Best Mobile Marketing Practices and Strategy in 2024

The mobile phone has become everyone’s closest companion in daily routines. It’s the first thing a lot of people check in the morning and the last thing they view before going to bed. Phones are often used for work, entertainment, shopping, and communications. For some, it even functions as an alarm clock, street navigator, and remote control. The fact that these devices are synonymous with human activity has given rise to mobile marketing.

Mobile marketing leverages the mobile experience to promote brands, products, promos, and events as well as communicate with customers. It makes use of mobile marketing software and harnesses features native to mobile users. Effective as it may be, marketers have to apply several fool-proof strategies to truly entice their audience.

With this, we have compiled 13 mobile marketing best practices for you to convert better. These touch on mobile-specific strategies such as the use of push notifications, QR codes, and geolocation-based content. We will also cover tips on how to increase a brand’s online presence.

Mobile marketing is one of the most relevant modes of marketing today, and for a good reason. According to recent mobile marketing statistics, there are 5.96 billion unique mobile phone users in the world, accounting for 67.1% of the global population. The staggering number of mobile device users affords marketers limitless potential in the plans they can furnish.

Moreover, the vast number of mobile apps and features have caused a sea of change in internet browsing habits. As of February 2022, 56.05% of internet users browse the web using their mobile devices, more than those using desktops (41.52%) and tablets (2.43%). Among the activities commonly done while on the web include opening email. Recent email statistics reveal that 42.4% of emails were opened using mobile devices, a higher rate than those of webmail (41.2%) and desktops (16.4%). Mobile phones have clearly become the most preferred device for browsing the internet and sensibly the center of many marketing plans.

As such, it is no surprise that mobile marketing has been dubbed the “future of marketing.” In fact, 69% of marketing firms already tap into mobile channels while 91% use social media and digital ads, both of which are also primarily accessed by mobile. Furthermore, social media giant Facebook stated that 94% of its ad revenues came from mobile in 2019, which would have likely been maintained in succeeding years.

Brands clearly have a lot to gain by centering on mobile. And so, we have prepared several mobile marketing tips for them to apply.

1. Leverage Push Notifications

Push notifications are indispensable tools leveraged in most, if not all, mobile marketing campaigns. After all, these automated reminders appear on mobile devices even if the user is using other apps and come with audible beeps. Since these are designed to grab attention, push notifications boost app engagement by 88% and drive 65% of users to visit their app source. In addition, 48% of mobile users buy products after receiving targeted notifications.

All apps leverage push notifications because these serve as optimized calls to action. They alert people to any timely information, from important meetings to the latest discount promos, down to online order statuses. As such, marketers can customize them to display newly released products, event invites, special offers, and buying incentives like cashback offers and free shipping. This leads to a 23.3% increase in clickthrough rates.

A smart mobile marketing strategy is to personalize notifications according to the immediate needs of mobile users, which potentially raises the clickthrough rate by 60.7%. For instance, brands can create geofencing- and proximity-based promos to draw segments to the nearest physical stores. They can also be harnessed to remind you of important affairs like appointments, task deadlines, and social engagements.

2. Utilize Hyperlocal Marketing

Market segmentation brings a huge incentive to mobile campaigns: hyperlocal marketing. Harnessing the GPS of smartphones, geofenced promotions cater to the location-based interests of segments. This drives people to visit physical stores and purchase items. If we look at the numbers, location-aware push notifications are about 10 times more effective than standard ones. After all, proximity-based concerns are out of the picture.

Mobile marketing best practices convey that brands should develop special promos and discounts based on the proximities of each branch. For instance, a marketing platform can be cued to send discount codes or limited-time coupons to shoppers who are 100 meters away from a branch. This will instantly drive brand interest and conversions. In fact, recent online shopping statistics reveal that digital coupons are 35% more effective than their paper-based counterparts at bringing in new customers.

Another advantage brought by hyperlocal marketing is its ability to intercept and retarget customers. Marketers can create geofences and geofenced promos near the branches of competitors. For this to work, you must provide better offers than your competitors, which can be accomplished through research and analytics. As for retargeting, you can assign a juicy offer or promote a loyalty program to leads who have engaged your campaign.

3. Vertical Content Orientation

Mobile phones, by default, are vertically-oriented devices used by people on the go. Considering one’s dimensions, it makes perfect sense that smartphones are held upright 94% of the time. After all, a website that bears the horizontal orientation of desktops compromises the entire point of having a mobile phone: mobility. How so? Imagine scrolling horizontally and vertically on your screen while walking down a busy street. Such inconvenience would drive leads away from any website.

This underscores the need to optimize a website’s design for mobile. All content should be laid out and scaled vertically, including the menus, photos, and videos, to create a fulfilling browsing experience. Create dedicated pages for each of your product lines and mark those that are part of discount promos. Moreover, integrate a payment gateway and adopt a simple checkout workflow so that customers will have an easy time buying from your site.

Lastly, create or set a landing page for special offers, especially for customers drawn by localized discount codes and promos.

4. Implement a Chatbot

The cost of exceptional customer service is a cause of concern for a lot of companies. After all, it necessitates new equipment and at least a team of personnel. Modern technology has come up with a cost-effective solution for this: chatbots. These auto-responders are affordable, don’t require new hardware, and best of all, they do the work of entire customer service teams. With this, chatbots are an integral part of mobile marketing best practices.

According to recent chatbot statistics, 56% of consumers prefer to message than call customer service. In addition, 30% of people show enthusiasm over chatbots. This goes to show how effective these bots are. And these can also be pivoted to commerce as a tool for guiding customers through the buying process and informing them of the latest promos.

However, the use of chatbots does not mean that the technology can handle the entirety of a brand’s customer service. Subject matter experts (SMEs) are still necessary for queries that are beyond the scope of the chatbots’ knowledge base. But having a few SMEs is still more affordable than hiring an entire team of agents and installing an array of new workstations.

5. Create Content that Drives Conversations

Content is still king in marketing, but it won’t exactly be kingly if it fails to evoke conversations from its readers. This is why the content of many brands shows a bit of color so that write-ups and social media posts don’t solely appear like digital brochures. After all, a lot of customers cherish the experience of interacting with companies online, and these experiences can shape brand reputation and galvanize purchases. What you can do is add interactive content like polls and quizzes as well as ask questions, besides publishing informational posts. The same goes for augmented reality, if relevant to your initiatives.

When producing written content, a mobile marketing tip is to keep the messages clear and crisp, especially for social media. For Facebook, captions with 50 characters or less, on average, deliver the highest engagement. Meanwhile, the sweet spot for Instagram falls within 1-50 characters.

Moreover, offer variety to your followers, such as posts that are fun, trending, informational, and sales-driven, and categorize them as such on your content calendar. Designate schedules for each category and strategically distribute them per week. Some brands also share tagged content posted by other users, which encourages interaction.

Website and blog content, on the other hand, should show authority, with the claims backed up by cited research. This establishes trust with readers, even those who aren’t part of a brand’s target audience, and could likely influence buys and brand recognition. Also, keep an eye for trending topics that you can incorporate and if your brand dabbles in entertainment, you can launch a podcast or, if relevant, produce ebooks.

6. Incorporate Promotional Videos

Videos are the current darling of social media. Not only do these increase brand awareness by 54%, but they also drive the most value among post formats according to 54% of marketers. In fact, the high engagement rate of video posts and the rising popularity of short-video-based platform Tiktok led Instagram to switch its primary format from photo to video in 2020. Any smart mobile marketing strategy includes a series of videos for promotions.

Promotional videos come in many forms. They can be mostly informational with hints of a suggested lifestyle, a lifestyle-based post that hints at the use of a product, or a post that centers on entertainment to achieve virality. The key to creating an effective one revolves around your audience’s interests and your brand’s image. Leverage the analytics of a marketing or social media management platform to determine what your audience desires.  After which, create personalized video content to use on social media and video streaming platforms like YouTube. If you want something stylish, you can tweak the content using video editing software to make the segments snappy and more engaging.

Through analytics, you will see which types of video posts your audience interacts with the most. As such, your social media campaigns will improve over time.

7. Leverage a Reliable Mobile Marketing Platform

Mobile marketing solutions aren’t made equal. Some platforms may not have all the functionalities for users to properly distribute content across various mobile channels while others might not have responsive support. With this, we’ve listed some of the leading solutions available.

Maropost Marketing Cloud

Maropost Marketing Cloud is a powerful marketing software that serves solutions for multichannel marketing and enables users to build workflows to optimize operations. Marketers can map out customer journeys through the platform as well as assemble workflows for generating leads. The platform also comes with custom landing pages and supports A/B testing to properly segment customers.

Trumpia

Made for companies of all scales, Trumpia is an omnichannel mobile marketing system that offers comprehensive SMS solutions, from mass texting to automation. Its smart targeting feature analyzes lead data to discern potential customers while its lifestyle engagement tools allow users to map out customer journeys.

Messente

Having partnered with more than 800 mobile networks, Messente is a handy mobile marketing solution that enables users to send SMS messages to more than 190 countries. It has an adaptive routing feature that seeks out the fastest channels through which messages are sent. The platform also has an expansive set of SMS marketing campaign tools and supports omnichannel messaging.

SearchAdsHQVISIT WEBSITE

An official Apple Search Ads partner, SearchAdsHQ is a robust mobile marketing tool designed to optimize Apple Search Ads campaigns. It is equipped with an array of useful features like an automated CPT bidder, powerful app analytics, and automation tools. The software also carries an API framework that enables users to customize integrations.

Mobile Text AlertsVISIT WEBSITE

Mobile Text Alerts is an integrated mobile marketing software that offers comprehensive SMS solutions. These include mass texts, scheduled text blasts, SMS analytics, and SMS surveys. It also affords tools for drip campaigns, auto-responders, and subscriber management. As such, the software guarantees a 99% SMS read rate.

8. Optimize Emails for Mobile

Reading emails is so much easier on mobile than on a desktop. It takes only one tap on an email app to reach your inbox, a far cry from typing an email URL and then signing on the site before you get to your precious mail. In lieu of this, 81% of people use smartphones to check their email. Additionally, 63% of emails are opened on mobile devices. The huge disparity between desktop and mobile in this regard makes the latter an essential component of any mobile marketing strategy.

Effective email marketing requires streamlining the email distribution workflow so that recipients are organized into groups and the email per group promptly scheduled. Software solutions like advanced mobile marketing software or marketing automation systems help here. You can also arrange an integrated email app like Outlook to send to different groups. This saves you a lot of time since you’ll be sending mail to entire segments instead of individuals.

Before sending, be sure to optimize your mail for mobile. This means slightly larger fonts, fewer links, crisp and concise content, and a personalized approach. The consequence of not doing so is dire as 72% of mobile users delete emails that are not optimized.

9. Build QR Code Promos

The smartphone camera is not just for taking photos and videos. It can scan QR codes and access the information concealed by their abstract patterns. All types of data can be embedded in those codes, from brand landing pages to digital forms. The versatility and trendiness of QR codes make them effective tools for marketing. Furthermore, the height of COVID-19 saw the accelerated use of these matrix barcodes for dining, retail, and contact tracing, so people are already accustomed to scanning them.

QR codes carry a boatload of uses for marketing. Marketers leverage them for mobile-exclusive promos, branch-specific offers, newsletter signups, and links to brand pages and social media. Some even hand out discount cards and flyers with QR codes so that their recipients can immediately buy upon reading. You can elect to go with any or a combination of these options since they are practiced by a lot of known brands right now. However, to be safe, going with mobile-exclusive and branch-specific promos is wise, given their exclusivity.

In any case, think of the QR code as a virtual gateway to anywhere you want to bring your leads.

10. Apply SMS Marketing

Instant messaging may have rendered SMS nearly obsolete in the realm of personal and professional communications, but when it comes to mobile marketing, the humble text message still wields a lot of influence. This might come as a surprise but SMS has an open rate of 98%, dwarfing that of email. What’s more, it boasts a conversion rate of 29%, trumping more popular channels like Facebook ads, Google ads, and email marketing. Furthermore, it owns an astonishing clickthrough rate of 30%. A channel bearing such remarkable numbers is a must-have in any seasoned marketer’s playbook.

To make the most out of the uncanny pull of SMS on people, keep the content short, clear, and snappy. This appeals to the short attention spans of today’s audience. Take the informational route instead of hard-selling products since it conveys more class and authority, both of which can elicit trust. You can also pair your SMS campaign with push notifications and email to stimulate brand recall, but space them out properly to avoid oversaturation.

11. Get a Google Business Profile

If you google the term “coffee shops near me” on your phone right now, the search engine will populate a list of recommended places beneath an interactive map and on top of the search results. For each suggested establishment, you’ll find its operating hours, photos, address, customer rating, and distance from your current location. Google can even show you how to get to each using the map. And this works not only for food and beverage stores. It caters to many retail categories, including auto parts, furniture, and clothing, as well. So, how do establishments get recommended by Google?

All the recommended brands signed up for Google Business Profile. By completing its profile, a brand immediately improves its mobile marketing strategy, and the latest Google search statistics have the numbers to prove it. Brands with a Google Business Profile are 70% more likely to be visited by customers. Consumers are also 2.7 times more likely to think that a brand with a Google Business Profile is reputable. Moreover, Google’s space for recommendations is designed to call attention and appears above the actual search results.

Google Business Profile is free. When signing up, you will fill up a form that asks for your services offered/in-store products, photos and/or videos, business hours, and attributes to describe your business. Google also provides a section for customer reviews and ratings and enables you to ask for feedback from your patrons.

12. App Store and Voice Search Optimization

Content and search engine results are not the only things primed for optimization in digital marketing. A mobile marketing tip is to also optimize voice and app store searches. After all, 48% of consumers are inclined to use voice commands to search for things on the internet. Meanwhile, 65-70% of mobile app installs come from app store searches. Ranking well on search results for both mediums puts brands in a better position to be found and purchased from by customers.

Similar to SEO, voice search and app store optimization require you to identify the most searched keywords concerning your brand and brand category, with the help of analytics. However, the two diverge from SEO when it comes to their other requirements.

Voice searches hinge on snippets, which answer questions asked on a search engine, thus webpages should be optimized to feature them, accompanied by question-oriented and long-tail keywords. App store search optimization, on the other hand, necessitates visual elements like photos and a video to accompany the optimized text.

13. Leverage Analytics

The best mobile marketing platforms with automation carry powerful analytics engines, and for a good reason. In a nutshell, analytics quantifies the actions performed by mobile marketing systems and the performance indicators of marketing campaigns. These include profiling and segmenting leads, tracking website activity, gathering social media data, visualizing every aspect of a campaign, tracking the flow of money, and monitoring returns. Marketers consider it a primary source of marketing intelligence from which mobile marketing best practices and strategies are derived.

A 2020 report shows that 52% of businesses leverage advanced analytics, and this figure would have likely increased significantly since COVID-19 accelerated the digital transformation of enterprises worldwide. As such, it is advisable for you to follow suit before your competitors use it to gain a larger share of the market.

14. Take Note of the Ideal Posting Times

A brand may have the best mobile marketing strategy, but if it posts content at a bad time, it won’t likely achieve its intended outcomes. Some days and times do not come with satisfactory levels of engagement. And the ideal schedules for posting vary per platform. This is why seasoned social media managers carefully plan their posting schedules before creating content.

To standardize this guide, we’ll be using US Central Time as the basis for the ideal times.

Facebook

Best Days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday

Best Time: 9 AM- 1 PM

Worst Day: Saturday

Instagram

Best Day: Tuesday

Best Times: Tuesday, 11 AM – 2 PM; Monday – Friday, 11 AM

Worst Day: Sunday

Twitter

Best Days: Wednesday

Best Times: Wednesday, 9 AM – 3 PM; Tuesday and Thursday, 9 – 11 AM

Worst Day: Saturday

LinkedIn

Best Days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

Best Times: Tuesday and Thursday, 9 AM- 12 NN; Wednesday, 9 AM – 2 PM

Worst Day: Sunday

Always Be Relevant

Recent mobile marketing best practices center on improving visibility, improving communications with customers, and stimulating engagement. And it makes perfect sense, given how COVID-19 made remote and hybrid work arrangements the new norms. Remote solutions like push notifications, email, and SMS nudge recipients on the latest products and promos. Meanwhile, strategies like hyperlocal marketing, chatbots, and conversational content can enhance interactions, build trust, and improve conversions.

These practices will certainly make a difference, but there is one more rule to adhere to that can make or break any campaign: staying relevant. Remember, millions of brands are vying for the attention of the digital public at any given time. Many of which belong to your industry. To stand out from the clutter, you should keep abreast of not just the best keywords but also what a lot of people are posting about. If you can incorporate it into your content, do so, especially on social media. This enables your customers to identify with your brand better.

However, if a trending topic is too off-course your brand’s values and identity, do not weave it into your content. Your audience might think that you are simply taking advantage of an occasion to make a quick buck, which decimates trust. Besides, new trending topics come up after just a few days, so you won’t run out of ideas to post.

Speaking of trending topics, should you wish to know about recent developments in mobile marketing, you can browse our guide on the latest mobile marketing software trends.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.