Marketing is an art; you need to know exactly what to say, who to say it to and how to sell yourself. Email marketing is slowly dwindling and the commonly known “guest post” has since been dubbed an ineffective and even harmful way to advertise yourself.
But it’s not all doom and gloom as there is a new way of marketing that is not only effective but promises to be long lasting.
Mobile marketing has only been possible due to the popularity of smart phones and the huge surge in social media users. This has given marketing a whole new lease of life and an extremely bright future.
Over a quarter of the worlds mobile phones are classed as smartphones, and over half of all local searches for products or services are performed on a mobile device. This means that if you own a business that focus on gaining locally sourced clientele, you want to make absolutely sure that you have a mobile version of your website.
You don’t need to have a large budget or hundreds of clients to be able to make your website responsive, you can use several tools to help you. Dimensions Toolkit in the Chrome store, for example, is an extension you can add to Chrome to help with testing your responsive websites.
You also need to make sure that your websites work on various screen sizes and in different browsers. Apple and Android make up 75% of the smartphone market, Chrome and Safari of which are the most preferred browsers.However there are many browsers you need to test such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.
It has been said that by 2015, mobile web browsing will account for 50%, if not more, of all internet browsing. It is no surprise that mobile marketing is on the rise as the sales of smartphones increases annually and the ease of use. It is much easier to quickly search for something on your phone rather than having to turn on your PC as most of us leave our phones on permanently.
Social media has also been a huge help when it comes to marketing yourself through mobile devices, with 25% of smartphone owners (between 18 and 44) saying they couldn’t recall the last time their smartphone wasn’t beside them. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus have made it possible to talk to almost anyone anywhere.
Out of the three, the biggest influencer in social media is most definitely Twitter as 500 million people actively tweet. What has made this change even easier is that you can connect several accounts together for your everyday needs, using your Google Plus to create a YouTube account etc.
You can even use your mobile phone now to receive and send emails, from several different accounts. If you’re a businessman or woman on the go then being able to quickly access your emails is essential to keeping your business on track. It also means that outside of work hours you are always aware of any news or updates with clientele etc. 42% of total time spent online is solely checking emails and email readership in mobile devices increased by 34% in 2013. Just like with responsive websites, you also want to make sure that the emails you send out are also optimized to adjust to screen sizes.
It’s not just social media and email marketing that has been affected by the rise in smartphone use, e-commerce has also seen a huge surge in usage. 52% of the UK’s younger age groups prefer using a mobile site to an application to buy products, rising to 86% for those over 45. 1 in 5 smartphone users scan their products using their mobile cameras and 1 in 8 will compare prices on their phone while in a shop. This has made it much easier for consumers to get the best deals and you can even use your smartphone for vouchers and coupons. 1 in 4 mobile users will redeem a coupon via online promoters by 2015, so no fiddly bits of paper in your wallet or purse.
So why should we all make the jump to mobile?
Well it is predicted that in 2015 there will be approximately around 1237 million sales of mobile devices, 1380 million by 2016 and 1516 million by 2017. That is a lot of people you can reach out to, not only this but mobile technology is most prominent in English speaking countries such as the UK, Europe, Australia and USA.
In the UK in 2010, fewer than 1 in 100 donated to charity by text; but by 2015 this figure is expected to rise by over 800%. We’ve come a long way since the days of only being able to use basic mobile browsers, now we can use the very best browsers and everything you can on a PC or tablet. Which does beg the question, is there anything your phone can’t do?
Back before smartphones, you were very limited in what you could do. You had basic functions beyond calls and texts such as alarms, a calendar and maybe some games, but very little more. Now mobile phones are capable of taking pictures that are of higher quality than professional cameras, they are capable of scanning your fingerprint or recognising you through facial or voice recognition and they’re also capable of answering questions with systems such as Siri for the iPhone.
Even basic functions on a mobile device have improved ten fold. With smartphones you are able to collect contacts the old fashioned way by typing in a number or you can gain them through social media or email contacts and sync them all into one contacts list.
You can also personalize each contact with a picture, ringtone and even have a list of other contact details such as home address, other contact numbers and emails. Texts are mixed in with instant messengers such as Facebook messenger or iMessage for the iPhone, which shows you whether a message has been read or is being actively replied to.
Mobile marketing is most certainly the future of marketing in general and what makes it even better is that you can gain your precious links more effectively and, more importantly, more naturally than before. So next time you want to market yourself, think about the following points:
- Does your client have active social media profiles?
- Does your client have a blog to share interesting content on?
- Is your clients site responsive with all manner of PCs, tablets and mobiles?
- Does your clients site have a slow page loading speed?
