MOBILE MARKETING TIP FOR YOUR NIGERIA BUSINESS

Mobile Marketing on Fire

With the first quarter of 2014 well underway, it’s time get creative and put some weight behind your brand. To help you achieve this feet, I have narrowed down a few important aspects to keep in mind when developing your sales strategy this year:

Increase Mobile Advertising Spend
With a growing mobile economy reaching more than 30% of Nigerian adults, companies will find it crucial to integrate mobile advertising solutions into their overall advertising strategy. Brands that have already intelligently implemented mobile marketing strategies must start thinking of the appropriate mobile advertising channels to bulk up. Tracking the success of various mobile advertising services and understanding where the greatest ROIs are seen will help companies determine a proper increase in mobile ad spending for the holidays. With the projected increase in sales revenues during November and December, there’s no doubt that increasing ad spend as well as developing creative mobile marketing ideas to draw traffic will prove worthwhile and ultimately profitable.

SMS to Online Sales
In utilizing mobile phone advertising during the holidays, companies will find it fruitful to launch SMS marketing campaigns that encourage online sales. In other words, using mass text messages that point to a mobile-optimized web site, via a text hyperlink, will be a great direct marketing tool. This is a sure way to quickly discover what text campaigns are converting at sufficient rates and thus grow such campaigns.

Optimize Your Mobile Website
Building on the previous point, and considering the influx of visitors via text message marketing and mobile device searching, your company must develop a mobile version of your web site, designed with ease of use and conversions in mind. Keep the content on mobile sites limited, the buttons large, and the engagement or purchase process ultra simple. Customers should be able to understand what to do on the mobile site and how to do it within 30 seconds. Otherwise, you could lose their attention and risk losing their business.

This year, your business  must learn to stand out among your competitors. So connect with your customer base through the most intimate and conversion-friendly process available: mobile advertising. 

But ask yourself the following questions before embarking on a mobile campaign:

• When are consumers most active on their mobile devices?

• Where are consumers most active on their mobile devices?

• What mobile devices are consumers using (tablet, iPhone, android, etc.)?

• What are the demographics of your target audience?

• What are the psycho-graphics of your target audience?

• What types of offers are most appealing to customers?

The answers to these questions will form the bedrock of your mobile marketing strategies. Reboot these questions via surveys and polls at least once every quarter. The answers will be dramatically different from month to month, so there is no point creating campaigns based on market research you conducted 18 months ago. 

Keep your data fresh and up-to-the-minute. Reach out to people outside your core demographic (this will probably involve offering a freebie in return for filling in a survey). Above all, remember this: research the market to reach the market.

See below for more tips on how to balance successful returns with mobile marketing privacy obligations:
  

Do have a strong call to action. There's no point investing in a mobile marketing campaign if your audience doesn't understand what they're supposed to do with your message. Define a clear call to action as your first order of business, and make sure you offer relevant content to boost customer engagement and, ultimately, opt-in retention rates.
Don’t try to say too much in one message. Mobile marketers are looking to emulate Twitter's success in promoting concise, pithy content bound by character limitations. If you have multiple offers in the pipeline, spread them out over a few texts – but don't bombard your list of contacts with daily messages or they will quickly opt-out. Limit yourself to no more than one every ten days, and only then if you have a really attractive offer attached to each message.
Do use an attention grabber. Come up with a neat hook to lead your SMS. The shorter the better, and if you can make it witty or profound you will notice a far greater response rate.
Don’t use text speak. It might save you some characters, but it makes you sound like a teenager or, even worse, an out-of-touch senior, desperately trying to appear hip. Text as you talk – like a normal grown-up. Same goes for exclamation points – use them very frugally if you don't want your campaign to appear air-headed.
Don’t forget to mention who you are. This is a dumb, but surprisingly common mistake to make. If you have a strong, branded domain, use this to alert customers to your website, and provide a hyperlink that will take them straight from their SMS screen to their browser.
Do think long term. Mobile marketing strategies are not a short-term tactic. The idea is to build brand awareness and trust over time. This means sending texts sparingly and not irritating your contacts by sending messages in the middle of the night or making them hard to understand.

See you at the bank!