Mobile marketing or mobile marketing is one of the types of marketing that can be considered a subset of digital marketing.
Mobile has been called the seventh mass media in the world. This means that after printing, gramophone screens, cinema, radio, television and the Internet, mobile is the seventh generation of mass media that technology has made available to humans.
Usually, in explaining the importance of mobile marketing, they refer to the mobile penetration rate and the number of mobile phones around the world and statistics like that, but considering that it is not difficult to access these types of statistics, I will refrain from mentioning them and repeating them because the ITU site It is a suitable and reliable source for this type of information.
The concept of mobile marketing
The term mobile marketing or mobile marketing was initially considered equivalent to SMS marketing. But gradually, with the increase in the capabilities of mobile phones, the spread of smartphones and the provision of access to the Internet through mobile phones, mobile marketing became a much broader concept.
To such an extent that sometimes they prefer to present it not as a subset of digital marketing , but as an independent branch of marketing in order to sufficiently emphasize its importance and position.
Some people like Turban in his e-commerce book consider mobile marketing as a subcategory of mobile business so that the importance of mobile and mobile marketing is not diminished among other digital marketing tools .
Definition of mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is a tool to connect companies with each other and with their customers via mobile, using direct messaging, at the right time and place.
Mobile marketing is a set of actions that help organizations to establish interactive and appropriate communication with their audience according to the needs of each audience. This type of communication can be done through any type of tool or telecommunication network.
The term action in this definition covers any activity, institution, process, industry sector, standards, advertising and media , promotion, direct marketing, CRM , customer service, customer loyalty programs, social marketing and any other aspect of marketing.
Also, communication with the audience in the above definition covers all stages of relationship building, acquiring customers, creating interaction with customers or between customers and any other form of relationship.
As is clear from this definition. Today, mobile is less often placed next to other mass media, and the ability to customize and personalize mobile communications is considered one of the fundamental features of mobile marketing. Customization and personalization are two main components of power in mobile marketing.
In addition, attention has been paid to the capacity of mobile phones for use in different parts of the business value chain.
Therefore, we must remember that mobile marketing is not limited to mobile advertising, and the word marketing in mobile marketing is used in the same general sense as marketing, i.e. market discovery and value creation for the target market, and not the limited meaning of advertising.
Mobile feature in marketing
It’s not that difficult to come up with a list of valuable mobile features for marketing, advertising , and communication, and any of us can come up with a long list of benefits in a matter of minutes. However, a list-wise emphasis on a few of these features can be useful:
It is personal
Mobile is one of our most personal devices and few people are willing to share their mobile with another person. It is not an exaggeration to say that mobile is an extension of our hands and brain, and from this point of view, access to mobile is direct access to the customer at the closest imaginable level.
It is often with us
The mobile phone is usually with us and is turned on and connected to the Internet. The mobile screen is one of the first things we see after waking up and many of us fall asleep in the last hours of the night with our eyes fixed on the mobile screen.
Instant payment is possible
Therefore, if the audience is satisfied with the purchase decision, they can implement this decision at the same moment.
The most accessible source for information
Even those who prefer using laptops and personal computers to mobile phones have no choice but to refer to mobile phones to get information quickly in the streets and shops as well as in meetings and parties.
It is an important channel for content consumption
A significant part of digital content is consumed (read, heard, seen) on mobile. News, social media content , e-mails, video clips, audio files and podcasts are among the contents that many of us consume on mobile phones.
Ability to define and access control indicators
The possibility of defining quantitative indicators and measuring the effectiveness of activities is one of the characteristics of digital marketing . Mobile marketing also benefits from this feature. But all kinds of sensors and hardware tools and software processes embedded in mobile phones, including measuring the user’s geographical position, provide software developers with extraordinary possibilities for designing control systems for mobile users.
Common tools in mobile marketing
Setting up a list of mobile marketing tools is not difficult. Each of us, as a customer or marketer, has reviewed some of them, but I would like to mention a few of these tools below:
1. SMS
As a rule, this list should start with SMS Marketing; A feature that quickly attracted the attention of marketers. The ability to send and receive MMS, as well as fast and cheap two-way communication, are among the features that have made SMS marketing still popular.
Value-added services (VAS) based on SMS, although it has spread in our country in a very superficial and sometimes deceptive way, is a valuable opportunity for which potentials can still be searched and defined.
The future of SMS and its place in mobile marketing cannot be definitively commented yet, but user validation using SMS is one of the applications that does not seem to fade away anytime soon. Of course, in countries where the telecommunication infrastructure is centrally managed and access to text messages is not far from imagination, experts do not consider this method to be the safest validation method.
2. application
Apps are one of the most popular mobile marketing tools. We know that in many businesses, the application is used directly to supply and provide services, such as banks, magazines and news sites, internet taxis and online stores .
But let’s not forget that some applications are designed with the sole purpose of increasing brand awareness. These applications may try to create their desired identity in the mind of the audience in the form of games or information.
As an example in this field, we can refer to the Audi application (Android / iOS).
Despite being clear, I need to emphasize that applications, contrary to their appearance, which seem to be one of the first options in mobile marketing, are not necessarily the most appropriate option.
The application market is very competitive and the memory and space of the mobile screen as well as the user’s mind are very limited, and the strategy of using the application is successful when it can gain a suitable place in the mind and mobile of the audience in this very competitive environment.
Many applications offered by businesses are either not downloaded or are forgotten after being downloaded.
Therefore, while emphasizing that the potential of applications is very high, it is necessary to remember that the path to achieving a successful application is very difficult and uneven, and we must consider this issue when designing a marketing strategy .
3. Location-based marketing
Location-based marketing using mobile is very low-cost and effective.
We know that the location of mobile users can be accessed in different ways and with different accuracy, although the accuracy of access is different according to the permissions that the user gives to the application.
GPS embedded in the phone, telecommunication antennas in the vicinity of the phone, Access-point used by the phone to access the Internet and IP, which of course is the most imprecise method, are among the methods of determining the geographical location of the mobile phone that can help businesses to personalize their services.
Sending special messages to audiences in a specific area or helping to search for specific stores and products near the user are among the simplest applications of location detection tools.
Many businesses also use tools such as Check-in at certain times and give points to customers who announce their presence at stores or exhibitions.
The breadth and variety of location-based strategies is much more and I will mention it here only as one of the mobile marketing opportunities.
4. Social Networks
Social marketing is an independent branch of digital marketing . However, it’s also commonly touted as part of a mobile marketing strategy.
Considering that mobile is one of the main tools for consuming social network content, it is common to consider social networks and their presence strategy as a subset of mobile marketing.
We all know people who are not used to go to Google and search the web when using mobile and limit their mobile searches to messaging software and social networks.
Therefore, it is not incorrect to say that ignoring or abandoning social platforms means giving up part of a business’s audience.
5. Web access
Due to the fact that mobile phones are considered as one of the web access tools, mobile access to websites is also considered as one of the subsets of mobile marketing.
The weakest form of this work is accessing the desktop version of the websites by mobile, which can be said that in this case, businesses have not done any special activity in the field of mobile marketing and have only used a small part of the existing telecommunications infrastructure.
But designing a dedicated mobile version for a website or responsive designs makes mobile access to the web a better place in a business’s mobile marketing strategy.
6. SEO and search engine optimization
The topic of SEO is somewhat similar to the issue of web access. This means that even if you don’t do anything specific to mobile, being on the web and optimizing for desktop audiences regardless of mobile will cause search engines to direct part of their mobile traffic to your site.
But two points make SEO as an independent tool in the list of mobile marketing tools.
First of all, Google, as the most popular search engine , has made the evaluation algorithms of the mobile and desktop versions largely independent of each other. Even the content you publish on your website does not appear in the mobile and desktop results lists at the same time, and after publication, the ranking of the content on the mobile and desktop search results pages is not necessarily the same.
In other words, the algorithm and pattern of indexing pages in mobile and desktop are largely independent. The difference in the behavior of users on mobile and desktop has helped to further distance these two systems from each other.
The second point is that the questions of users on mobile are not necessarily the same as those asked on the desktop.
Many of the questions that are asked to search engines on mobile are for immediate needs. For example, a person who wants to buy a TV in a store may want to check the prices of other stores or other brands right away.
However, more in-depth questions are likely to be asked on the desktop. For example, it is unlikely that someone will decide to check the difference between different types of screens and their advantages and disadvantages when buying a mobile phone in the store. This work requires a more detailed and comprehensive examination at home or at work, in which the probability of using a desktop increases.
The short moments when the audience wants to quickly access compact information for quick action are called Micro-moments.
When optimizing the site for search engines, it is necessary to pay attention to these micro-moments separately and consider specific designs for them.
The list of mobile marketing tools could be much longer and include things like QR Code , virtual and augmented reality, NFC and the like.
So consider the above as just a few examples of mobile marketing opportunities.
Measurement challenges
Some businesses make an important mistake in evaluating the effectiveness of mobile marketing. To the extent that they abandon this type of marketing or allocate a small and disproportionate budget to it.
The spread of mobile phones has made the customer journey map become a complex and non-linear path in many cases.
For example, a customer may not go there at the same time as the promotion program after seeing a store’s discount SMS; But the probability that he will visit there for his next purchase will increase.
Or the person who went to your competitor’s business, after checking the prices and specifications, abandons his purchase. But he doesn’t refer to you, or even after referring, you can’t realize that mobile marketing played a role in his referral.
As another example, let’s say someone reads your office phone number from the bio section of your Instagram account and calls you. Unless he explicitly mentions this point, you may never realize that his phone call is the result of being on Instagram.
For this reason, evaluating the effectiveness of mobile marketing requires special care and attention, and despite the availability of basic facilities, it faces its own challenges and difficulties.
The non-linearity of the customer journey map makes defining, analyzing and evaluating quantitative indicators in mobile marketing more difficult than it seems at first glance.
