According to comScore, the number of mobile users globally has exceeded the desktop in 2014 alone, let alone in 2017, this year. You already know that mobile advertising is important to any business or brand.
But without a proper mobile advertising strategy, how are you going to ensure your mobile advertising campaign to be a success in generating bigger brand awareness or driving sales?
If you’re looking for best strategies to use for mobile advertising, this post is going to be your resource. Go through it and ensure your next advertising campaigns follow these strategies.
You might already know some of these strategies, but I’m going to approach them based on experience working on past mobile advertising campaigns. Let’s get started.
Table of Content
1 – Include a Phone Number
92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone – SalesForce
It’s always a good idea to minimize the barriers for your potential customers to call your business.
If there were one thing all mobile users have in common, that would be the need for a quick way to get more information. And in most cases, making a phone call is the fastest way to do that.
To add on the earlier fact, according to Entrepreneur.com, phone calls convert better than mobile traffic.
So rather than showing your ad with a traditional headline or creative that would take users to a landing page following a tap, include your business phone number on the ad.
This would effectively minimize the barrier between a business and their potential customer. However, there’s another problem. By including a phone number on the ad, a user will still have to memorize the phone number or write it down on paper, before making a phone call.
This problem can be fixed by using an interactive rich media ad. With a rich media mobile ad, you can include a tap-to-call ad component directly on your ad. Upon seeing your mobile ad, the potential customer can tap to call and they’ll be connected to the business immediately.
See more rich media mobile ad examples
While this is effective, it’s important to make your tap-to-call button as visible as possible. Many advertisers make the mistake of not having the tap-to-call button obvious enough on their ad, given the small mobile ad space, thus losing out on phone calls from potential customers.
And once you have your mobile ad creatives setup for effectiveness, make sure you have the bandwidth to field the incoming calls. Otherwise, you’ll be only frustrating your potential customers who are directly calling you from your ad.
2 – Provide an Incentive on Your Ad
People love free stuff, which is why special offers and promotion are effective for getting mobile users to act on your ads. Whether it’s a discount, free shipping, or a voucher, these offers will motivate people to click through and act on your ads.
There are many types of mobile advertising formats & creatives, but providing an incentive is one of the best ways to attract new customers and generate leads. As an example, a clothing line called Smooth Sailing offered a 15 percent discount for signing up for their newsletter. A food chain such as Subway, implementing the same strategy by offering a free sandwich for every 10 subs purchased.
The bottom line is that incentives are great for advertising. But there’s a huge problem.
Because of the crowded advertising market, advertisers are losing out with audiences not taking immediate action on offers. There are often too many steps involved to claim an offer, such as redirections or email confirmations that a user has to take before they can claim an offer.
For your incentivized ad to be effective, you must make it easy for potential customers to claim the offers.
Here’s what you can do.
Include a lead capture or redemption form directly on the mobile ad itself, so users can quickly input their information and claim the offer immediately.
The success of an ad with an offer highly depends on the value of the offer itself, but the creatives also directly affect the success of the ad.
So as your ad goes live, make sure to track every engagement on your ad. With this, you’ll know whether your creatives or design is working, with your potential customers actually filling in their details to claim the offers.
With insights from the engagement reports, then consider tweaking the creatives, text or CTA message on your ad and continue to track if there’s an increase in users claiming the offers.
3 – Customize Ads Towards Your Target Audience
Personalized ad content and behavioral targeting features are not only important for an online advertising strategy, but it can also lead to an increase in mobile conversions.
No matter the platform you are advertising on, most users have very low tolerance for irrelevant ads.
So even before you start creating your ad creatives, think about your potential customers. Who are they? When do they use their mobile phones and where do they normally consume mobile content?
Up to now, energy, time & budget are spent into creating ads in hopes they’ll do well in a given target market. Some of them will do really well, and some miserably fail.
This is where Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) comes in.
DCO allows multiple versions of an ad to be made. Each of the ad creative templates made will automatically change to appeal to the right target audience. Think about how a few combinations of ad creatives, can be effective to different audiences – a dog owner, schooling teenager, professional working adult, a music enthusiast and more.
Using dynamic creative optimization technology would help you customize ads towards your target audience better. What’s important is you look for a dynamic creative solutions vendor that has a good support team to help you as dynamic creative technology can be technologically challenging to setup.
Besides using dynamic creative optimization technology for mobile advertising, you also need to target your audiences correctly when buying ad inventories. Targeting your target audience can be based on more than just one variable. In fact, you’re encouraged to include as many targeting options as your mobile ad network allows. These variables usually offered by a DSP may include:
- Geo-location
- Demographic grouping (gender, age, socioeconomic status, etc.)
- Audience affinity
- Day-parting
- Type of device being used
- Retargeting
- Etc.
4 – Pair Ads with Social Media
According to Pew Research Center, 74% of all online adults use social networking sites, and from that, at least 40% of them uses a mobile phone.
Social media has become a crucial piece for advertising and as an advertiser, you should leverage on it as well. Done correctly, pairing your ad campaigns with your brand’s social media presence can be very effective in driving brand lift.
Here’s an example from a past mobile ad campaign done for a brand that was aiming to increase their brand awareness. The interactive ad featured a camera capture function which prompt users to interact with the ad and then it provided an option for the audience to share the ad to their social media accounts.
Not only the mobile ad campaign was successful with the right targeting, audiences who engaged with the ad also shared the ad to their social media pages resulting in the ad going viral – thus increasing the brand’s reach and awareness.
Pairing your ads with social media gives you additional reach without paying for anything extra. So whenever possible, especially if your ad is an incentive or offer, pair it with social media and remember to track the number of shares that was made on your ad.
5 – Keep Your Ads Lightweight
Ad loading time is obviously an important part of any audience experience.
It’s an undeniable fact that ads can be annoying when it interrupts a user’s attention. Add on to that with a slow loading ad and your audiences will most probably get a negative brand experience on your ad.
A study by Hubspot revealed that 44% of people online are using ad blockers because of slow loading ad times, affecting their browsing experience.
So here are some ways to help the problem of slow loading ads.
First, when building your mobile ads, don’t include too many images or hosted video content on the ad. If you must, make sure your ad elements are correctly compressed under 1000 bytes for the best user experience.
Next, to make sure your ads will be accepted in most publisher websites & apps, ensure that you have the ‘polite load’ support on your ad – an ad serving process where a lighter file is loaded while the content page is loads. The additional content of the ad is then fully loaded after the host page has finished loading.
Also, avoid using flash and other incompatible technologies for ad serving. The benefits to using HTML5 ads is not only you can create better looking and interactive mobile ads, but HTML5 technology is compatible with modern mobile browsers and thus does not require users to download any extra plug-ins that might potentially slow down their loading time.
6 – Avoid Leading Users To Another Landing Page
A big problem with traditional banner ads is that following a tap, they redirect a user away from the web page or app they are in. Not only it increases the hurdles a typical user has to take to perform an action, it is also highly intrusive.
The same study by HubSpot revealed that 48% of users strongly agreed that ads are more intrusive now than ever compared to 2-3 years ago. And to add on that fact, the average CTR for static mobile banner ads is only 0.14%.
One reason why the average CTR for static banner ads is so low is because of the uninteresting creatives & lack of interaction on the ad. However, more importantly, is users do not want to click on the banner as they’ll be disrupted from the activity they were on, whether if it’s consuming a web content or using an app.
This is where interactive mobile ads come into play. With interactive ads, you don’t have to lead users to another landing page.
Depending on your advertising goals, you can get your target audience to complete a goal on the ad itself. For example, you can prompt your target audience to fill up a lead form or even use a map to find your store on the ad itself. And once the audience is done interacting with the ad, they can simply close the ad and continue doing whatever they were doing before.
Below is an example of a mobile ad that does not disrupt user experience by providing in-ad interactions rather than redirecting the user to another landing page.
7 – Measure Engagements Instead of CTRs
CTR or Click-Through-Rate is a dying metric. While for a long time, advertisers and marketers have used it as a metric to measure a sale conversion or purchase intent, it no longer accurately serves that purpose.
There are a few reasons why measuring CTR is no longer relevant.
First, advertisers, these days are using multiple channels or platforms to advertise their products or services. This increases touch points which the target audiences can interact with.
The behavior of consumers has also changed. With the many touch points across channels, a typical consumer could have seen an ad while browsing an app but then only commit to interact with it following an online search or when they later saw the ad again while browsing a web content.
Next, the advertising industry has moved into using interactive ads. And as explained earlier, with interactive ads, you would have somewhat brought the ‘landing page’ into the ad by including in-ad interaction components such as lead capture forms, store locators, tap-to-call and such. Users are directly interacting with the ad and no longer tapping an ad to be redirected to a landing page.
So if you’re still measuring click-through rates for your mobile advertising campaigns, it’s time to rethink the way you measure the success of your ad campaign.
Conclusion
I hope this brief list of mobile advertising strategies gave you some good ideas to running successful mobile advertising campaigns. Most importantly, remember to always test your ad campaigns as they go live.
And as you may know, viewability is growing metric that has become increasingly important, so make sure to measure the viewability of your ad inventories your ads were served into as you run your campaigns.
If you are planning to run rich media mobile advertising campaigns, visit MobileAds.com to explore our mobile advertising solutions.
What are some mobile advertising strategies that have worked for you? Share your experience in the comment section below.
