Mobile Marketing for Your Small Business: 7 Tips On Doing it Right

  • Your mobile website or app should be designed to help your customers find what they want quickly

Your mobile website or app should be designed to help your customers find what they want quickly

Take a good look at the growth plans for your business. Do they include a solid mobile marketing plan?

If not, you may as well consider filing for bankruptcy right now. With growing numbers of consumers looking to their mobile devices for purchases, a good mobile marketing strategy is essential to grow your business.

Today we’ve gathered seven tips to help you create a mobile marketing plan tailored to your consumer’s individual needs.

Keep Things Simple

Mobile marketing is not meant to be wordy. Ever. Most mobile users only spend a few seconds glancing over items in their inboxes, so it’s important that you capitalize on what little attention they allow you. Keep your offers simple and memorable to ensure that they’ll remain with your customers even after they’ve moved on from your advertisements.

Help Your Customers

If it’s even remotely difficult to purchase something from your website, especially when viewed on a mobile device, you’re doing your mobile marketing wrong. Everything should be designed to help your customers find what they want quickly while on the go, ensuring a smooth and hassle-free experience. Consider adding simple buttons to help customers contact you, find directions to your location and, of course, a digital cart where customers can add purchases.

Utilize Responsive Design

Why pay separately for a mobile and desktop website when you can purchase one that works on both devices? Responsive design is incredibly important to business owners, as it allows your website to adjust itself automatically to various screen sizes and resolutions. This allows you to forgo having two separate web pages, increases your SEO, and ensures your website will run the same on any customer’s device.

Limit Your Texting

While sending discounts and promotional deals to customers is a great way to grow your market, sending an overabundance of ads can send them fleeing in disgust. It’s important to monitor the unsubscribe rate to any of your digital distribution lists, as well as to reach out to your subscribers and ask what types of communications they’d like to receive from you. The best option may be to offer multiple levels of sign-ups for your offers, allowing your customers the chance to decide how often they’d like to hear from you.

Focus on Social Media

The amount of time people spend using social networking on mobile devices is staggering, and no business looking to expand its mobile marketing can afford to ignore this trend. Social media lets you connect directly with your customers, share news of special sales, advertise new products, and best of all, is completely free. By growing your social media presence, you can develop your fans into free promoters, spreading your deals and offerings throughout the web.

Create a Mobile App

Creating a mobile application for your business allows you the opportunity to provide a custom shopping experience tailored directly to your consumers. The key is to determine why your customers would prefer an app over your primary website, and design your application around those specific needs. Simplicity and functionality are vital here, as they’ll make your app easier to navigate and cut down on development costs to boot.

Test Your Software

Perhaps the most important step in improving your mobile marketing experience is to test your software regularly. Testing on a high- speed 4G LTE network allows you and your staff to simulate the use of your mobile site from a customer’s point of view, and to see how intuitive your software is to use. By examining your mobile marketing through the eyes of your consumers, you can identify areas needing improvement on a regular basis, upgrading your weak spots before customers start to complain.

No matter what type of business you run, it’s vital that you have a well thought out plan dictating your mobile marketing strategy. Such a plan helps you to ensure that you’re not only meeting the needs of your customers, but also exceeding their expectations and developing your relationships with them as well. Whether you focus on connecting via social media or testing out your software, a solid mobile marketing plan will help your business soar to new virtual heights.

JT Ripton is a business consultant and blogger who enjoys writing about many things, business and technology among them. Ripton’s advice has appeared in numerous places like BusinessInsider, Entrepreneur.com, The Guardian, and The Street.

2015-09-25T05:51:09+00:00

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