Getting Started With Mobile Advertising

According to Statista, about 6,648 billion of the world population owns smartphones, equating to around 83.72%. Altogether, the number of people that own a smartphone and a feature phone is 7.26 billion, which equates to 91.54% of the world’s population who own a mobile phone.

With such a broad reach of mobile advertising space available, we have numerous ways to use this newly available means of advertising as a digital marketer. Companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube have recognized the massive potential for marketing and advertising with mobile advertising.

So, how does one get into mobile advertising if we’ve never used this medium of advertising before? Let's take an in-depth dive into this topic to understand how mobile advertising can help you to promote your product and brand.

1. Understand The Mobile Landscape

Understanding the mobile landscape is essential to get started with mobile advertising. This will involve researching what other social media influencers are doing in the mobile advertising space and how they use mobile advertising to promote their products and brands.

Find social media influencers like Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) and Huda Kattan (@hudabeauty) and learn from them. These are only two of the most well-known and popular social media influencers on Instagram and YouTube, but there are more.

Search through Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to find other social media influencers within your niche. Furthermore, do additional research within your specific niche to learn how mobile advertising will benefit your product and brand.

Another aspect of understanding the mobile landscape is to define your objectives. What do you want to achieve with your mobile advertising campaign? More brand awareness? More sales? More engagement?

2. Identify Your Target Audience

As you are doing your research within your niche, you will start to understand your target audience and their particular needs. But, you will want to broaden your search to understand what social media influencers are doing in other niches.

Understanding this will give you a broader understanding of how to promote your products and which mobile advertising platforms work the best within those niches. 

If you run an eCommerce store that sells branded hats and shoes, it might be worth looking at other niches within the clothing and fashion space to learn how mobile advertising helps those brands succeed.

Identifying your target audience will help you tailor your advertising to their needs. Also, gather some statistics on search trends and get some statistics about how many potential customers you are targeting. You can get these statistics from Google Trends and Statista.

3. Research The Different Types Of Mobile Advertising

Many types of mobile advertising services and platforms are available to you, and knowing what they are and when to use each of them will be helpful.

1. SMS Ads

SMS Ads are simple to create and understand by customers. SMS has been around since the inception of the mobile phone, so it is one of the oldest available means of mobile advertising. SMS ads are an efficient means of advertising since they have a wider reach, and most major network cell phone carriers additionally support them.

2. Push Notifications

Push notification ads are those ads that pop up on your mobile device while a user is active on an app, as well as when a user is not active on the app.

3. Video Ads

Video advertising is a powerful tool for any brand that helps users in decision-making. Mobile video advertising brings an entirely new and creative visual experience that allows the user to get closer to the product or service.

4. Banner Ads

Banner ads include text, graphics, images, or a combination of all three. These ads are most often seen on a website or mobile apps.

5. Location-Based Ads

Location-based ads are marketing communications sent to a mobile user's device based on their geographical location.

6. Interstitial Ads

Interstitial advertisements are full-screen graphics or videos generally placed at the top of app transition points. You might have noticed these ads appear during a video or while playing a game on your mobile device.

7. Native Ads

Native ads are like banner ads, except they are displayed within the app operating environment, so they naturally blend in with the flow of the app and are less likely to be seen as an advert.

4. Create Compelling Creative

Another key to success with mobile advertising is creating compelling content. This content should be interesting and engaging, and it should be targeted specifically at your audience. If you are advertising a product or a service, you need to make sure your content is on point.

Your mobile ads need to be eye-catching and relevant to your target audience. If you are no wordsmith and your writing skills are lacking, it might be worth your while to hire a good copywriter to write eye-catching and compelling content to get your sales rolling.

5. Always Test Your Mobile Ads

Always test your mobile ads before launching them to a broader audience. Don't be afraid of trying different tactics and strategies to see what works best for your campaigns. You can perform A/B testing on your mobile ads to check how each ad performs and which receives the most responses and traffic. 

A/B testing also called split testing or bucket testing, compares different versions of a mobile advert to determine which one performs best.

The process of A/B testing is an experiment that involves comparing two variations of an advert that are tested against each other and then analyzed to understand which of those two adverts is performing the best.

6. Monitor your results

Finally, constantly monitor your results. The process of any form of advertising is a continually evolving process. Monitoring your results will help you determine whether your advertising is working and whether you need to make any adjustments.

As you get to know and understand your target audience further, you will become more confident and create more compelling content and higher converting mobile ads that drive more sales for your product or brand.