Taking The Next Step: Launching Your Mobile Advertising Campaign

7
Sep

The increasing use of mobile devices, mobile web, advancement of network technologies, and multiple advertising platforms, creates new opportunities in the advertising market. Gartner expects global mobile advertising spending to reach $18 billion this year, up from the estimated $13.1 billion in 2013. By 2017 it’s projecting the market will have sized up to be worth $41.9 billion.

As the mobile industry grows, marketing and advertising budgets are also increasing year-over-year to promote products and services to a highly targeted customer-base. However, it is important to take a strategic approach to your mobile advertising initiatives.

Below you will find a baseline to help you get started on your new campaign.

  • Keep it simple: In the transition from desktop to mobile, the classic banner ad has shrunk to 300×50, a tiny ad unit that does nothing to optimize the ad experience to mobile. As such, your mobile ad has only a limited window of opportunity to get through to your audience. This means that your mobile ads need to focus on a single message. Don’t try to cram too much text or any complicated images into your in-app banner ads. Keep it simple. One message at a time.
  • Understand your customers’ mobile lifecycle: Mobile ads are useful because brands can collect a lot of information about how consumers are interacting with the ad. For example, whether people are clicking on your ads (or not) and more importantly what are they doing beyond the click to build a deeper engagement with your brand.  You can then use these events to better re-target customers and target similar customers (look-a-likes).  The best thing about mobile is the ability to have at the very moment targeting: right time, right place and right device.  The promise of hyper-local targeting is a huge benefit of mobile advertising.
  • It’s all about Personalization: One of the best ways to boost your mobile advertising campaign is to focus on adding value at every touch point.  Also with the increased focus on brand building ads, video and native ads you can really create a dynamic and powerful customer experience. The good news is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to add value to your customers’ lives. Sometimes providing useful content such as a white paper or informational video can be enough to start a relationship.
  • Test, measure, optimize, and repeat: One reason mobile ads don’t have to “do it all” is because it’s easy to create multiple versions and multivariate test them to see which works best. Unfortunately, one of the biggest mistakes marketers make is not having developers test their ads. Experiment with different offers, different creative designs, and different messages. See what works best. You might be surprised – the message your team thought was clever may not resonate with customers. Sometimes even a simple change in text, design or details of your offer can pay huge dividends.  Let the performance results speak for you and allow you to make powerful data driven decisions quickly to achieve your KPIs.

At the end of the day, it’s probably not fair for marketers to expect mobile ads to “do it all.” The real question is, “how can you make sure that your mobile ads are doing enough?” By taking a personalized approach, with one specific behavior you’re trying to impact, and testing its effectiveness, you’ll find the right way to get big results from your small screen advertising.