Three Mobile Strategies to Incorporate in Your Marketing Plan

mobile marketingTips and advice on different mobile marketing tactics you can use that will separate you from your competitors and keep your customers coming back

Marketing budgets can be tight and staff resources can run low. Knowing how to leverage easy-to-use and low-cost marketing tools is, as a result, critical for small businesses. Thankfully, there are many ways that small businesses can get the most out of their mobile marketing strategy with limited resources. From accepting mobile payments to creating mobile landing pages, here are three mobile strategies to incorporate into your company’s marketing plan.

Mobile Landing Pages, Websites and Emails

An effective mobile marketing strategy should include creating a mobile version of your landing pages, website and emails, and it shouldn’t take much extra effort. You may wonder, why target smartphones and tablets with your web efforts? According to Trinity Digital Marketing, over 1.2 billion people access the web from their mobile devices. What’s more, according to Knotice, about 25.9 percent of all emails are opened on mobile phones, and 10.2 percent are opened on tablet computers.

To adapt to this shift of mobile browsing behavior, optimize your websites, landing pages and emails for viewing on a mobile device. This is called responsive design, and encompasses all the requirements for creating optimized content. These techniques, such as fluid design, liquid design, scalable design or adaptive design, as well as truly responsive design, all typically achieve the same thing: a website, landing page or email that looks good on smaller screens.

For emails, there are templates available as part of low-cost email services such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Amazon SES that allow you to easily input your email content. In return, you get mobile-friendly emails. Typically, mobile-friendly emails have a single-column layout and are no wider than 600 pixels. The images, text and buttons all need to fit easily on the screen but should be large enough to be easy to see.

Integrated Geomarketing

Geomarketing is a concept that leverages geographical intelligence into various aspects of marketing. Geomarketing can apply to nearly every aspect of traditional marketing, and can add similar benefits when it becomes part of your mobile marketing plan with existing technologies at little additional costs.

You should already be utilizing automated notifications, such as SMS messages or push notifications, at certain times, such as during a sale or in the event of a purchase. Event-based notifications, combined with user preferences and behaviors gleaned from mobile marketing, give you contextually relevant content, delivered directly to your customers’ pockets. With an integrated geomarketing strategy, you get geographically relevant content as well, with the help of location-based services.

What it boils down to is a system that sends out notifications, coupons and other promotional materials when a user is in or near a designated area, such as a retail store. The inherent location-based services available in the most widely used cellphones can be used to deliver content to the right people — your customers — at the right place and time.

Accepting Mobile Payments

As part of your mobile marketing strategy, the ability to accept mobile payments can bring an added convenience for both you and your customers. You can save on space and time in a brick-and-mortar retail store by eliminating cash registers and POS systems, in turn eliminating lines.

Mobile payment hardware and apps for your smartphones or tablet computers are inexpensive to acquire and implement, and they also save you from the maintenance costs of your current system. It’s an inexpensive and easy way to start accepting credit cards if you don’t already.

Furthermore, turning to mobile payments exclusively can give you reprieve from high rates, as many mobile credit card processors offer rates that are much lower than traditional credit card processing companies. If you’re worried about security, mobile devices are capable of providing authentication capabilities that older POS systems simply can’t, thanks to inherent cellphone technologies such as encrypted passwords and embedded computer chips.

Even larger firms are getting in on the act, especially when it comes to mobile-friendly websites, geomarketing and mobile payments. These strategies and technologies are easy to use, easy to implement and inexpensive to operate, allowing you to achieve results on a small or limited budget.


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Kristen Gramigna

Chief Marketing Officer at Bluepay
Kristen Gramigna is Chief Marketing Officer for BluePay (www.bluepay.com), offering mobile credit card processing services. She brings more than 15 years of experience in the bankcard industry in direct sales, sales management, and marketing to BluePay and also serves on its Board of Directors.