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Marketing is often used as an umbrella term to cover all efforts to get the word out. Because of this, it can seem as if all efforts and avenues are equal. But there is a big difference between a local newspaper and a national magazine. There’s an even bigger difference between print marketing and mobile marketing. Because of these differences, the marketing approach has to be tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of each medium.
Multiply that by a mix that includes dozens of media types such as these:
- Newspapers
- Websites
- Podcasts
- TV
- Radio
- Search engines
- Social networks
Obviously, this list is not 100% inclusive. We didn’t list banners or sports teams or sponsorships. While they are all marketing, it is not the same. Ours is a mix of media and modes that must be analyzed in a way more commonly known as marketing mix modeling. This type of modeling allows a company to more accurately assess their marketing efforts across a broad spectrum of categories.
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We know from such modeling that it makes sense for companies to increase their spend on mobile marketing. That said, there are more ways to do mobile marketing wrong than to do it right. However, knowing what to avoid is more than half the battle. Here are a few tips on what to do and what not to do when marketing to people on the go.
Good Mobile Marketing Starts at Home
Like so many best practices, good marketing starts at home. In this case, home refers to the home page of your company’s website. It is no longer just about website design. It is about mobile website design. Everything you are marketing to a mobile device ultimately brings a person to your homepage. If that page is not properly designed for mobile, you will lose the sale right there. And it will be exceedingly difficult to regain the attention of that potential buyer.
These days, you have to assume that a person’s first look at your site will happen on a mobile device with a screen of about five inches. No matter how good your site looks on a 27-inch desktop monitor, if it looks or behaves in an unpredictable manner on mobile devices, your marketing efforts have been for naught.
Avoid the Corporate Takeover
Your two-inch ad may be innocent enough on a desktop browser. But that same ad amounts to a full corporate takeover of a smartphone display. When the app or social media that a person was enjoying gets taken over by an ad, they feel powerless, frustrated, and indignant.
Remember that every corporate takeover brings the user a little closer to a people’s revolution. They do this by purchasing apps that don’t have ads and employing ad blockers on their browsers. They are perfectly willing to pay for an ad blocker. And there are many free ad blockers they can download and activate within seconds of deciding to revolt.
Most users don’t care about unobtrusive ads, however. They only start to care when the corporate takeover of their expensive mobile devices becomes too egregious. Once you turn an apathetic consumer of your marketing into an active adversary, you lose. They can fight back. And it will have a negative effect on your bottom line.
Don’t Be a Bandwidth Bandit
For the most part, desktop bandwidth is unlimited. However, mobile bandwidth is limited for most people. Heavy-handed advertising on mobile directly costs users money. And when they find out where that cost is coming from, they will not thank you for it.
Digital marketing agencies have seldom considered the effect their campaigns have on bandwidth costs and smartphone performance. This is because they create and monitor these ads on large, powerful computers with nearly unlimited resources. But those same media-filled marketing campaigns have a profound and deleterious effect on smartphone resources.
People are a lot more sensitive about smartphone performance. That’s because they have to make those pocket-sized resources stretch to accomplish more computing than they ever did on a desktop. The main resource people track moment by moment is battery life. Once they connect that drain to your marketing campaign, consumers will be quick to correct it. And they will no longer be in the mood for reasonable discourse.
Finally
Improve your mobile marketing effectiveness by providing a better mobile experience at home, avoiding corporate takeovers, and respecting the limitations of mobile resources.
