be from
• Their marital status
• Their gender
• The country, state, city, or locality you’d like to focus on
• Their income bracket or financial status
• Their interests, hobbies, etc.
• The challenges or problems that your target audience face

There might be a lot of such factors you’d want to consider. Based on these, you can come up with 3-5 different personas.

2. Think about where to find your audience (the right place)

Once you create the personas, think about where are these people likely to hang out? For example, if you’re an affordable cosmetics-based business, you’ll be likely to find your audience on Instagram, Facebook, etc.

On the other hand, if you’re a B2B company, platforms such as LinkedIn and Google search would work better.

Doing this exercise will ensure that you reach the right set of people at the right place.

3. Curate highly customized communication (the right message)

Now that you know whom to reach out to and where the next step is to craft your message.

Since you already know about the characteristics of your audience, create an empathetic and friendly message. In fact, keep your message relevant yet concise. Why? Because mobile users mostly ignore lengthy messages.

When you do come up with a message with the solutions to their problems, they’ll connect with you. And when that happens, the likelihood of them converting into customers would significantly increase.

Now that we’ve seen the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of mobile marketing technology, the next step is:

C. Find the right mobile marketing technology for yourself

Here are the top eight technologies you can use to carry out your marketing campaign:

1. QR Code technology

You would have seen QR Codes around. They’re rampantly used for payments, logistics, and promotions.

What makes them highly sought after is their ability to connect the offline audience with digital content. Hence, they’re often used to:

• Drive people to a website
• Show product specifications and guides
• Get people to visit your social media profiles
• Drive mobile app downloads
• Share the location of your business on users’ mobile devices
• Get people to add you as a contact
• Create mobile-friendly landing pages
• Share multimedia (such as images, videos, and files)

Since scanning a QR Code is as easy as clicking a picture, they offer a smooth user experience. And given the factors such as customization, editability, traceability, and contactlessness have made them globally famous.

2. Mobile applications

You would have used mobile apps that show in-app advertisements. This is especially common for free apps for games, entertainment, etc.

Many marketers leverage these ads to showcase their products. And if the end-users like, they can click on the ad to go to the product website and check everything in detail.

Facebook, Instagram, and many third-party apps are the leading examples in this category.

3. SEO and content marketing

Do you have a business website? If yes, you’d certainly want relevant people to visit it. And they’ll do so only when your website has good visibility. The question is—how to increase your visibility?

Well, SEO and content will take you a long way. Curate content that’s genuinely helpful for your target audience. You can do so in the form of blogs, YouTube videos, GIFs, and infographics.

When people find your content helpful, they’ll be highly likely to check out your services too. And that’s what any marketer would want.

What is relevant to your content writing process should be the main question when you start writing content for your audience.

In addition, make sure your content and website are SEO-optimized. Great content with awesome SEO is known to take businesses a long way by increasing their visibility manifold!

4. Mobile-optimized website

Besides optimizing for SEO, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. As mentioned above, Google gives great importance to mobile-friendly content.

And since you want to reach people on their mobile devices, giving them a great mobile experience is a pre-requisite.

5. Social Media and paid ads

Is your audience likely to be on social media? Then make sure you have an up-to-date social media account.

Once you set up your account, start posting content to intrigue your audience. This will not only spread awareness about your business but also help you gain targeted followers. Also, make sure you use hashtags followed by people in your niche.

And while you use organic content, you can also think of using paid ads. Platforms such as Facebook allow you to target people based on demographics, hobbies, interests, etc.

These ads show your product or content to a huge set of audience. And while you ramp up your organic effort, paid ads will help you gain a lot of traction.

6. SMS marketing

In case you have the access to a huge database of relevant contacts, SMS marketing can help you too. It continues to be one of the most personalized mobile marketing technologies. However, when considering SMS, it’s important to weigh “RCS vs SMS” as RCS offers a richer and more interactive experience. Here are some statistics to substantiate its potential:

• Text messages tend to have an open rate of over 9%
• The click-through rate of most messaging campaigns is about 19%-20%
• Finally, the conversion rate for SMS marketing is often recorded as high as 45%

But before you get started, make sure you have your audience’s consent. Sending promotional texts to people without their permission is likely to annoy them.

Having your audience’s consent will make your SMS marketing strategy likely to hit success.

7. Location-based promotions

If you want to target audience based on their location, this would be helpful for you. It’s mostly used by businesses that have brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, ecommerce websites and apps that offer location-based recommendations can reap the benefits of this technology.

Many businesses that do location-based marketing and localized digital marketing record over 80% increase in:

• Customer base
• Customer engagement
• Response rates

8. Video and image-based content

The era of solely text-based content is long gone. People now prefer content that is more versatile and visual in nature.

Hence, your content mix must have text, videos, GIFs, and even infographics. As per research, 75% of people prefer watching videos while learning about a product.

Making multimedia content will also:

• Enliven your brand and website
• Make your content mix more versatile and appealing
• Fetch you more web traffic and conversions

If you’re still reading, you’ve learned everything about mobile marketing technology. You can now go ahead and get started with curating a plan for your own business. Just make sure you reach out to the right people at the right place with the right message. And your chances of registering success shall be sky high!