With the number of people choosing to shop through their phones rather than in-store, the number of smartphone users is growing by the day. In fact, more than 275 million Americans own a smartphone, of which 79% have made a purchase online using their mobile device. If you see mobile marketing as a great opportunity to grow your business this year, then you ’re already one step ahead of your competitors.
by Liz Rustia
Mobile marketing is the most efficient and effective way to reach your target audience. People today spend more than 5 hours a day on their phones. Because of this, they get 2x more interaction with brands on mobile than they do in-store, TV, radio, website, or on print.
Analysts predict that mobile commerce sales will reach up to $432.24 billion in 2022. It is why you need to learn and focus more on mobile marketing this year.
What are the top 5 Mobile Marketing Trends this year?
Social Media Commerce Integration
Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest saw the opportunity to use their platform to help businesses maximize their sales and conversion by providing a smooth in-app shopping experience.
This revolutionized the way people shopped online!
You no longer have to switch from a social media app to a website just to buy the products you want from your favorite brands. All you have to do is to click on the product tags on the photo and it will automatically redirect you to a product page.
This makes shopping 100x easier, increasing sales and conversion rates.
Due to the pandemic, many businesses were forced to close their doors from the public and start going digital.
This strengthened social shopping even further. During this time, many grocery stores, restaurants, clothing stores, and other businesses that embraced social media commerce integration experienced a peak in their revenues on what would have been usually a low sales month.
Instagram has over 500 million daily active users, while Facebook has over 1.85 billion. If your company doesn’t have an optimized social media account for business yet, you’ll be losing a lot of potential customers and sales.
In the start of the year, food delivery apps, financial apps, and social shopping continues to gather steam. If you own an online store, having a website might no longer be enough to keep your business alive.
You need to also have social media accounts and optimize them for shopping, so you can capture every potential client there is on every platform.
5G and Location-Targeted Mobile Ads
You can maximize your sales and conversions by sending out the right ad at the right time and place to the right people.
Location-targeted mobile ads are found to be more effective than generic ads because they’re able to cut through the marketing noise and capture customers by offering them exactly what they need at the right time.
This can drive customers to your store, increase customer engagement, and boost sales.
Geo-positioning technologies like Bluetooth and 5G can accurately pinpoint a person’s location. Together with advancements in mobile communication, this can help strengthen the efficacy of location-targeted mobile ads, allowing businesses to target customers who are within proximity accurately.
Hyper Casual Mobile Gaming and Apps
The COVID-19 outbreak was a difficult time for everyone. With stores closed down and nowhere to go, people were forced to stay at home and turn to mobile games for entertainment instead.
This spiked the number of mobile game downloads on both the App Store and Google Play. Given the remarkable growth in downloads, it is safe to say that mobile games are now being introduced to a new market of individuals who may have not been interested in gaming if not because of the lockdown.
Multiplayer gameplay and mechanics that focus on meaningful interactions between friends and family is sparking joy among individuals because it is helping them stay social while social distancing.
It’s a great way to stay connected with your friends, make new acquaintances, share a laugh, and just have a great time in general during lockdowns and even after. Mobile games now serve as social networks.
For marketers, this is a great opportunity to penetrate a whole new set of audiences, especially the younger demographics.
Placing ads on mobile games and video streaming apps is a great way to get your brand out there and interact with your target audience.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) can be a very powerful content marketing strategy.
When you use the pictures, videos, blogs, and other forms of feedback that your customers have voluntarily created by featuring it on your social media posts, it can make them feel heard, important, and appreciated.
Aside from this, UGC can establish a higher degree of trust among your audience since these testimonies are based on real-life, unpaid experience, and opinions. More importantly, it can be a great source of ideas for your product development and improvement.
This year, UGC will still play an important role in your mobile marketing strategy.
You need it to build trust among your audience and to solidify your relationship with your existing customers. As things start to go back to normal, people would want to see and know that people are still buying and engaging with you.
Video marketing
The last but not the least trend of mobile marketing on the list is video marketing. Today, people prefer to watch video more than any other content. It is because videos easily attract the user’s attention and make them to watch the video till the end. No doubt, a two-minute video is more desirable than reading out a lengthy text. In fact, 87% of companies’ use video marketing and video marketing boosts organic website traffic by 157%. So, make sure to produce relevant, unique, and short videos for your product.
Mobile marketing becomes a significant pillar in the overall foundation of a business and we believe that it all boils down to personalization. This year is all about creating a very personalized shopping experience for your target audience at every touchpoint. The more targeted your marketing message, product offers, and compelling creates are, the more you’re able to draw customers in. Use these trends to guide your mobile marketing strategy this 2021.
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