Businesses today need good mobile marketing to complement other marketing efforts and get the most from their ventures. As more and more people use their mobile devices in their daily lives to complete a myriad of tasks, it’s important for businesses to make sure they get in front of these audiences. Effective mobile marketing can be the key to achieving this, but it isn’t without its unique set of challenges that businesses must overcome.
If you want to make sure your mobile marketing efforts succeed, the following are some of the challenges you may encounter and some strategies for overcoming them.
1. Measurement of Success
A huge challenge that many businesses face in mobile marketing is measuring the results of their campaigns. For instance, it’s not always easy to determine whether a customer has completed the desired action based on a push notification or if a user has ignored that notification entirely.
While it’s possible to measure certain metrics such as the number of people who opened text messages or use your app on a regular basis, you may have a blind spot when it comes to the big picture. One way to increase the transparency of results is to use certain apps that help track how many users make purchases. Tracking the number of in-app purchases can help determine whether people are using your offerings and contributing to a revenue stream. In turn, you can better determine if your app is seeing high ROI.
Another way to improve measurement capabilities is to request feedback directly from your audience. You can do so by asking users to review your app or business and include details about how they heard about you, what they enjoy and dislike about you, and other information that can help you further optimize your efforts. Requesting feedback from audiences not only helps you gauge how well you’re doing, but it can also show mobile customers that you value their input.
2. Developing an Effective Strategy
If you’re relatively new to mobile marketing, it’s often difficult to determine what campaigns will work and which won’t. If you’re not sure how your specific target audience is using mobile, you won’t be able to figure out how to connect with these potential customers.
There are multiple ways to develop a solid mobile marketing strategy. To start with, conduct some research into your audience. You can look at your existing customers and find out how they’re using mobile devices, or you can look at your competitors to find out what they’re doing to connect. Additionally, you can segment audiences into different target markets and create buyer personas around them, which will help you figure out how best to strategize around each segment.
By researching your audiences and what they want, you can begin to develop a strategy that speaks to them. This will help you optimize your campaigns and get the best possible results from them.
3. Choosing the Right Communication Channels
In addition to selecting the right messaging and visuals that speak to your audience, you need to select the right communication channels to reach it. Using mobile marketing, there are a few unique ways to overcome the challenge of communication.
These include:
In-App Messages
Through the use of in-app messages, you can notify users who are actively engaged with your app. Users won’t need to opt-in to view in-app messages, unlike push notifications and other communications. You can use them in your app to encourage users to complete a specific action that could involve making a purchase or taking another step to connect with your brand. It’s best to keep these messages brief and effective and be sure to compliment them with engaging visuals. However, like push notifications, you should make sure they’re not obstructive and annoying to users. Try to strike a balance that keeps users engaged and optimizes the performance of these messages.
Push Notifications
Like in-app messages, push notifications use brief messages to encourage users to complete a certain action. These notifications appear when users aren’t using an app, with messages often attempting to bring users back to the app. The best way to use push notifications is to ensure they bring value to users who receive them. Every push notification should include a message that users will actually care about. Otherwise, they could annoy them and even get people to opt-out of receiving future notifications. These messages may include everything from cart abandonment reminders to personalized recommendations and updates about sales.
Email remains one of the best ways to connect with both mobile and desktop users. They’re ideal for when you wish to send longer, more in-depth messages to audiences in an attempt to drive more engagement. In your emails, you can use a combination of text and visuals—including animated GIFs, videos, and other rich visuals—to engage in ways that you simply can’t with most in-app messages and push notifications.
4. Insufficient In-House Expertise
Another reason why mobile marketers struggle is because of a lack of in-house expertise backing them. In an attempt to save more money, companies may choose to avoid outsourcing and rely on their existing team, but the fact is that outsourcing marketing is often the best way to optimize campaigns and significantly boost ROI.
Working with consultants, freelancers, and other outsiders can lend expertise to your campaigns and help you get the best results. You can also use a comprehensive marketing platform to help you manage and measure your campaigns.
5. Budget Restrictions
One critical issue that many businesses face is a limited budget, especially if they spend money on many efforts beyond mobile marketing. The best way to overcome this challenge is to research what your mobile marketing efforts will require when it comes to a budget. From there, you can determine how to allocate resources and channel your funds. Oftentimes, the best strategy is to start small and work to build profits, which can help you scale your campaigns and grow your budget accordingly. By targeting the right platforms with hyper-focused campaigns, you’ll be able to save more money while driving success and growth.
6. Cross-Channel Integration
To get the most from your mobile marketing efforts, you need to connect with audiences on all relevant platforms in a cross-channel strategy. This can take a lot of time and effort, but it’s often worth it to maximize exposure and make sure people come to recognize and trust your brand.
In cross-channel integration, you’ll want to harness the power of all platforms available to you, including social media, email, your website, app advertising strategies, and more. You should also keep all of your messaging and visuals consistent across these platforms to reinforce your brand identity.
Keep in mind that while cross-channel integration is crucial, you need to select the right channels. Many businesses make the mistake of choosing as many platforms as possible to extend their reach as much as possible, but this is often highly inefficient and culminates in wasted marketing spending. Instead, identify the specific platforms that your audience uses. For example, instead of targeting all social media platforms, pinpoint the specific ones your audience spends their time on and target those.
7. Overcoming Competition
App discovery is another major challenge that mobile marketers face, particularly as competition continues to grow. Users will install the very first relevant app they see in the app store more often than not. With millions of apps available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, you need to make sure your app rises above the competition with good app store optimization (ASO).
Generally, ASO is the most effective way to get your app seen in app stores. This entails a variety of tasks, including writing a solid description of your app and incorporating engaging visuals that accurately represent the in-app experience and details about app features that users can expect to see. You can also encourage users to leave a review, as a large number of positive reviews can further boost your app’s performance in stores. Additionally, endorsements from influencers may be a good way to encourage more audiences to download and use your app. Of course, hyper-targeted ads and social media marketing will further connect with audiences and put you in the spotlight over competitors.
8. Maximizing Retention
It’s difficult enough to attract new users, but it’s often equally or even more difficult to retain those users. Keeping people engaged with your app is the key to your app’s success in the long term, particularly if you rely on in-app purchases and high customer lifetime value.
If you’re looking for ways to increase retention among your user base, the following are a few key steps to take:
- Retargeting — You can retarget users to get them to return to your app after the initial engagement.
- Providing Real Value — You can also provide users with certain types of content that they’re looking for from your app. For example, you may want to provide information, free giveaways, or entertainment. Showing that you can give the users what they want is crucial for boosting engagement and retaining users.
- Integrating with Social Media — Another way to retain users is to get them to share the various achievements they earn and their experiences in general via social media channels. This will give users the chance to share their excitement about your app, keeping them engaged for much longer periods, particularly if friends and family start using it.
- Analysis — Gaining a complete picture of how people interact with and use your app will help you determine where people are falling off and no longer engaging will help you figure out how to fix those issues. To accomplish this, you can use a reliable mobile analytics platform to gain insights into user data and help you strategize accordingly.
9. Privacy Concerns
This could pertain to either your customers’ or your own privacy concerns, both of which are important to address as you work to protect user and app data. With the increasing risk of hacks and other forms of data compromises, mobile businesses need to do what they can to keep all of their and their users’ data secure and reassure audiences of these measures.
You should make sure that you relay to your audience that their information is consistently safe and secure while taking steps to implement sufficient security measures to prevent potential compromises. This will help keep your audience at ease and encourage people to use your app while your team also benefits from the peace of mind regarding the integrity of data.
10. Personalization
All of your marketing efforts should integrate personalization, but it can sometimes be difficult to speak directly to every person in your audience. Different people will respond to different messaging, making it important to do what you can to understand your audiences’ needs and cater to them with the ideal communication.
As mentioned, researching and segmenting your audience will help you determine how best to speak to each potential user. Segmentation tools can help you achieve this by collecting and organizing information regarding your audience’s demographics, behavior, and certain defined events, all of which enable you to gear your in-app messaging, push notifications, ads, and other content to specific target audiences. By offering personalization, you’ll establish a much stronger connection with your audience than competitors that remain distant and impersonal.
Get Ahead of the Competition With a Strong Mobile Marketing Strategy
By overcoming all of the challenges described, you’ll have the chance to flourish beyond your competitors. Your mobile business will be able to attract new users and retain them in the long term with a strategy that truly works. To get the results you want, it’s important to implement the right tools for the job.
If you want to get the best possible results from your mobile marketing efforts, one of the best tools to include in your kit is App Samurai. Using this mobile growth platform to supercharge your marketing will help you develop successful campaigns that yield consistently great results. Get in touch with us to learn more about AppSamurai’s many capabilities and what it can do for you.