23 days in a year – That’s the time an average mobile user spent browsing and interacting with online media since 2013. Convergence of social, mobile, analytics and Big Data has opened up a rather dynamic marketing landscape element for the marketers in recent months. Statistically, the mobile marketing industry is slated to grow from US $28 billion in 2016 to US $98 billion in 2021. This projection reveals that the mobile marketing hype is not a bubble; rather, it’s a big wave every marketer had best learn to surf by 2017.

 Why You Need A Mobile Marketing Strategy?

“The adoption rate of mobile is twice that of the internet, three times that of social media, and 10 times faster than PCs.”

– Emma Crowe, Chief of Client Strategy, Somo

Currently, there are more than 2 billion smartphone users in the world. Since humans are more likely to have a mobile device in their possession than a desktop, it is best for the marketers to start building a mobile marketing strategy.

The future of mobile marketing is now.

CMO spending in 2017 will revolve around mobile-first strategy. Top tech leaders and market researchers acknowledge the growth of mobile as the most business-friendly platform to showcase brand portfolios across user demographies. From designing mobile-first landing pages to providing interactive web content across social media channels, mobile marketing is a dominant force. Even the findings from latest reports on marketing attribution and email marketing support the incentivization of mobile marketing as a big game-changer for digital marketers in the long run.

What do the numbers say about mobile marketing?

On an average, every user looks at the phone 46 times a day. With more than 90% of mobile phone users glued to the screens for most part of the day, mobile marketing is the quintessential activity every marketer should explore in order to churn new ways of engaging audience and maximizing ROI from their marketing campaigns.

Marketers are investing heavily on digital ads and Mobile ad spending in 2016 alone has been projected to touch US $50 billion – representing more than a 400% increase from 2013. By 2020, the mobile ad spending will cross $100 billion outbidding TV ad spending. Currently, mobile ads account for nearly 50 % of all digital ad spending globally.

What Are the Various Mobile Marketing Methods?

Mobile marketing ecosystem is in a constant state of flux due to ever-expanding set of channels of communications. Marketers starting fresh with a mobile marketing strategy can initially focus on the following mobile marketing methods.

Mobile Push Notifications

A push notification is a pop-up message that appears on the mobile screen even when the device is locked or the app is not working currently. It is a direct 1:1 platform for marketers promoting a new product launch or driving users to explore vendor’s marketing channels like social and email.

In-app Messaging

In-app messaging is primed to engage a user with more targeted, purposeful interactive sessions while still accessing an app. It is a faster mode of user engagement generating 8 times more response rate compared to push notification models. In-app mobile marketing model allows marketers to project their most valuable promotional/ transactional content to a loyal set of users who recently showed purchase intent.

Wearable device notifications

Still at the cusp of making it big in the mobile marketing ecosystem, wearable device notification is best described as the ‘silicon in flesh’ model. Heavily inspired to converge with futuristic artificial intelligence capabilities, wearable device notifications perfectly complement the mobile marketing strategies powered by instant analytics on content traffic and user experience.

Mobile Wallets

Factually speaking, mobile wallets hold more disruptive power in the mobile marketing landscape than any other mobile marketing channel. Mobile wallet marketing is the next frontier of digital marketing technology that allows marketers to leverage opportunities across all marketing channels with customized offers and coupons. More than 30% of smart phone users have mobile wallets and most of them are likely to save tickets and offers in addition to making in-app payments.

As far as digitally-driven loyalty programs are concerned, mobile wallet marketing can be tracked, updated and loaded with location-based content.

SMS/MMS

SMS/MMS retain their place in the mobile marketing strategies owing to their technological singularity. SMS/MMS is one app platform that every smart phone user can access to. To begin with a marketing campaign, marketers can either opt for automated email marketing or automated SMS/MMS marketing targeting the same set of smart phone users. Budget-wise, SMS/MMS marketing is cheaper and more ROI-centric than email.

Mobile App Marketing: Taking Mobile Marketing Beyond Search Engines

As on June 2016, there were 2 million mobile apps in Apple’s App Store and 2.2 million apps on Google Play. By 2020, the mobile apps industry is pegged to generate US$180 billion in revenues via in-app advertising and app store purchases. In 2017, the total number of app downloads is estimated to reach 268.69 billion.

Industry-wise, e-commerce and retail mobile apps secure the highest user engagement with an average of 17.5 session launches per month. Technology, gaming, media and entertainment apps also contribute significantly to the audience engagement with mobile internet usage. As new touch points in the customer journey are introduced, new mobile app marketing strategies are needed to adequately boost ROIs from organic and paid search programs.

With the kind of numbers that mobile app marketing holds, marketers can finally move towards developing a single mobile-friendly website  rather than working on multiple platforms —social, web and mobile, simultaneously.

In fact, Social + Mobile will be the most relevant marketing channel for marketers beyond the existing search engines. It’s a win-win for both customers and marketers. Not only does it offer customers a reason to interact with the brand without barriers but also empowers marketers to build a mobile-specific relationship based on customer preferences, analytics, recurrent incentives, discounts and content-driven ROI.

Top 5 mobile marketing trends in 2017 expected to drive maximum ROI are

1. Customized mobile e-mail campaigns
2. Enhanced UX with click-prompting CTAs
3. SMS/MMS text clubs
4. Wearable device notifications and beacons
5. Mobile video advertising

For marketers, the future of mobile marketing is pretty much the safest thing to build. Flawless video-based ads, enriching messages, personalized email, MMS/SMS with high-scoring social listening engagement—that’s enough to reach out to every mobile user and deliver targeted products with minimum attribution.