Mobile Marketing: What Every Business Needs to Know
A decision framework for whether a business should invest in mobile marketing in 2011, as smartphone adoption crossed into the mainstream.
By 2011, mobile marketing meant something noticeably broader than it had two years earlier. Smartphones had moved from early-adopter novelty toward genuine mainstream ownership, app stores were maturing and mobile web browsing was becoming common enough that a business’s website needed to work on a phone, not just tolerate one. For a business owner deciding where to put limited time and budget, here’s how to think through whether mobile marketing deserves a place on that list this year.
Start with how your customers behave, not how the industry talks about mobile. If your customers research on the go, compare options while out shopping or need to find you quickly (a restaurant, a repair shop, anything with a physical location), mobile matters directly to your revenue. If your business runs on long sales cycles researched primarily at a desk, the urgency is lower, though it’s still growing.
Check whether your website works on a phone before doing anything else. This is the single highest-leverage mobile investment for most businesses in 2011, and the one most often skipped in favor of flashier tactics. A site that’s slow to load or impossible to navigate on a small screen loses customers before any other mobile marketing effort even gets a chance to work.
Weigh SMS against email for time-sensitive communication. SMS still delivers exceptional open rates for the audience that’s opted in, but building that list takes real effort and the format is unforgiving of overuse. It’s worth it for businesses with time-sensitive offers, a lunch special, a flash sale, less so for businesses whose updates aren’t urgent enough to justify a text landing in someone’s pocket.
Consider whether an app makes sense, and be honest about the answer. For most small and mid-sized businesses in 2011, a dedicated app is still overkill: expensive to build, hard to get customers to download and hard to keep updated. It tends to make sense only when a business needs functionality a mobile website can’t provide, like offline access or deep integration with a phone’s own features. Otherwise, a well-built mobile website covers the need at a fraction of the cost.
Factor in the growth of mobile advertising options. Ad platforms are increasingly letting businesses target specifically mobile users, and click-to-call ads in particular convert well for local, service-based businesses. This is worth testing on a small budget before committing significantly, since performance still varies a lot by industry and audience.
Decide based on your customer’s moment, not the hype cycle. Mobile marketing earns its place when it meets a customer at a specific, real moment, standing outside your store, deciding where to eat, needing a quote right now. It doesn’t earn its place just because it’s the platform everyone’s talking about this year.
The honest bar for 2011 is this: every business needs a website that works reasonably well on a phone, full stop. Beyond that baseline, how far to go with SMS, apps or mobile-specific advertising depends entirely on whether your customers’ actual behavior calls for it, not on how fast the category is growing in the trade press.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2011 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
