Mobile Advertising: Reaching Your Audience Where They’re Connected Most

Mobile marketing and advertising used to mean placing some static ads on popular websites. Now that seems so antiquated! This day in age, it’s about marketing your business in a way that will make an impact where many, if not most, of your customers are – on their mobile devices. At the beginning of January 2017, US digital users spent 71% of their digital time on mobile devices with 90% of that time being spent in apps. Currently mobile ad spending doesn’t track the same percentage of mobile usage, but that’s about to change. Mobile ad spending will reach over 70% of all digital ad spending by 2019, less than two years from now. Delve deeper and you’ll find that 66% of marketers use mobile for business and you have a densely populated landscape where you can talk to leads and customers. So if you’ve been thinking that mobile advertising is just for consumer-based businesses, you may be missing major opportunities. Here are three key ways to get started with your mobile marketing and advertising strategy. Use your data. Review the data your company is already collecting on your customers to see where they are engaging with you and focus on digital engagement – websites, apps, email links, etc. Use that information to develop a mobile strategy and personas, just as you would for a traditional marketing strategy. Create mobile personas. Create a profile that describes your typical target and how they use mobile devices. You may need more than one persona, depending on how many audiences you talk to. Include their mobile habits – what device do they use to open their email most frequently, what apps they use, do they use devices for research and/or buying, etc. Then you can build your media and content plan to help develop targeted content that will engage your audience best. Develop a media plan. Based on your data, where is your audience spending its mobile time? Should you buy ads in apps like Facebook or mobile gaming apps? Or use push notifications? Or create native ads that are seamless from the content? Maybe all of the above? There are numerous ways to go and the mobile personas will help you determine what’s the best way to personalize your message and reach your audience. This is just the tip of the iceberg! Once you determine how to reach your mobile audience then you can start working on effective, engaging content. Stay tuned for my next blog post in this series, focused on engaging content for mobile channels.