How to Kickstart Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Over half of digital media consumption happens on mobile devices. For marketers, that means mobile video is increasingly critical for success.

But the fact that people love watching videos on their mobile devices doesn’t mean that any video will do. If you truly want your videos to perform well, you need to create a solid mobile marketing strategy.

This is the subject of our webinar video, “4 Strong Marketing Tips”:

Your mobile marketing strategy will fit in with your overall marketing strategy, with a few added considerations:

  1. On mobile, awareness goals may produce better results than conversion goals
  2. Mobile is a personal space and your target audience should be clearly specified
  3. It may take longer than other channels to get people to the bottom of your funnel
  4. Certain ad formats and design techniques work better than others
  5. A/B testing never goes out of style
  6. Don’t be surprised by results that buck the trends

In this article, we’ll show you how to set up your strategy with these ideas in mind.

Set Your Mobile Marketing Goals

As with any social marketing strategy, it’s best to start from concrete goals and work backward. Facebook’s business tools make it easy to tie your campaign to any number of performance metrics. You may want to jump right in with an aggressive revenue goal. But with social media ads, you’ll be more successful if you focus on brand awareness.

Consider how people use their mobile devices in general. People are more likely to use their mobile devices to communicate with friends, read, watch videos, or play games than make purchases.

statista-mobile-usage
Source: Statista

If people would rather be entertained than sold to, consider that when setting your goals and creating content. Awareness campaigns get people familiar with, and excited about, what you’re selling – without making an outright pitch.

Awareness goals for Facebook and Instagram ads include:

  • Reach – how many people see your ad
  • Ad recall – how many people remember your brand after seeing an ad
  • Purchase intent – how many people are more likely to purchase after seeing an ad

Your goals drive your creative process, so it’s important to figure this out first.

Define Your Audience

One of the unique aspects of mobile marketing is reaching people in intimate spaces, such as social media apps, where they spend time catching up with friends, family, and interests. Since mobile is such a personal medium, your ad audiences should feel like they’re being personally catered to. Otherwise, they won’t be interested in your content.

Mobile audience segments can be extremely specific on Facebook and Instagram. You probably already know about your target customers’ demographics (age, gender, location) from your previous marketing efforts.

So for your mobile ads, focus on deeper categories like these:

  • Interests such as hobbies, books, movies, and music
  • Lifestyle such as fitness buff, traveler, city dweller
  • Identity such as religious affiliation, group membership, and causes

You can filter this information in the Facebook Ads manager, and you can also search interest categories directly from your Instagram Business account on mobile.

instagram-audience-promoted-post
Selecting a travel-oriented audience on the Instagram app.

For example, for a travel product, you might divide your audiences into not only man or woman, but thrill seekers, holidaymakers, or digital nomads.

Creating custom content for specific audiences is easy. You can change the ad’s target audience by using a different template on top of it. For instance, the same video ad for a gym can be targeted to a seasoned CrossFit buff, as well as a person who’s working out for the first time. One is a high-energy, adrenaline booster, while the other is more inviting.

Set up Your Funnel

Tien Tzuo, the founder and CEO of Zuora, likens the sales funnel to a three-room art gallery.

  • Room 1 is what’s going on in the world that creates challenges
  • Room 2 is the customer’s feelings, needs, and pains
  • Room 3 is the product

The goal in creating this system, he says, is “to show the changing world how you understand your customers’ changing needs, and how you built your product to respond to those changes.”
zuora-three-room-funnelThe content you create for mobile fits into this larger narrative. Here’s how you communicate that narrative to customers:

  • Top of Funnel (Room 1): Create brand-focused videos. Stay away from the cold pitch. Your brand awareness efforts will widen the top of your funnel.
  • Middle of Funnel (Room 2): Once you’ve made one contact, you can retarget your audience with more educational content, maybe a Q&A, product trial, or non-salesy Instagram Stories.
  • Bottom of funnel (Room 3): Keep it simple. Create direct-response ads with clear calls-to-action.

For Facebook and Instagram ads, the custom audience feature will help you sort your audience into funnel levels based on who’s viewed your ads.

fb-custom-audiences

Here’s how to create a custom audience for a video ad you’ve created for Facebook:

  1. Open up the Facebook Ads Manager and then click Audiences.
  2. Click to Create a New Custom Audience and select Engagement. Then select Video.
  3. Select to create custom audiences for all of your videos collectively, or individual videos, then use that custom audience in your targeting when you create a new Facebook campaign.

Using custom audiences makes it really easy for you to make sure that your bottom of funnel video isn’t being seen before your top-of-the-funnel video, and that you’re not showing duplicate ads.

Create Your Ad Content

Even if you’ve diligently executed all of the above steps, your ad creative can still make or break your campaign. Taking advantage of trends in marketing will give you a competitive edge. Video is one of the fastest growing areas for content on Facebook and Instagram. You should also consider Instagram Stories and longer-format IGTV ads as well.

Videos are so effective because they’re visually engaging and more likely to stand out in the feed. If you’re just starting out with video ads, you can use your iPhone, stock assets and Shakr templates to produce a video. For more information about using Shakr to produce a video ad, check out this guide to making a video ad in less than five minutes. 

shakr-video-template-square

For mobile, we recommend using a square or portrait aspect ratio to take up as much screen space as possible. Don’t forget these best practices for news feed ads and Instagram stories ads as well.

Don’t forget copy! Since most mobile videos are watched without sound, copy is vital for getting your message across. Ad copy includes text within the photo and video assets, as well as captions.

Last but not least, add a button CTA. Even if the ad is not bottom of funnel and the link just goes to your Instagram profile, click-through rates can help provide meaningful feedback.

Test Ad Creative

Always a best practice, split testing never goes out of style – as long as it’s done with purpose. If you’re using a template, you can easily produce multiple videos that you can A/B-test on Facebook and Instagram. You might be surprised at which video works best.

Try testing different design styles, speeds, video lengths, moods, CTA, and more. Of course, only test one element at a time.

care-of-facebook-video-ads
Care/Of tests out different vertical video creative on Facebook.

For a step-by-step process, read our guide on Facebook split testing.

A/B testing is the best way to confidently allocate your budget on ad spend. Through A/B testing, you can use a small portion of total budget to run the same video ad cut two different ways, with two different opening statements, or with two different video openings, and compare the results to see which video has stronger appeal for audiences.

Your videos should resonate deeply with your audience. What they like might not correlate with what you like personally. So get testing and see what works. Don’t be afraid to try out new things that you might not be a fan of.

Do it All Again

There’s a lot to explore when it comes to mobile marketing and video. You won’t figure it all out on the first try. You’ll probably fail.

But over time you’ll gradually gather information about your audience, their behaviors on social media, their likes and dislikes, and what resonates. This will enable you to create better quality ad content that gets a good response from your audience.

From monitoring your ads, you’ll also see the emerging trends on each mobile platform as relates to your brand. Perhaps your audience prefers square videos to portrait, or swipe-through carousels cause people to linger, or live-action footage is preferable to slideshows, or eight-second ads do a tiny bit worse than seven-second ones. Perhaps your data proves the opposite of trends, i.e., you get higher engagement on timeline posts than Stories content. You can only learn by trying again and again.


Also published on Medium.

Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Shakr

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