With all of the mobile options in marketing, and all of the traditional marketing channels that they can support, channel management within mobile marketing can build up and get complex pretty quickly. Channel management in mobile marketing is most often determined based on the most dynamic and lucrative mobile channel that is in the marketing mix. This will be different for each company, and it may be heavily dependent on the unique skills and experience of the marketing and technical teams that are working on the project. Of course, it may also depend on the nature of the product or service that you are trying to market. For example, a company that is promoting a new app will likely have a vastly different strategy than a company that is just a local restaurant trying to drive foot traffic or a clothing brand that is trying to drive both on‐ and offline purchases.
When you are determining how mobile marketing fits into your marketing mix, it is often useful to think about what mobile technology offers are not available in the other marketing channels. Usually, the most relevant benefit of mobile marketing is the location‐specific nature of the mobile devices, the ubiquity and constancy and personal nature of interaction that consumers have with their phones, and the potential for simple, multi‐modal interactions on mobile devices. Thinking about these benefits, it is easy to understand why a local business would see value in ranking well in mobile search results in Google Maps, or why a new mobile game app might benefit from push notifications and SMS reminders to keep users engaged with the app during their downtime.
Conversely, a clothing brand with both on‐ and offline commerce could really benefit from multi‐modal mobile interactions, leveraging email, mobile web, SMS, and possibly even an app to support loyalty, customer service, and conversion goals for their shoppers, in ways that allow them to shop online or in an app from wherever they are, but also driving them into the store for special events, to avoid waiting on shipping, or to pick up or return items in a quick, hassle‐free way. This chapter goes into further detail about how you can effectively leverage elements of mobile marketing like mobile search, mobile video, mobile advertising, and other mobile channels to work together, and with traditional marketing channels to create the perfect marketing mix.
In large campaigns, mobile channel management can become more and more complex, especially as each additional channel is added and as different target markets, cohorts, and funnels are identified. As the level of complexity increases, it may become more useful to create a combined dashboard that brings all of the different channels together so that they can be understood as a group. In some cases, many of your marketing channels may be part of a larger entity, like Google, Apple, Chrome, Microsoft, or Amazon. If that is the case, it may be useful to see if a combined management platform exists within that larger company; it can be useful to leverage that for channel management.
As you read this chapter, you may notice that Google is mentioned a lot. This is primarily because Google has an incredibly dominant presence in the mobile marketing world—especially for advertising, marketing, browsers, handsets, and apps. Rather than fighting against this, it is generally best to allow the different Google products to work together as best as possible, using systems like Google Ad Manager 360 and Google Analytics to measure and combine whatever you can. Their products are often free and generally have easy integrations that help the different channels and lines of business work together more seamlessly than they otherwise might if they were all part of different platforms. This is why the preference for Google and Apple products will seem especially strong in the mobile marketing world.
Mobile and Other Marketing Channels
One of the best ways to think of mobile marketing is as the glue that can bring other marketing channels together. That means that it can be very useful to keep your mobile projects top‐of‐mind when you are working on the overall channel management or even when focusing campaigns in one specific channel. Mobile technology and advertising are generally a great way to learn more about your target audience and home in on your messaging, segmentation, and conversion funnel development mobile marketing. This tends to be perceived as somewhat more personal, as long as you get your messaging right and show the right level of respect for your customers.
Mobile Search
Mobile search marketing is generally described as search engine optimization (SEO, or in this case, mobile SEO). It is the process of building and improving websites to make them more appealing for computer programs like the ones that Google uses to rank them for relevant queries when customers search. In general, mobile search marketing is not that different from other search marketing; it is about making content that is simple and easy for Google and other search engines to understand and rank. More searches are submitted from mobile phones than computers now, and Google uses what they call mobile‐first indexing, which prioritizes the mobile rendering of a website over the desktop when they are evaluating the pages that should rank in their search results.
Google uses the same basic website information to rank websites on mobile and desktop search but results can be different on mobile—especially when there is local intent, like to find a local business, or app intent, when it appears that the searcher is looking for an app. Most companies that consider mobile marketing important should already have a website that is mobile‐friendly. This is the first requirement for showing up well in mobile search results. This means building your website in responsive design so that the same content can be presented clearly and in a usable way on mobile and desktop devices.
If this is not possible, then other more technical solutions, like adaptive design, cloud‐based selective, or adaptive serving options, can be used to switch to different variations of the content for mobile and desktop users. What is important for search engines is that the URL and the actual content of the page—that is, the text and images—are basically the same between desktop and mobile, even if they are in different locations or if the images are smaller or of lower quality when they are on mobile.
Once this is done, the next most important thing to do is make sure that your website is easily crawlable by Google and other search engines and that the keywords that you want to rank for appear on the pages. There are a couple of things that make a website easy to crawl, but they can basically be summed up as minimizing the impact of JavaScript and maximizing page speed and load time. In both of these, what you have to remember is that Google’s main limitation is its crawler, so the longer time and the more computational effort that a website takes to load, the more of Google’s resources it takes to crawl, and the less incentive they will have to crawl it completely or regularly.
Even if your site does not rely heavily on JavaScript, you need to make sure that the pages on your websites load quickly so that the search engine doesn’t stop before the page is fully loaded and so that they don’t leave the site early because the pages are loading too slowly. Google has a variety of tools that are designed to help website owners figure out if their pages are loading slowly and to give them feedback about what can be fixed to make the pages load more quickly. The most well‐known one is called Google Pagespeed Insights.
There is also a related set of standards called core web vitals, which is about both the load time and the user experience that is associated with the load time and about how much things move or change, during the time when the page is loading. Basically, you want your pages to load as quickly and stably as possible, without movement or a refresh once an asset is in place. This makes it easier and faster for Google to load and render the page when it crawls it.
The JavaScript Conundrum
Google takes active measures to prevent individual websites from hogging too much time with the crawler because the websites are slow, take a high amount of computational power to render, or rely heavily on more complicated code like JavaScript. This is a bit of an over simplification, but Google computationally tries to balance the value of ranking content from the site with the effort it takes to crawl it.
As the web advances, more and more websites use JavaScript to make their websites more interactive and to make them look and feel more like native apps. What you need to know about JavaScript is that for many years, Google totally ignored it because it slowed down their crawlers and created security risks for the crawler. Now, especially since most of the web has transitioned from HTTP to HTTPS, JavaScript is less of a security threat for a search engine, but other risks are still present.
JavaScript can contain a lot of information and be slow to load it into a page. In some cases, certain types of website coding practices, technically called WebApps and Single Page Apps (SPAs), allow developers to build entire websites on one URL, using JavaScript interactions with the server to refresh the contents of the web page rather than requesting a new page on a new URL. Since search engines use URLs to organize their index of information, these JavaScript solutions can be very limiting for SEO success. Similarly, even pages that require a lot of JavaScript to load their content can be problematic for search engines to rank.
The best option, if you have a site that uses a lot of JavaScript, is to maintain separate URLs for separate pages on the site whenever you can. The other thing that you should do is to server‐side render (SSR) or prerender your pages so that the JavaScript is already executed and processed when it is sent to the browser and also to the search engine crawlers. This is a technical service or setting that can usually be controlled by your hosting company or your content delivery network (CDN), if you have one. SSR basically executes the page code before it is sent to the browser. It saves a copy of that executed code and sends that to the browser, so that it does not have to take time for the code to be processed by the browser. It is great for users because it makes the page load much faster, and it also decreases the computational power needed for a search engine to render the page.
If SSR is not possible, the next best option is to make sure that all of the links on each page of your site are written in HTML instead of JavaScript. This means that each link should include the “<ahref=” code for an HTML link rather than linking with “ID=” or other JavaScript code. Google and other search engines look specifically for HTML links when they are crawling, so this will ensure that they can at least find the internal pages that are linked to, even if some of the page code might still be in JavaScript. These steps will make it much easier to crawl, despite the inclusion of JavaScript.
Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising is another potentially powerful marketing channel that can be used alone or combined with other mobile marketing initiatives, and it is capable of a wide range of impacts, from simply supporting and generating brand awareness, all the way to driving very targeted and adaptive marketing campaigns that are designed to create very specific types of engagement and conversion.
According to eMarketer statistics, in 2021 all segments of U.S. industries spent more than 50 percent of their ad budget on mobile advertising, with retail and consumer packaged goods as the two industries with the highest focus on mobile (based on total spending and on the percentage of the ad budget focused on mobile).
Oberlo, a digital business and entrepreneurship portal, explains the growth in mobile advertising spend like this: “According to the latest data, mobile advertising spend in the United States in 2022 is expected to reach $137.13 billion, after surpassing $100 billion for the first time in 2021. This refers to expenditure on everything from classified ads and display ads to email, lead generation, and search on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. This will represent a whopping 16.86 percent year‐over‐year increase in mobile ad spend, a slowdown from 2021’s 22.15 percent growth rate…. If it does continue to grow as experts forecast, this will mean that mobile ad spend will have doubled in the few years from 2019 to 2024.” With this perspective in mind, it is important to understand the many options that are available in mobile marketing.
One digital advertising tactic that has become common on mobile and desktop experiences is called remarketing. Remarketing can be controversial because it is when websites and apps use third‐party tracking code called cookies to track users’ behavior across different websites and apps, and sometimes even across different devices, including mobile phones. As a consumer, you know it is happening when ads for certain brands or products seem to follow you around the Internet. Customers who recognize when it is happening claim to dislike it, but conversely, it is actually one of the best digital advertising tactics for driving brand awareness and eventual conversion. The personal nature of mobile phones makes remarketing even more effective, but they also can make it seem even more invasive and sometimes like a violation of privacy. It is this type of digital marketing especially that has pushed the industry to create more stringent privacy protections for digital customers, which are discussed more at the end of this chapter.
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