(Akiit.com) Online marketing has quickly become the most valuable tool that all companies use to promote themselves and their products. Traditional marketing strategies have fallen by the wayside in favor of cheaper and more effective online platforms. You can reach a lot more customers with less investment and get real time updates on the effectiveness of your efforts. A solid website and a good social media presence are the cornerstones of any good marketing strategy but in recent years, mobile marketing has become more important than ever.
Now that everybody is carrying a mobile phone around with them all the time, it’s the best way of reaching customers at any time of day, wherever they are. You can target advertising at customers directly and tailor it to them specifically which brings all sorts of benefits. However, mobile marketing isn’t always the most effective tool and some companies won’t benefit from it as much as others. If you’re unsure of whether you should invest money in mobile marketing, check out this list of the pros and cons.
It’s Instant
This is one of the biggest benefits of mobile marketing because the majority of people have their phone on their person at all times. If you were using a billboard, for example, you only reach the customers that pass it and it could be days until they drive past it. If you’re sending an email, you need to wait until they open it and read it, assuming they don’t put it straight in the trash. However, with mobile marketing, they receive it immediately. Even if their phone is switched off, it’ll be waiting for them when they turn it back on. It’s far more difficult for people to ignore your adverts if they come directly to them.
Less Expensive Content
Creating content for adverts is a large expense but you can reduce that if you’re using mobile marketing. The screen size is smaller which limits the amount of text, images or video that you can put on there. That means you’re more likely to avoid spending money on lots of content that isn’t valuable. Customers don’t want to spend time searching around your website for ages before finding what they need. On a mobile device, you’re forced to be a lot more economical with space which usually leads to a far more streamlined site. Simple content is also far easier to adapt for lots of different platforms which is increasingly important. If you develop content that only works on one or two platforms, you’re alienating a large portion of your target audience.
Easy Access To Promotions
Before mobile marketing, most promotions and offers came in the form of coupons. That worked fine but it’s easy for customers for to lose a small bit of paper or forget it when they leave the house. Every time that happens, you’ve lost a sale. That problem is eradicated by mobile marketing. If you have an android app development build you a dedicated app, you can send those offers directly to a customer who can then store it on their phone. They’ll have it on their person at all times, making them a lot more likely to use it and making it impossible for them to lose. Even if they lose their phone, they can log back into their account once they get a new one and they’ll have it there.
Location Advertising
Most phones have GPS tracking that is switched on permanently which offers a unique opportunity to marketers. Location based advertising is a great way for traditional brick and mortar businesses to increase their traffic. For example, if somebody is walking through a city and they are close to a restaurant, adverts for the location, with directions, can be sent directly to their phone. If they got the same advert while they were sat at home, they might remember it next time they were in the area, but it’s far less likely that you’ll see a tangible return on that investment.
Tracking Responses
One of the major benefits of online marketing is that you can get a solid idea of just how effective your marketing efforts are. It’s even more effective with mobile marketing because you can track whether somebody has clicked on your advert, and exactly how long it took them to look at it after arriving. That way, you can see which ads are working and which aren’t. Then you can channel resources toward the effective ones and stop wasting money on advertising that isn’t working.
Instant Sharing
When people are constantly on their phones, they’re prone to sharing things on social media. People are still doing this when they’re at home on the computer of course, but it’s nowhere near as instant. If you send an ad to somebody and they share it immediately, you reached hundreds, if not thousands of people instantly, with very little investment. In short, your customers are doing a lot of the work for you.
Those are some pretty big benefits, but mobile marketing does have its downsides.
Permissions
This is perhaps the biggest problem you’ll have with mobile marketing because there are a lot of privacy issues involved with personal devices. A sidebar advert on a website is there whether they like it or not, you don’t need their permission to display it. But you do need their permission to send advertising directly to their phone. Customers are only likely to give you permission for direct advertising if they’ve dealt with you before so it’s not always best for finding new customers.
Diverse Platforms
While there are only a few operating systems that run on the majority of phones, you still run into problems with different platforms. Trends in screen size on phones change quite often so a platform that you’ve developed might not display very well on everybody’s phone. That means you usually need to do a little more work optimizing it for different devices and keep it regularly updated when new models are released.
While there are a couple of cons to mobile advertising, it’s an invaluable marketing tool for most companies. Just remember, it’s not always the best way to find new customers.
Staff Writer; Jon James