If the likes of Don Draper were able to imagine not only a personal computer, but that nearly every person on earth would have effectively a personal computer in their pocket just a few decades in the future, the boys of Mad Men would have gone wild.
They, like some mobile marketing strategies today, would also likely fall flat on their face due to not understanding how to approach the concept, and find themselves putting off customers instead of attracting them to a product. It’s a mistake that’s easy to make, but also nearly as easy to avoid.
Avoiding a Frustrated Target Audience
Because we’re carrying mobile phones around with us wherever we go, finding an ad staring back at us triggers much the same reaction we’d get with an invasion of privacy.
How did this get here? Why me? How did they find me?
These questions put off your target audience despite being what the logical marketing approach to mobile marketing would be. Instead, a new approach needs to be taken to generate leads with mobile marketing: give the customer something they want.
The Internet itself is built around the idea of instant gratification. You read an article and notice something interesting in a blue font, you know you can click that and go off on a tangent reading about that subject. This is also how mobile marketing should be approached, and why banner ads are so notorious for using bait-and-switch techniques: the process works.
A Better Approach
Instead of creating a banner ad, though, a much better approach is by making reasonable offers.
Use a simple text message campaign to offer “10% off shoes”. When the shopper enters a short code, provide an incentive to participate in your marketing, and avoid running them off with invasive, traditionally rooted ads.
Loyalty cards are also a fantastic way to generate leads and conversions, and play extremely well into the mobile marketing world. They also give you a wealth of options, from limited time offers for bonus points to sweeten the deal, to providing a wealth of contact information you can use to warm the leads up should they go cold.
Generating leads through mobile marketing requires that you to take a step back and think about how you can optimize content for mobile experiences.