Mobile is quite possibly the most personal channel that exists. Mobile devices are in our pockets, on our desks, or in our hands consistently throughout the day. The ubiquity and proximity of the mobile device is why it’s indispensable to modern marketing strategies. This makes it vital that you understand how to effectively market on mobile so that you can unlock the potential of a huge, expanding and engaged audience. Mobile marketing targets users on their mobile phones and tablets. It leverages these devices to communicate and engage with buyers at any point in the customer lifecycle. And it drives brand value and demand for your products or services. Mobile marketing provides many ways to listen, learn, and engage with your buyers. You can send text messages to your audience, create mobile responsive websites and emails, and develop apps to engage them on an ongoing basis. With advancements in mobile and marketing automation, you can collect mobile-specific insights, which helps you engage users across all of your channels.

Unlike any other engagement and communication channel, mobile allows marketers to reach larger audiences in a way that is real time and personal. Your buyers already spend a large amount of time on their mobile devices, so you want to make sure your mobile presence is front and center. Done properly, you can create relationships with your audience at any time, wherever they are.

Integrating mobile into marketing automation, creates multiple touch points and chances to engage your buyers. SMS or text messaging can be used to communicate with your customers right in their text message app on their mobile device. This type of messaging is used to deliver timely notifications, like pending appointments or special offers. You can use push notifications to communicate with your customers right on their mobile device from installed apps. This type of messaging is designed to appear on the customer’s mobile screen and could contain an offer, greeting, notification, or even an account alert. Another example of mobile marketing is when in-app messaging is used to engage directly with your customers while they’re using your app. When they take a specific action, you can display information like offers, promotional content, or reminders. These are the different ways you can listen and react to key mobile behaviors such as who is installing your mobile app, visiting your mobile website, opening emails on mobile devices, and performing other in-app activities.

Testing your mobile campaigns is an important part of progressing towards your marketing goals. The two most common types of tests you can run for your mobile programs are A/B and multivariate. A/B testing takes two similar elements with slight differences and compares them to find the one that results in the most engagement. This is done by randomly splitting the traffic between elements such as two landing pages, two home screens, or two calls to action. To compare more than one element, use multivariate testing. Just keep in mind, depending on the amount of variables, that you need a significant amount of traffic to successfully run a multivariate test. By testing a single variable at a time, you can form more actionable conclusions. For more, check out our module on A/B testing.

When creating your mobile strategy, it’s important to consider your audience. The makeup of your buyers helps you determine which mobile marketing activities and channels to use. Create buyer personas. Personas will help you determine which touchpoints make the most sense, decide what content you need, and set the tone, style, and delivery strategies for your mobile messages.

Set key performance indicators. Once you have a good baseline regarding what you’re doing now and what you want to do in the future, you’ll need to center your KPIs around engagement, acquisition, and service quality.

Determine your overall communication cadence. Meet with stakeholders in your organization to determine how often you should engage with your audience. Be sure to test and iterate to identify the optimal number of touches based on your results.

Use Marketo’s Marketing Calendar to see all of your campaigns in one place, so you know exactly which marketing activities are taking place across all channels. You need to track database emails, social campaigns, and your mobile campaigns at any given time. With this holistic view, you can see exactly who you communicate with and when. Now that you know how mobile marketing works, we’ll show you how to set up mobile features in Marketo. -