How to create a mobile marketing strategy

1. Set your objective(s)  

Before you do anything else, deciding what your objectives are is crucial. Given that all of your mobile marketing activity will be designed to further your objectives, a clear view of what you’re trying to achieve is absolutely vital.

Ultimately, all roads lead to a conversion of one form or another, but there may be other, softer objectives you’re trying to achieve with your mobile marketing strategy. Some of these might include:

• Improving awareness
• Improving brand sentiment
• Increasing brand or product advocacy

2. Know your customers

You’ll likely have a fair amount of anecdotal consumer data stored away in a variety of places, such as an email marketing database or in your CRM or DMP software. Getting this information into some sort of order that allows you to segment your customers can be a headache if you’re not hyper-organised.

Your best bet? Invest in a CDP, or Customer Data Platform, this will do the heavy lifting for you by pulling information from a vast range of data points across web, social, email and collating all that information in one place so that you can get to work targeting your customers effectively. 

If you want to know more about managing your customer data, here are some of the differences between CRMs, DMPs and CDPs.

3. Channel strategy

Once you know who your customers are and where they are, you can work out how to reach them effectively. If they spend lots of time on Facebook, you might find that using Messenger to reach them is most effective. Similarly, if they’re an avid WhatsApp user, using WhatsApp for Business to engage with them is a great way to interact. You may find that email is the best way to reach them – bear in mind that it can be the most cost-effective solution if you have a sizeable, clean email database already. 

Make sure you use the data to prioritise each channel. An effective mobile marketing strategy will show you where to spend the most time to maximise results.

4. The right content for the right people…

Now you know who you’re targeting and where you’re targeting them, you’ll need to think about what to target them with. Relevance is key here to ensure your communications aren’t passed over in favour of your competitors’ efforts. Knowing who your customers are and where they are is next to useless if you don’t know what to show them or talk to them about. 

Content strategy is a key part of any mobile marketing strategy and is essential to ensure you’re creating enough of the things your customers and potential customers are interested in. Ultimately, you’ll want to build trust, conversions and, finally, brand advocacy. 

5. …at the right time

Knowing when your audience engages with content is crucial to knowing when to serve them content. Ensuring your emails, SMSs, WhatsApp messages, etc. are actually engaged with will prevent wasted time and resource going into content that doesn’t move the needle.

A good data platform will allow you to segment customers based on the times they are typically active across various channels to ensure you grab their attention when you communicate with them.

6. Make sure you have the resources

A peerless channel strategy is one thing. Another is the ability to deliver on it. Once you’ve decided what you want to produce and where you’re going to put it, make sure you have the time to:

a.) Produce the content in the first place

b.) Manage the channel effectively

If you can’t answer affirmatively to both of these questions, consider which elements of your plan you can deliver and which channels are most important. You may wonder why we’ve created a channel and content strategy before deciding if we have enough resources. That’s because your resources can change over time and you may find that in a few months, you’re more able to deliver on the wider mobile marketing strategy. In that instance, doing the extra planning upfront will have been worth it. One thing that will help free up some time is to…

7. Automate!

Deciding which elements of your mobile marketing strategy to automate will allow you to focus on the areas where automation is less helpful and allow you to concentrate on creativity while your software looks after more repetitive administrative tasks. There are a huge number of reasons why automating your mobile marketing strategy can improve its effectiveness - we talk about that more in this article. 

The best mobile marketing automation software will allow you to create campaigns and promotions with minimal effort. Obviously there’s a cost involved, but it will be many times more cost effective than hiring extra staff to deliver your mobile marketing strategy. 

8. Keep your audience engaged 

Since you’ve spent time segmenting your audience, you’ll want to spend time making sure you’re sending them useful content and communications. 

Be sure to reward existing customers with content, discount codes and subscriber-only assets, for example. Targeted prospects should also be given a specific stream of content to move them down the purchasing funnel and towards a conversion. Remember the rule of seven dictates that, on average, a new customer will need to see your marketing messages seven times before they buy from you. So make sure you have enough useful content to keep them reading.

9. And finally… know the pitfalls

We’ve put together a list of the most commonly made mobile marketing mistakes. Before you put your mobile marketing strategy into practice, make sure you’re aware of the potential pitfalls.