How SMS and Mobile Sharing Will Play An Important Role In Mobile Marketing
Mobile Marketing is the future. Think about it. In a 24 hour day, how many hours do we NOT have our phones beside us? I take my phone with me almost anywhere I go. It is right beside me while I sleep and it’s probably the first thing I check as soon as I wake up.
Mobile is taking over and we have been seeing large companies taking advantage of this to market their products. The things you can do on a mobile phone is quite limited compared to a desktop, but that is also what makes mobile marketing such a powerful marketing channel. You are forced to focus on one thing at once. In other words, you are forced to focus on that facebook ad that takes up your entire newsfeed view.
SMS
A few days ago, I woke up to a text message from Facebook. The text message said something along the lines of, “Your friend Jason’s birthday is today. Reply to this message with a “1" to say Happy Birthday.” That definitely caught my attention and I would not have remembered it was my friends birthday if it wasn’t for that text message.
That same night I was listening to a few marketing podcast and the host was telling everyone to sign up to his webinar by texting a specific number. Afterwards you will receive a comfirmation and reminder a day before the webinar occurs. This is very smart because most people tend to miss out on webinars, not because they don’t want to attend it, but most of the time they just forget to attend it. Typically, webinar host tends to send out an email reminder, but not everyone checks their email every few minutes. A text message on the other hand, will generate a reminder that you will most likely check right away because most people find it more personal.
There are a lot more companies that are taking advantage of the SMS platform. Integrating SMS into your marketing app or website is easier than ever with a well built platform like Twilio. SMS marketing in mobile is nothing new, but it is more effective than ever especially with how many smartphone users we have in the world now.
I personally check my text messages a lot more than my email and usually subscribe to a lot of Amazon package tracking etc.
I would imagine that the hardest thing for marketers that are trying to take advantage of the SMS market is actually getting users to subscribe to SMS newsletter etc. I would find it extremely annoying to be receiving advertising offers from different companies via text.
Mobile Sharing
Another thing that a lot of companies are taking advantage of for mobile marketing is the mobile sharing features. A few years back when creating “niche” sites or blogs were considered to be popular, a lot of big bloggers were able to make their post go viral via sharing buttons.
A great example of this is Upworthy. One of the biggest reasons why they went viral was because of the way that they optimize their sharing buttons. I’m personally not a politic guy nor do I read Upworthy, but as a marketer I’m amazed with their results. The design is clean, simple, and effective.
Again, those buttons look amazing and it stands out. Now, this works extremely effective for the web, but the problem is that it doesnt work as well for mobile. There could be a lot of reasons why it doesn’t convert as well for mobile, but here are a couple that I could think of
- Readers tend to not scroll all the way down after they are finished with the article
- The website isn’t responsive, so readers are bugging out.
- The sharing buttons open up the external social media link in the browser and not the native app, therefore requiring users to sign in again on the mobile browser is a hassle.
- Readers just tend to miss out on the button because it is not as attractive as other objects on the screen such as pictures or related articles.
I tend to ignore out most of these share buttons as well, but most of the time is because I tend to not see the button. When I do happen to notice the button and want to share, the button directs me to twitter’s login page within the browser, which is a hassle for me to login again. If the link opened up my twitter app, then it would be a whole different story.
With that said, I recently stumbled upon a Techcrunch article on my mobile phone and man, the site stood out in terms of encouraging me to share the article. The buttons were stuck to the bottom of my screen and it looked like this.
Notice these sharing buttons on the bottom of the screen. It’s stuck there and follows you as you scroll down. This encourage me to share. I quickly went to another blog, Mashable, and noticed that they still haven’t implemented these sharing buttons yet.
I decided to give these sharing buttons a test on my personal blog over at wilsonpeng.com . I tried two variants. One with a sharing arrow on the bottom of the screen and one with these buttons. The reason why I chose to do one with a sharing arrow is because I didn’t want readers to feel annoyed with the buttons being stuck on the screen.
The first variant looked like this.
I ran this for about a day and made a couple of tweets about the article. Didn’t see an increase in the usual share and 72% of the traffic came from mobile users that day. I had about 108 shares throughout the different networks in total.
Day two comes and I decided to give the buttons on the bottom a shot. The buttons looked like this.
Looks like Techcrunch all over again, but o well let’s see if it works. The same drill as day one, made a couple of tweet post and send it a couple of people. At the end of day two, I received 202 shares in total with 66% of the traffic coming from mobile users. This was enough for me to notice the power of mobile social sharing icons.
Note that I used SumoMe’s sharing tool because it’s free and dead simple to set up. It’s not the best looking tool, but it gets the job done. They also have the whatsapp and mobile sharing options which you have to pay for.
Nevertheless, mobile sharing, mobile sms, mobile advertising, in app purchases are all the apart of the future of marketing and we should be doing what we can to take advantage of it now.
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