12 Winning Types of Mobile Marketing Strategies

Mobile marketing is a powerful tool and essential for modern businesses. Ninety-six percent of Google traffic is via mobile. It's crucial to get your message where your potential customers, clients, or partners can view it. These 12 mobile marketing strategies will help you achieve exactly that.

Mobile Marketing Types

1. Mobile Websites

The absolute essential foundation of mobile marketing is a mobile website that works on any device. Mobile websites that are clunky or missing core features cause users to simply click away, losing potential sales and damaging brand reputation. Want to be sure your mobile site gets seen? Get your SEO specialist to focus on Bing and Yahoo search engines, as well as Google.

2. Mobile Apps

Branded mobile apps make interacting with brands convenient and simple. Some great examples of successful branded apps include:

• IKEA's augmented reality app (more on AR below), which allows customers to see what an item will look like in their own home.

• Fenders Guitar’s free tuning apps, which boost their reputation as a helpful brand.

• Under Armour's Smart Shoe app, which connects to smart apparel to track metrics.

3. In-Game Advertising

Advertising spend on mobile games is on the rise. Today, marketers can get just about any product or service advertised within mobile games. It's well worth doing so. The mobile gaming industry boomed in 2020, with a 12% increase in players to over 2.5 billion. That's a lucrative opportunity.

4. Shopping on Social Media

The Facebook Marketplace has made online shopping social again, and with the introduction of "shops," businesses can now join that trend. eMarketer reports that 18.3% of American adults made a purchase on Facebook in 2020, showing the importance of social media marketing.

5. SMS Marketing

SMS marketing, using text messages to get messages directly to the customer, is widely used and extremely profitable when done correctly. SMS promotions are especially effective when combined with time-sensitive deals or updates about user-preferred items. You can use SMS to send your message to 85% of the world’s population.

Always Get Permission First

Businesses cannot send SMS texts without permission. That means the user has to opt-in for SMS marketing, so ensure they get the opportunity to do so. The upside? SMS messages have much higher open rates than email—98% compared to 22% for email campaigns.

Text Message Campaign Strategies

Users tend to open text messages right away, so avoid sending them at odd hours, like in the middle of the night. Always include your company name and try and link your SMS marketing campaigns to the rest of your digital marketing strategy for a consistent brand approach.

6. Social Media

Social media and mobile marketing go together like chips and dip. Social media users are on smartphones, tablets, and a range of other devices, so having a multichannel marketing strategy that reaches out to users on the platforms they use most is essential. Brand pages or accounts with brilliant customer interaction, gorgeous imagery, plus advertisements and gamification combine to make social media a potential marketing utopia.

7. Chatbots

Chatbots are messaging services enabled by AI to engage with customers or service users on your website in your text marketing efforts. They're a great way to deal with repetitive tasks, automating simple queries or jobs that don't require human intervention. You can use chatbots to promote products with targeted messaging or to boost user engagement.

How to Use Chatbots?

Chatbots can use short prompts (e.g., "how did you find us today?") to learn more about consumer behaviors. They can help customers get access to account information, answer questions about products, and often even handle transactions.  They can also be used to connect customers with your human agents, when that’s the most effective way to get the information passed. You can even use a chatbot to confirm orders and increase personalization.

8. Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) superimposes something virtual into the real world via a mobile screen. Popular examples include Snapchat and Zoom filters, or games like Pokémon Go. AR can also be used as a marketing tool to create digital showrooms or allow users to view or interact with products virtually.

Examples of AR Marketing Campaigns

We already mentioned IKEA's AR capabilities in their mobile app. They expanded on this way back in 2017 to create a special Christmas campaign where users could virtually decorate their home for the holidays, a digital try before you buy.

Other great examples or AR marketing campaigns include Domino's Pizza, which lets users see what the pizzas look like in situ via Snapchat, and Macy's cosmetic sampling which allowed users to "try on" a range of lip colors.

9. Voice Search

As people use voice search more and more, particularly with digital personal assistants, it's never been more crucial to ensure your website is optimized for voice search. That means when someone asks Google (or another search engine) a question relating to a product or service that you supply, your website answers that question and relays the information to the personal assistant or mobile device.

10. Location-Based Marketing

Location-based marketing uses the physical location of a consumer, learned via their mobile device, to target them with very specific marketing messages. Geofencing is one way of achieving this, and it can create something called hyperlocal targeting. A geofence is a virtual barrier that, when passed, triggers a push notification. Fast-food restaurants and retail stores often use these. There are many potential applications for hyperlocal targeting. You're sure to see more of this in the very near future.

11. Mobile Video

Video is such an effective marketing tool because it grabs the attention of the user straight away. Social media giants are constantly working to provide newer, more interesting ways of letting users interact by video. Instagram has both Reels and IG TV, and Facebook has its Live function plus the newer Rooms and the facility to post and share prerecorded videos. Successful mobile video marketing goes beyond advertising to product demonstrations, behind-the-scenes videos, meet the team, or anything that promotes your brand's values.

12. Snapchat

Snapchat reported 280 million active daily users in Q1 of 2021. There are plenty of opportunities for marketing on Snapchat, from sponsored filters to gamification to advert inserts in existing minigames. Marketers with a younger demographic in mind should keep Snapchat in mind, as 60% of Americans aged 24 and underuse the platform.

How Clickatell Can Help

With the majority of your customers and potential customers spending more time than ever on mobile devices, it's crucial to make mobile marketing strategies a significant part of your marketing efforts. The best way to ensure that you are putting together the right mix for your business is to find a partner with the experience and track record of success.

Twenty years ago, Clickatell created the world’s first SMS API. We’ve continued to lead with smart, scalable, secure SMS solutions that let you connect with customers across the globe.

Clickatell’s Chat Desk is one of the most advanced digital contact center solutions in the world. Chat Desk works by giving your customers the ability to get immediate answers from a live agent through whatever channel they choose—mobile Chat apps like WhatsApp or online web chat. It helps reduce contact center costs, lets customers get information and resolve issues more quickly, and gives your contact center greater flexibility to manage teams, call volume, and increase satisfaction.

Our drag-and-drop visual tool, Clickatell Chat Flow, simplifies the process of rolling out seamless cross-channel customer journeys from one that requires weeks or months and pulls on many resources across your company, to one that can be designed and deployed by a non-technical business user with no long lead times.

Let's talk about which specific opportunities in this power, cost-effective marketing channel are right for your company.