Yes, this is the year of Smartphones. You may probably have heard that the year 2014 was the year of Smartphones, or probably the year before that too was the year of Smartphones, but research indicates that…..2015 is really the year of Smartphones.

Few years ago, nobody had Smartphones and mobile marketing was just about text-messaging and selling ringtones. However today, Smartphones have changed the landscape of consumerism by becoming our favorite tool for communicating, watching the news, shopping, socializing and for just about everything.

According to reports by eMarket, the number of smartphone users on the globe, which was 1.31 billion in 2013, will grow to 2.56 billion by 2018. These figures directly challenge the existing popular marketing mediums, such as newspapers and television broadcasts. Furthermore, mobile marketing can instantly lead to the sales without requiring month long follow-ups. All these aspects highlight the possibilities of the mobile marketing for any business and most of the marketers are aware of it. Yet many fail to extract the marketing opportunities that Smartphones offers them. They are new at this thing and are still working out the kinks. Being a personal medium, it is easy for marketers to commit massive mistakes that could turn off any user forever.

According to a report by Cisco, in the time to come, there would more mobile devices on Earth than people. With that in mind, here are few mistakes you should look out for before launching your next mobile marketing campaign.

Walking the Wrong Lane

Modern marketers are continuously emphasizing on apps and websites for the marketing without understanding the targeted audience and underestimating the traditional mobile communication options. There are various other ways than apps and websites in which mobile users can be targeted for marketing. SMS and calling are among those very strong mediums of communications and are more abundantly available among the users than apps or web access on mobile phones. Wikipedia reports that there are more than 6.8 billion mobile phones for a global population of 7 billion. Though not all these mobile phones have an individual user, it still trolls the number of smartphone users by a big margin. This indicates that traditional mobile connectivity options have a better reach than smartphone supported ones. Try to maintain your reach to most of them.

However, it is even more important to understand how you collect the contact details to reach the targeted customers. Dialing a random number is just an outdated method and can even land the business in the soup of trouble. There are a number of smart and legal methods available to find these details. So, find the right ways and right sources that can connect you to the right contacts. At the same time, if you are marketing with in-app advertisements, try to focus on the apps that have the potential of reaching your targeted client-base instead of choosing just a popular app.

Not Optimizing for Tablets, Too

This is the most profound mistake available in the mobile marketing arena. Remember, there is more than one kind of device out there. Optimization simply refers to making the advertisement compatible for the device-friendly viewing. To deliver better experience the size and the orientation of a webpage viewed on the 21 inches screen while working on Windows PC should vary from the one viewed on Android Smartphone with 4.5 inches screen.

The good thing is that most of the marketers are able to offer the basic optimization. The bad thing is that the basic does not serve all. There are a number of operating systems, such as Windows Phone, Android, iOS, BlackBerry OS, etc. and then there are a number of web browsers available, like Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. Different users have different choices with them and it is the responsibility of the marketers to make sure that marketing efforts are reaching most, if not all, of them in fine form.

Marketing with the apps gets even more complicated for different platforms because the development methods are completely different for most of them. It gets even tougher because it is not just a one-time job. To meet the new updates, you need to keep up with the changes. To avoid the juggling and stumbling with these hassles, most of the marketers end up giving up on certain operating systems and hence, losing on the certain customer base. Most affordable and convenient option is going with a third-party app development service.

Either Not Grabbing Details or Intruding Too Much With Apps

The details that app residing in the smartphone can grab are immense. Contact details, such as phone number and email addresses, are simply irreplaceable pieces of information for affecting the sales. If someone installed your app for once, it means there is strong chance that the users have something to do with the services that you offer. It would take a couple to taps on the screen to remove your application from the phone, but if you have got the email you have great chances of impressing the customer. Even stats show that email marketing has always offered great conversion rates.

Apps can ask for the contact details during the installation and most users do not find it annoying in most cases. However, the marketers could make a blunder here by asking too much. Asking for needless details can annoy the customer and business opportunity dies for you instantly. So, ask only for what you need. In case, your service requires a number of details and then ask them at various stages. Be polite and interesting with the methods that app offers for asking these details. Make smart use of the available browsing cookies on the phone. More importantly, never steal any information from the phone without the permission of the users. Security features in Smartphones are very advanced, and consequences of challenging them can be business threatening. Always follow the principle of not intruding into the privacy of the users uselessly.

Call to Action Let Down

All the effort made with the mobile advertising sums down to the call-to-action button. A ‘Call to Action’ button is the option offered on the advertisements to proceed with the product purchase. The real estate on the mobile devices is very precious because of the smaller screen size. Neither the marketer can expect the user to zoom many folds to find the way to reach you, nor can the contact details be made too attractive to overshadow the services you are offering. So the advertisement has to be attractive, informative, and confined within the very small space. A huge number of marketing experts fail to get all these acts right and the marketing efforts hit the ground head on.

In the mobile advertisement, call to action button requires just one touch. So, it can be smaller in size, but visibly appealing. More space could be given to the product information, which needs to be mentioned within limited and appealing words. Be careful with the optimization of the advertisements for various devices as well. For different ad banners, the size and position of Call to Action button may vary. In the end, Call to Action button should lead to exactly the product you are advertising. It should not cause any confusion and hassles for the visitor and make sure that email address is the first information that you ask for.

Never Checking the Analytics!

The best thing about mobile marketing is that calculating the results becomes very easy and the worst thing about those who channel the mobile marketing is that they often ignore the result analysis. The world of virtual advertising is high on showcasing the performances. However, the marketers are so busy in planning the campaigns and controlling those plans that they forget to keep a check on the performance stats. Like traditional marketing measures, they calculate the results at the end of the each campaign. Hence, it curbs the chances of improvements midway during the campaigns, which actually cancels the real advantage of mobile marketing.

If the right mediums are used, the analytics can display various traits of the campaigns, based on time, geographical locations, devices, etc. It can help in understanding the plus and the minus that your campaign needs. Be it link tracking or call supported sales, the analysis of mobile marketing can list the various activities of the leads, potential customers, and customers almost instantly. It helps in a big way as marketers are in better control of the campaigns with the instant performance results available at their service.

Not Making Your Mobile Presence Felt

The world is moving into the mobiles. It is easily replacing TV, radio, newspaper, books, ticket counter, shopping malls, travel guide, and a lot of other stuff that one may need. It is inevitable to stay alive in the market with a product without bringing an app for it. Most marketers have sensed and have got a working app to fit the cause. But building an app is not a big challenge. The real challenge is making it visible to the potential customers and this is where the marketers fail.

For smartphones, there are more than 3 million apps available together on Android and Apple’s app store only. This count is rising and there are a number of other platforms as well. Forget about being a leader in this crowd, just being among the visible ones is a tough ask. So, it requires a special marketing effort just to make sure that your presence on the mobile world is felt.

To start with, ask your existing customers to try your app, ask existing users to rate the app, and highlight your app for various platforms on your websites and advertisements. Special offers for app users and dedicated marketing campaigns to popularize the mobile apps can turn out to be a good idea. But the most essential and critical part is the app itself. It must benefit the business in some manner. Planning it smartly remains a task of the marketer.

Wrapping it up

Mobile marketing is nothing short of a warzone. If you are popular, then competitors are always waiting for your mistakes, so that can publish it, make it go viral, and defame your reputation. If you are emerging business, then there are a number of challenges ahead. Servicing all the mobile platforms at once is not a cakewalk. Ignoring any of them means lose. It takes some continuous, herculean, and serious efforts to fetch out the positive results. Results are definitely proportional to these efforts.

Mobile is a personalized device and is accessible to the user for a longer part of the time they are awake. For most homo-sapiens, checking the mobile phone is usually the first task after waking up, the last before going to sleep and an often repeated task in between. It remains with them at the workstation, during travels, even on holidays, and almost every time. That gives more chances for the marketers to reach and impress the customers. So the marketers must always be on their toes to make most of this opportunity.