Mobile advertising and mobile commerce are closely linked. Mobile apps have been linked to higher sales and increased revenue across industries. In fact, Retail Dive reported mobile sales across all devices – tablets and smartphones – was reported at over 700 billion dollars. It’s never been more important to make sure that your customers know about your mobile presence and can engage with your mobile app for m-commerce.
Research projects that by 2025, over 70% of people will use mobile-only to browse and use the internet, making it crucial to engage with both mobile advertising and mobile commerce.
How can you capture more mobile business with your mobile marketing? Here are the best ways to use mobile advertising to grow your m-commerce presence.
Best Practices of Mobile Advertising to Grow Your M-Commerce Business
1. Know the differences
StartApp makes several suggestions about how to optimize your mobile marketing to drive mobile app downloads and engagement. The first is that, while mobile has a global reach, it’s not treated the same internationally. Each market has certain preferences and limitations when it comes to mobile commerce. StartApp notes, “mobile users in western countries like the US and Europe are more likely to have access to mobile payment systems like Android and Apple Pay, and they are more likely to have ready access to credit and debit cards. In contrast, users in emerging mobile markets like India or Nigeria are less likely to have credit cards and instead prefer alternative methods of payment.” These are important things to consider when you’re both developing and marketing your app.
2. Understand your user
How do your customers operate on mobile? Where do they spend your time? These are questions you need to be able to understand to effectively launch a mobile advertising campaign that will help grow your mobile commerce business or app engagement. StartApp points out, “For example, knowing a customer’s socioeconomic level will help you to target a campaign. In the US and Europe, users with more disposable income tend to use Apple devices, while lower-income users are on Android devices.” Like any other marketing campaign, you want to have a deeper understanding of where your target market spends time and money online – if your app is suitable for younger audiences or geared towards younger generations, for instance, you might find the most mobile advertising success by marketing on gaming apps, dating apps, and of course social media.
3. Create the best product possible
The most important thing to remember about any marketing campaign is that no matter how good your advertising is, it won’t matter if your product quality isn’t up to par. If Apple ran incredible marketing but offered a subpar product, they wouldn’t have nearly the popularity or market share they do. The same can be said about mobile apps. In the modern world, apps are products as much as a phone or a desk or a piece of clothing. Some things to consider when developing a good app experience include the ability for users to save or favorite items, save shipping and payment methods, and other options that can help create a simple, streamlined customer experience every time.
4. Use your audience to grow your audience
Your customers might be the best way to market your app to additional customers. Incentivizing your customers with coupons, discounts, or promotional codes is one of the best ways to ensure that they’ll spread the word to new people and gain new users Additionally, the better your app is, the more satisfied your customers will be, making it much more likely that you’ll drive app engagement and mobile commerce with word of mouth.
5. Get the right mix
Marketing for mobile needs to happen on mobile as the primary marketing channel. But other forms of advertising can be used to grow your mobile business, including traditional advertising methods like print ads or TV commercials, as well as radio ads and video ads on platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
While a marketing mix is certainly key, SmartApp recommends remembering that, “As mobile continues to grow and become a dominant force in global culture, more retailers are looking for ways to capture mobile audiences. The biggest mistake they make is assuming that mobile behaviors mimic desktop and TV behaviors when it comes to purchasing. It is essential to create mobile marketing and advertising strategy that is mobile-first from beginning to end.”
Mobile advertising is one of the most important ways to connect with customers in the modern business age and mobile commerce is an important part of revenue and relationship building as well as securing customer loyalty. Making sure that your advertising and marketing support your mobile commerce goals is important to your overall business success and can be integral to the future of your organization.
