Paul Joseph

Mobile Marketing in the next big thing. Mobile has changed the landscape of consumerism in a few short years by becoming our favorite tool for reading the news, watching television, communicating, socializing, shopping, navigating…for just about everything! As a marketer, mobile is a very powerful place for you to connect with your audience. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Since mobile is such a personal medium, it is the easiest place for marketers to make massive mistakes that will turn off a customer forever. This articles serves the purpose to help you avoid making those mistakes. • Not engaging with your customers and not making your campaign local, social and mobile Mobile marketing is a way to build a relationship with your customer, the same way you do with social media marketing. Just pushing your product without building a relationship will annoy your customer and cause them to opt out. You should market to as much media as possible to reach as many people as possible. Concentrating on mobile marketing only excluding the other media will narrow the results you can expect. Concentrate on engaging with your customer through as many media as possible. Including other media can enhance your mobile marketing campaign. For example, when you use QR codes in your marketing, that can be scanned by customers with mobile phones. • Not respecting the privacy of your customer If you continually bombard your customer with push messages, and do so more than once a week without engaging them, you are going to lose them. Texting a mobile offer once a week is more than enough. When your customer subscribes he or she is literally giving you access to them 24/7. Don’t abuse it. • Not proofreading or testing your message Everyone makes mistakes. If you want your marketing to deliver results, make sure you know exactly how it looks. Do all the links work? Is there a phone number so they can call you back? Do the graphics show? Are the words a jumble? Not testing can be fatal for your campaign. • Mismatching content with mobile messaging Make sure your links to all content work on every mobile device available so everyone with a mobile phone can interact with your campaign. Don’t send someone with a normal mobile phone a link to an iPhone app. Make sure there are different versions corresponding to each mobile device. • Building an app without a plan for promoting it If you build an app and just wait for people to find it, you will be disappointed. When developing the app, make sure you plan how to promote it. You can use text messaging, e-mail, traditional ads and mobile advertising. You should continue to promote the app with regular updates, advertising any new features you release. It’s Mobile, Not Desktop Too many mobile experiences are just smaller versions of the brand’s desktop, enabling the exact same functionality, and trying to shrink it down to the small screen. Yet, a mobile app is an entirely different vehicle for experiences, and it should be treated differently for the new opportunities it provides. A mobile customer will quickly discard overwhelming designs that mimic desktop content page-for-page. It’s fairly common to assume that a customer will input as much information on the mobile device as they do on the desktop. But input is much more time consuming on mobile devices, and it’s important to design with that in mind. The reality is that the small screen can be a blessing , as it enables you to focus on what is truly important. Following the path of online advertising Mobile seems to be following the well-traveled path of online advertising with the same old strategy of placing ads around the experience taking up valuable real estate with irrelevant, interruptive and ignored advertising, rather within it.It is important that marketers understand what their target consumers are doing. Not Actively Promoting Your Mobile Web Site This one may sound like a no-brainer but it’s surprising how many great mobile sites are woefully under-promoted. If you advertise in print, on TV or in outdoor media, it’s far more likely that your audience members are closer to their mobile device than to a PC that’s on. The point is, there are some things your customers will only be able to do on your .com site and others they can only do on your .mobi. The more you promote the mobile experience, the more people will turn to it. Top brands that promote their .mobi sites are finding their traffic starting to rival their .com websites. But people can only spend time on your .mobi if they know it exists! So these were some of the most common mistakes marketers make when they jump on to the mobile advertising bandwagon. Let’s hope the article made you aware of these and will aid you in avoiding such mistakes in your mobile marketing campaign. Image Courtesy |  shuttershock Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency