Over the last decade, mobile marketing has become increasingly popular among businesses that are looking to reach their target audience. Considering the fact that mobile devices and smartphones are currently dominating the communication market, it is no surprise that more and more companies are opting for the mobile platform to promote their products and generate brand awareness. 
In fact, the global tendency has been steadily inclining towards investing in mobile marketing as opposed to traditional advertising. While companies used to spend millions of dollars on traditional media and TV just a few years ago, this is no longer the case.
They quickly realized that mobile ads are not only more effective, but also significantly more affordable and versatile – smartphones open the doors to hundreds of digital channels and mobile applications. So, if you are not investing in mobile marketing yet, today we will see some of the most important reasons why you should.
1. Increase your potential market reach
One of the biggest reasons why all businesses should at least try to invest in mobile marketing is the potential market reach that it has. According to Statista, global smartphone penetration is estimated to have reached 46% in 2020, which is an estimated 3.6 billion smartphone users worldwide out of a global population of 7.8 billion. For companies, this means that a good percentage, if not half of their entire target audience is using a smartphone, and can be reached on one channel or another.
Whether they are scrolling down on their Facebook feed, looking at pictures on Instagram or reading a blog they found through Google, a good mobile strategy will be able to reach them at the right time with the right message – and on the right channel. On the contrary, not investing in mobile marketing means that you will be missing out on a huge potential market rearch that is only expected to increase in the next few years.
2. Take advantage of mobile traffic
Another reason why companies need to invest in mobile marketing is to take advantage of the huge percentage of mobile traffic that is currently dominating the search results. Before the rise of smartphones, you could mainly visit a website on your computer, but doing that on mobile was slow, tedious, and required a lot of data consumption, incurring in higher costs for the user. 
On another hand, nowadays, the strong growth of the smartphone market, along with the availability of cheaper and better mobile Internet connection, has transformed smart mobile devices into powerful tools for generating web traffic. In fact, according to a Google Analytics Data report, more than 50% of the worldwide web traffic comes from mobile.
3. Leverage the tendency to consume digital media on mobile
According to a study conducted by Comscore, smartphones are not only cutting into the time that people spend on traditional media, but they also account for 70% of US total digital media time. Today, younger generations spend only 11 minutes a day reading printed newspapers (on average), while time spent on mobile Internet has increased from 80 minutes to 130 minutes a day over the last few years.
Additionally, the highest concentration of time spent with digital media on smartphones is spent on apps: in the United States, more than 89% of mobile minutes are spent on apps, while for other countries is even higher – 96% for Indonesia, 95% for Mexico and 94% for Argentina.
On top of this data, Comscore points out that mobile marketing is significantly more effective than desktop advertising, especially when your target audience of potential buyers comes closer to making their purchase decision. This could be due to the fact that mobile advertising is great for targeting customers in proximity to the point of purchase through push notifications and location-based marketing. Additionally, there is less ad clutter in comparison with desktop.
And that’s not all – the latest data from Statista shows that factors such as the coronavirus outbreak skyrocketed time spent on digital media to almost under 8 hours! 
Statista: Time spent per day with digital versus traditional media in the United States from 2011 to 2022 Considering the continuous shift from traditional media to digital media, combined with the fact that more than 70% of digital media is consumed on mobile as opposed to desktop, businesses should definitely consider investing in mobile marketing if they want to reach their target audience and convert them further down the funnel.
4. Communicate with your audience through push notifications
Another reason why companies should invest in mobile marketing is that it provides a more direct and clear way to communicate with their target audience. Push notifications are one way to do that – by sending direct messages to the user’s mobile device, businesses can:
- Improve customer engagement;
- Increase conversion rates;
- Target the right audience with the right message;
- Generate brand awareness;
- Achieve brand consistency;
- And all that with less competition than other channels.
Nowadays, push notifications aren’t exclusive to native mobile apps. In fact, you can also send them with progressive web apps, cross-targeting your audience on any device that they are using for a more powerful conversion strategy.
Automated actions such as targeted push notifications have completely changed the way users access their mobile phones. Nowadays, companies can send automated and personalized emails to a highly refined audience, retarget their customers based on certain buyer patterns, and even send unique promotional links to convert customers in different stages of the buyer’s journey.
5. Achieve a better and faster engagement
Next on our list of reasons to invest in mobile marketing is the level of engagement that you can get compared to other approaches. There are many benefits of focusing on mobile, and one of them is the ability to use SMS text messages to reach your customers in a more direct and less intrusive way that allows you to engage with them more effectively.
While SMS used to be a popular, intrusive and even overused way to reach your audience in the past, companies use it so little nowadays that it has actually become a surprisingly engaging way to connect with potential customers. In fact, studies have shown that more than 90% of text messages are opened and read within 3 minutes of receiving the message.
This level of engagement and open rate is something that email, for example, isn’t able to achieve nowadays – an average open rate for emails is about 27%, and many users will simply open them to have the email marked as read, without actually interacting with it.
This makes SMS an excellent way for businesses to alert their customers about upcoming sales, exclusive discounts and promotions, new product arrivals, and the status of their product delivery.
6. Leverage the power of mobile commerce
According to TeleMediaOnline, approximately 28% of online e-commerce sales are made using mobile devices, a percentage that is steadily increasing – especially in times of the global pandemic in which people are browsing through their phones from the comfort of their sofa. For this reason, one of the biggest reasons to invest in mobile marketing is to leverage the power of mobile commerce.
Even if the desktop percentage of online sales is still a lot higher, mobile plays a huge role in generating even desktop sales. As TeleMediaOnline confirms, it appears that many users prefer to browse e-commerce apps and webs on their mobile devices (+50% of the search traffic happens on mobile!), but they prefer to make the actual purchase on desktop.
This statistic shows the power of assisted conversions and the fact that many people will first find out about your business and products on mobile. Even if they end up purchasing on desktop, mobile devices has played an essential role in the conversion process, and the purchase might not have been possible without it. As a result, not investing in mobile marketing means that companies would significantly reduce their customer base over the long run.
7. Take advantage of more affordable prices
Another indisputable advantage when it comes to investing in mobile marketing is that it offers much more affordable prices for advertisers compared to traditional media. Despite having decreased in popularity and user base, traditional media such as TV, magazines and newspapers still offers significantly higher prices than digital media.
On another hand, mobile ads still remain significantly more affordable for many industries.
Graphic: Major Media CPM Comparison. Source: Marketingland.com. Investing in mobile marketing.
According to the above graphic from Marketingland.com, the average CPM (or Cost per Thousand Impressions) for mobile ads is about 3 dollars on average – of course, this cost that may vary from country to country and between industries, but it is still a good average.
In contrast, however, the price to place an ad in your local newspaper can reach an average of 32.50 dollars per thousand impressions! We can see similar prices to get your ads to TV – about 33 dollars to launch in primetime, a price which drops to 9 dollars outside of primetime.
Although again, this prices may be even higher for the most popular TV channels within each country. In magazines, the cost to publish your ads would be an approximate of 14 dollars per CPM.
Looking at the graphic, we can see that digital media shows the lowest costs per thousand impressions overall – not only for mobile ads, but for general display ads as well.
On average, the cost to reach an audience of 2,000 people is about 500 dollars for magazines, 250 dollars for newspaper, and 150 dollars for broadcast. In comparison, you only need to spend 50 dollars on search ads and 75 dollars on social network to reach the same amount of people!
Bonus: Improve customer experience
When it comes to digital media, customer experience is one of the most important factors to improve your engagement and conversion rates, and drive more customers for your business. Given the high penetration of mobile usage, companies that invest in mobile marketing should treat this medium as an opportunity to deliver cohesive customer experience that is streamlined, attractive, user-friendly, and consistent with overall brand experience across channels.
The main reason why great customer experience can make a huge difference is because mobile marketing is significantly more likely to be viewed by your customer almost immediately, and an excellent first and even second impression will go a long way.
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