Now that you know the basics of mobile technology, you need to think about your potential customers and determine how and where you will have success getting their attention with your marketing message. Knowing who your users are and where they spend their digital time will be helpful for reaching the best possible mobile customers. Often, social media sites can be used to learn about your customers and their preferences and what types of marketing messages they respond to. If you don’t know much about your customers, it can be useful to start with the more ubiquitous platforms like Facebook to test the success of your messaging and begin learning about your audience so that you can eventually segment users into different groups. On the other hand, if you feel like you already know a lot about your ideal customers, you might be able to start with more niche social media marketing, especially if you know that your users tend to spend more time engaging socially in online venues with similar people, or if they are tied to certain social networking sites like LinkedIn or Reddit.
The demographic and psychographic profile of your ideal customers may lean more toward mobile or more toward desktop, but at least in the United States and most developed countries, you can generally assume that potential customers will probably actively engage with your marketing with both and may bounce between the different marketing channels and devices. This means that the wisest marketers will not put all their budget on mobile or all on desktop, but they will split efforts between both and then reallocate funds to support the most successful efforts while deprioritizing or redesigning less successful aspects.
Mobile Marketing Strategy and Planning
The mobile marketing strategy that you choose can be very important, but mobile marketing can be leveraged many different ways so there isn’t a single right or wrong way to plan and evaluate a strategy. In general, you need to look at your budget and goals and find the options that will be the most effective at reaching your target audience with the most compelling messaging and offers possible, taking the various types of technology on both sides of the equation into account.
One of the biggest questions that you have to answer is how much of your marketing budget will be used for digital marketing and, from there, how the budget will be divided between mobile, desktop, and other digital marketing options. To help you make this evaluation, it is often useful to think about the product or service that you are selling and what causes a potential customer to choose it over the competitors’. With that in mind, you can think about the various ways that current customers have gone about researching and finding your offering, or you can look at competitors’ offerings and how the different mobile marketing options can fit, expedite, or support that customer’s purchase process. If you are launching a new product or service, you can look at the existing competition and make your best guess about these aspects of the strategy.
Products and services that will skew more toward mobile will be ones where the core offering is a mobile app, a social network, news, information, gaming, entertainment, and offline or local businesses that people may be searching for when they are out and about. In general, the cheaper and the lower the level of consideration needed for the purchase, the more likely it is that a product or service can be marketed successfully on mobile. Examples include meals, transportation, movies, games, and general consumer goods. Products that will skew less toward mobile and more toward desktop digital marketing are more expensive and more consequential, like cars, homes, vacations, and expensive technology, although mobile marketing can still help support these products too. While this trend is shifting, it is still more common for people making bigger purchases to research these options and make the digital purchases on desktops rather than mobile devices.
Just because what you are selling may skew one way or the other doesn’t mean that either should be ignored. It may simply mean that you need to plan calls to action based on the device where the potential customer will be most likely to take the action. For example, it might be tough to convince someone to purchase a car on their mobile phone, but if your mobile call to action encourages the viewer to book a test drive or call and talk to a sales representative, those requests will be more reasonable and more likely to eventually lead to a purchase. Similarly, it generally doesn’t make sense to market an app or mobile game on desktop devices with a call to action that encourages the user to “download now,” since the product is not meant to be consumed on the device they are on.
The other question that comes up a lot in mobile marketing is the question of which is better—app or web marketing. As discussed, the safest option is to always do both whenever possible. The reality though is that the budget limitations can make that option impossible or impractical, so you may actually have to make a choice. The best option will always be a judgment call that you will need to make for your individual company and its ultimate goals, but in general, if you have to choose, we recommend starting with the website rather than the app.
You can use a lot of different statistics to inform this decision, but some can be confusing and misleading, so we would like to address them quickly here. First, it is true that on average, users spend more time on mobile applications than they do on the mobile web. Unfortunately, this can be deceiving because there is a lot of long‐form app behavior that can skew the statistics. If you think about apps like Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, Uber, GrubHub, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Audible, Google Maps, and all the email apps—these are all very popular applications that people use and forget that they are actually interacting with apps. Similarly, gaming apps are very popular, especially with younger generations, and those can also skew the data dramatically.
The next statistic that comes up a lot is that when customers convert, they tend to convert at a higher rate and value in apps than web users. The problem with this statistic is that it is heavily skewed because of the behavior of highly loyal users in branded apps. For example, people who are already huge fans of brands like Target, Lululemon, The Gap, or Crate & Barrel are much more likely to download the branded apps, which they intend to use a lot, especially when compared to people who are only lukewarm or completely uninterested in the brand. What is important to understand here is that these brands already have strong brand loyalty and an ongoing relationship with their customers. The customers are likely searching the app stores for the apps by brand name. If you have this kind of brand awareness, the likelihood that you already have a website is very high.
Problems arise, however, when this statistic is provided to young startups that are eager to make money and please their investors. The reality is that apps and app stores are not great places for users to discover new brands, and in fact, many users go to the app stores with an app that they would like already in mind. They are not casually browsing for new apps to download. Companies who start with apps instead of websites will likely have to do much more promotion and marketing, working even in advance of the app launch, to create demand for their app because the chances of casual app discovery in the stores are not good. Conversely, search engines are eager to index and surface new websites—especially when they have unique and authoritative continent, and search engines are great at surfacing deep, detailed content on a website, reaching customers who are searching specifically for that information or product, which is just not the reality of the app store search capabilities.
To put it in simple terms, apps are great if you have existing brand awareness and strong, well‐established brand loyalty already. They are not great for discovery of new products and services; websites that are crawled and indexed by search engines like Google are much better for that. You will need to do marketing and promotion for both, whichever you decide to start with, but the effort will likely be much more if you start with an app, unless you have a very clever social media or other campaign that you can fully expect to go very viral, and with that, it can still be more work. Also, mobile apps are meant for mobile phones, limiting any potential for desktop discovery, but the same is not true for websites. It is for these reasons that we recommend starting with a website whenever you can, even if it is only a few pages to describe the app that is being developed, and not a replica of the app functionality. If the desire to start with an app first can’t be overcome, at least build a very small website to market the app and collect email addresses of interested consumers before the app launch, so that you can market to them and notify them when the app actually goes live or is updated.
With an understanding of the basics of mobile customer acquisition and strategy, it is time to think in detail about what types of mobile assets will be the most useful in your marketing mix. This section of the chapter includes details about the goals and strategies that apply to mobile websites, mobile apps, mobile incentive and loyalty programs, location‐based mobile services, and mobile advertising.
Marketing on Mobile Websites
Mobile‐friendly websites are one of the most basic options for mobile marketing and are almost a de facto requirement if you plan on engaging your customers on their mobile devices. Anymore, we don’t talk about mobile websites and desktop websites because the best practice is to have one set of website URLs that works on both. There are a variety of ways to make website code work on mobile and desktop, but the most common and well‐known way to do this is with a development process called responsive design.
Responsive design requires website developers to separate the content of each page from the design and layout. This way, you can have the same content on the page for mobile and desktop users, but you can use different technical cues to trigger different design and layout options, based on the size of the device that is requesting the page. This type of flexibility makes it much easier to build websites that can work on a variety of different devices, including small phones, large phones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, and even smart TVs.
The technology that allows responsive design websites to adapt to different screen sizes is called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Developers include code, called media queries, to set up slightly different layouts or styles for the content, based on the screen width of the device. This can mean that a page will have three columns on a desktop or laptop display, but those three columns may be rearranged to fit into two columns on a tablet or just one on a mobile phone. This way, when a new size of mobile device is released, developers don’t have to build a new page—they just have to make sure that the new device screen size is included in the ranges of screen widths that have instructions in the CSS.
Other than testing between the different operating systems and browsers, you should also try to test devices with a wide array of screen sizes. Focus mostly on width rather than height. Many phones now have extra‐large size options, and some have small or compact options, and now, with mobile phone screens that can bend and fold coming into the marketplace, we can expect to see more and more variable phone screen sizes being released.
The basic tenets of responsive design should accommodate a variety of different phone sizes, and the resizing that happens is based on the pixel‐width of the screen. Pixels are a tiny increment that has historically been used to describe the level of detail on digital displays. One pixel is 1/96th of an inch or 0.26 millimeters. When a device is above a certain pixel‐width, it gets one mobile design and layout, and when it is below that width, it will get a design layout that is slightly, sometimes imperceivably different. The goal is to set up the website to display properly in whichever mobile “viewport” is displaying it. The viewport is basically the view settings for how something should display based on the height and width of a screen. Remember that while desktops and laptops have viewports that are set up for landscape viewing, most mobile devices consume content in a portrait orientation, so if you simply scale down some content that you want to display above the fold, it may still be below the fold on mobile screens.
One problem with responsive design was that developers who are just getting into it can inadvertently create new problems for mobile users while trying to adapt their content to be responsive. In an attempt to fix these issues, Google released an updated version of HTML, called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) HTML, which is meant to be more streamlined. AMP was meant to speed up mobile page loads. There is also AMP JavaScript, AMP CSS, and specific guidelines for being “AMP compliant.”
Developers could build separate versions of AMP pages to connect with their slower counterparts using a pair of meta tags. They also had the option to build a “canonical AMP” page, which meant that there was no slow version of the page and that the fast AMP page could be shown on mobile and desktop as the main version of the page. Since Google prefers to rank fast pages and users prefer to view fast pages, AMP was a great thing for some companies, though it did add a lot of extra work and complexity in some cases—especially in terms of measurement and maintenance.
There was a time that AMP‐compliant pages were rewarded with a visible lightning bolt in Google search results, but this was only for certain kinds of content, and the types of pages that could get the reward expanded over time until the reward for being AMP compliant was dropped. AMP code libraries still exist and are still great for replacing slow code with a faster alternative, but it is unclear if there are any benefits associated with AMP compliance aside from a linear benefit of making pages faster. As you rely more on AMP code, the page gets faster and faster, and AMP‐compliant pages are generally almost as fast as they can be.
Core Mobile Products and Services
In some cases, companies will focus their products and services on a mobile‐only or primarily mobile. Usually these are app‐based businesses like Uber, DoorDash, and Facetune; we describe these businesses as core mobile products and services. In some cases, companies like this will believe that they don’t need a mobile‐friendly website because they are so focused on the mobile app. This assumption is generally disadvantageous, and frankly wrong, especially in a marketing context, because of the pronounced differences in how people discover new businesses and how people engage with brands that they have an existing relationship with. The reality is that most brand discovery and product discovery now happen on the Internet and in search engines. While some search engines index apps and Google claims that they can index app content, it is rare that app‐only content shows up well in search results. This is because search engines, and especially Google, have historically not been good at crawling, indexing, and ranking app content unless very specific and intentional measures are taken. This is because apps are built‐in code that search engines are not designed to crawl and index.
The caveat is that Google can index apps, but only if they have corresponding websites, and only if the corresponding websites have pages and a URL structure that matches the screens and the structure of the app. When this is the case, Google can index native iOS or Android app content, but based on the requirements, it seems mostly like Google is indexing the web content, and noting that there is an app landing page alternative rather than actually crawling and indexing the apps.
This possibility only emphasizes the idea that app‐focused brands still can benefit significantly from natively having a mobile‐friendly web presence. With this process, called app indexing, people can discover your brand when its contents rank in search engines, then as they get more engaged with the brand, they become more likely to download the app. The converse, however, is rarely true. People are not likely to search for products or brands that they have never heard of in the app stores, and they are also somewhat unlikely to download and immediately engage financially with an app from a brand that they have never heard of.
Even for companies that are very app‐focused, like Uber, it is important to have corresponding web content. App indexing is the process of communicating to search engines how pages in the website correspond to screens in the app. To connect the specific screens in the app to the specific corresponding pages on the website, you must set up something called deep links, which allow mobile browsers to detect when an app is installed that corresponds to a website deep link that is requested. When this happens, the browser can launch the app and open it directly to the corresponding screen in the app rather than simply linking to the website. This can be great for driving periodic re‐engagement with an app directly from Google, but it can also be fantastic for creating a better potential for the initial discovery, engagement, and conversion within an app.
Setting up deep links and app indexing can be technical and tedious processes, especially when your app content or organization does not exactly match your web content. Even then, it is important to understand that you will have to do all of the deep linking and app indexing work twice—once for the iOS app and again for the Android app. Since the two systems use different code, they require different steps to set up the deep links for this kind of website‐app transitioning and functionality. Apple and Android have documentation, but in many cases, it can be barely enough to get the job done, especially if the person doing the work has never done it before or is not somewhat familiar with how search engines work.
Incentives and Loyalty Programs
One type of mobile marketing that has exploded in the past couple of years is the use of SMS marketing and push marketing to help drive engagement and conversion with purchase incentive and loyalty programs. Since a mobile phone is almost always with our target customers, it is a great vehicle for reminding people about any exclusive program where they can get rewards in a physical store or online. To create an incentive or loyalty program, it is best to have a customer relationship management system (CRM) that can handle email and SMS communications to help manage customer communication. This is especially true because email and SMS require specific levels of opt‐in or permission to be legal, and if you are marketing to customers in multiple countries, the requirements can vary. A CRM can help make sure that you have all the permissions that you need for the user’s country of residence and lets you focus on one or the other if the customer has not opted into both.
One important point to remember is that no matter how much we follow any local marketing rules and regulations for opt‐in, many companies ignore them, and thus, potential customers are likely already receiving a barrage of mobile marketing communications in email and text messages all the time. That can be a double‐edged sword for decision‐making because it is critical not to send too many messages and annoy your customers, but you also want to send enough that even if some are missed or ignored, your loyalty messages are registering and being seen by potential customers—especially the ones who are most likely to respond with additional purchases.
One of the best ways to achieve this balance is by using email and SMS campaigns together, to support each other in loyalty communication—especially when it comes to messages about loyalty deals and things that are time‐sensitive. The time‐sensitive nature of loyalty communication makes the combination of email and SMS especially useful because you can plan an email campaign that focuses on reminding people that a deadline for some loyalty benefit is approaching and you can alternate reminders between emails and SMS. For example, emails can count down at 10 days, 5 days, and 2 days before the redemption deadline, and those email reminders can be supplemented with SMS messages that count down at 7 days, 3 days, and 24 hours in the text messages. This kind of planning can be enough to prevent users from feeling overwhelmed with the communication. The two different channels, which are potentially received in different contexts or at different times of day, make it less likely that the recipient will feel overwhelmed or annoyed with the communication—especially if you assume that they will miss or ignore at least some of the messages in either channel.
Location‐Based Services
Whether you are focused on driving customers to a mobile app or a website or to a physical store, location‐based services can be an especially valuable type of mobile marketing. One of the best and most unique qualities that mobile devices have over other digital devices is that they are so portable. They generally have GPS capabilities and other location services, which can be used as part of a marketing campaign. When it comes to location‐based services for mobile marketing, there are really only a few that are commonly used, and this type of mobile marketing is one where there is still potential for more innovation, evolution, and growth.
Location‐based mobile marketing can be broken roughly into two categories: GPS and proximity‐based location‐based marketing. GPS‐based marketing is all based on users and their phone’s physical location, based on the GPS coordinates of the phone. Constant GPS location monitoring can feel invasive, or like a violation of privacy, and this has been a limiting factor in the growth of this type of marketing. Proximity‐based mobile marketing, on the other hand, shows a bit more promise because the phone only reaches the marketing when it is physically within a certain range of wireless signals, like a WiFi signal or a Bluetooth beacon, and the interaction completely stops when the device is out of that range, making it feel slightly less invasive.
WiFi Geo‐Targeted Marketing One of the easiest ways to use a person’s physical location to market to their mobile phones is by using a WiFi signal. Since WiFi has a limited range (up to about 150 feet indoors and 300 feet outdoors, per network router), it is naturally location‐specific. By offering free WiFi in a physical location, you can reach people with a marketing message, or you can request that the customer participate with some minor engagement in exchange for access to the free WiFi. Companies like Starbucks, Target, and Walmart actively use this method of marketing in their physical locations and seem to achieve at least some good engagement with this strategy.
The basic model for using WiFi in location‐specific marketing is generally somewhat standard, even when the implementation or goal differs. The main part of the customer engagement starts when you add physical signage in your locations to let visitors know that there is free WiFi available in the location. In locations where there are multiple companies that might be offering WiFi, it may be important to note the name of the WiFi network and to mention the name of the company offering the WiFi, which is sometimes listed with a “sponsored by” attribution.
Once users turn on the WiFi on their phone or try to connect to the network that is specified on the signage, the system automatically redirects them to a landing page that the visitor must interact with in order to get to the WiFi. These landing pages can have a variety of goals; in some cases, they just collect the visitors’ email addresses in exchange for access to the WiFi, but the interaction can also be more involved. The landing page can request the visitor fill out a form or a survey, rate their service, watch a video, vote on a poll, or basically anything else. The landing page does not have to be limited to promoting one single interaction that will get visitors to the Internet—it can also focus on visitors in a branded experience, giving them information about the physical location that they are in, highlighting specials, deals, or important information, or linking people to other branded experiences like app downloads, coupons, or SMS signup. (Airlines are notorious for this with their in‐flight WiFi.)
By engaging visitors on a WiFi network, you will benefit from whatever information or interactions that you get on the branded landing page that you have created. This can include seeing how willing visitors are to engage with the landing page, what information they are willing to share, what links they are willing to click, and what calls to action visitors are willing to engage with from your landing page beyond just accessing the free WiFi. This can all be great research for learning more about your customers.
When visitors do submit their information and click past the landing page, you will also get aggregated information about what types of content people are accessing on your network. It is obviously important to protect your visitors’ privacy, and you shouldn’t be able to see specific inputs on the Internet once visitors leave your landing page, but you will be able to see aggregations of how much time visitors spent on your site, using the Internet, or on other sites on the web. This might be useful to see when and how visitors comparison shop while in your store, what products they are most interested in, what competitive sites they visit when searching for more information, what social networks they visit, and so on.
Bluetooth Beacon Marketing Bluetooth beacons are another location‐based marketing option. These were previously more popular, but interest has waned because of a variety of technical difficulties that have limited their performance and scared companies off from trying it in many cases. Apple and Google both have Bluetooth marketing technology on offer. Apple has the iBeacon, which was specifically targeted at iOS users, and Google has Eddystone, which is interoperable between iOS and Android devices and creates an encrypted connection, designed to be more secure than traditional Bluetooth beacons. Both options were popular because of their simple setup and low cost, but they have lost favor because of security concerns and limited consumer adoption and interest.
Bluetooth beacon marketing works in a similar way to WiFi marketing, but the messages travel over Bluetooth. This means that your visitors either have to have their Bluetooth on, or you need physical signage to suggest to them that they turn it on. After that, they need to know to opt into a specific Bluetooth connection permission request sent from the beacon. From there, the brand can send the visitor push notifications with advertising, relevant deals, or other similar types of information.
You can simply send text prompts over Bluetooth, but to have an interactive experience, it is best for the prompt from the Bluetooth beacon to send people to a mobile website, landing page, or in‐app experience. The transition between using Bluetooth to initiate the communication, then using WiFi or a data connection to access content from the web or in an app, can cause problems, but the main problem is related more to users’ perceptions about the security of Bluetooth as well as the low likelihood that they are walking around with Bluetooth on or that they are willing to receive Bluetooth marketing communication from potentially unknown brands. It turns out that for many users, allowing this type of connection is a big request—especially when the reward of the interaction is uncertain.
One of the benefits of Bluetooth beacons is that if you have more than one of them located in a particular area, you can use the signals to triangulate exactly where users are when they respond to a prompt. This information may be useful to understand the context that causes them to interact—for instance, are they lost or looking for help, have they picked an item to purchase, and are looking for a discount, or is there something else driving the interaction? Beacons have also been used to help attribute offline purchases after someone clicks on an ad. For instance, if someone is using their phone to search for a dress and clicks on an ad for a dress, then goes into a store to try the dress on, and eventually purchases it, that purchase can be attributed back to the digital ad even if it happened offline.
Geo‐Fence Marketing Geo‐fencing is a method of marketing that relies on GPS to set up a digital perimeter that can be used to send specific marketing messages to potential customers within the perimeter of the designated area. Similar to Bluetooth beacons, geo‐fencing received a lot of attention in the early days of mobile marketing but has lost steam due mostly to technical complexity as well as security concerns. To reach potential customers in a geo‐fenced area, their mobile phones need to have location services turned on in their mobile phones, and this was more of a hurdle than marketers expected.
The technology requirements for working with geo‐fencing generally require working with a third‐party to help with the technical setup of the geo‐fence. Given the right conditions, a marketing campaign that used geo‐fencing could send push notifications or text messages to potential customers, but it is much more common for geo‐fencing to be used in collaboration with a branded app that uses location data and already has the user opted into push notifications. This, however, limits the potential to use this type of mobile marketing for driving brand discovery; instead, it makes it better for engagement or re‐engagement of existing customers—especially for people who have a branded app and go to a related event, store, or location.
Google Business Profile Previously known as Google My Business, Google Business profiles are a mix of a location‐based services and search engine optimization and marketing. Google Business profiles are something that any small or local business can set up by going to Google Profile Manager and entering the business details. From there, you can go through a verification process with Google, and the business listing can start to rank in local Google searches. When people search for terms related to the business, the business listing has the potential to rank in mobile search results, generally as part of what is called a map pack, which generally includes a few other related businesses in the area.
Since mobile phones that search Google send basic geo‐coordinates of the mobile searcher, Google can change their search results when they believe that the searcher is trying to find a local business, and these types of results are slightly more likely to rank on mobile than they are on desktop searches. Google’s local rankings generally only rank within a relevant radius of the location of the business, unless the search is for the exact brand name, in which case, the business is more likely to rank outside of the relevant local range.
Different strategies can help Google Business profiles rank in Google searches. The basic tenets of a good local search optimization strategy are to fill out the Google Business profile as much as possible, with a lot of good information about the business as well as pictures, product listings, and accurate contact information, focusing on always using the exact same name, address, and phone number, exactly as the location is listed in other websites on the Internet. After that, it is important to choose all of the most relevant categories, and if possible, link the Business Profile to the business website, which also includes the same address and phone number information. Having good reviews on the Google Business profile and getting links to the website from other local business can help improve the business’s local rankings in Google, which means it will show up for more searches in a wider local radius.
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