Mobile Marketing: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What It Can Do for Your Business

80. That's the number of times Americans check their phones per day, or every 12 minutes. And that number is growing. In 2015, the average person looked at their phone 46 times per day and in 2014 the number of times was 33. With smartphones so integrated into our daily lives, it's no wonder then that companies are increasingly investing in mobile marketing campaigns, mobile marketing strategies, and mobile marketing platforms to reach these highly active and engaged individuals.

What Is Mobile Marketing?

If Marketing 101 is about developing a product or service to meet the wants and needs of your target audience, then Mobile Marketing 101 is about leveraging mobile to find, attract, engage, and retain target audiences precisely during the moments when they're deeply engrossed in their phones.

On the finding and attracting side of things, paid mobile marketing is about spending advertising dollars specifically on third-party mobile channels—such as via social media, search engines, and the broader mobile web—to pay to reach target audiences.

On the engaging and retaining side of things, organic mobile marketing is about growing your company's "owned" channels, or the platforms your company builds and cultivates itself, such as:

1. Mobile app push notifications
2. Mobile web push notifications
3. Mobile email marketing
4. In-app messaging
5. In-app News Feed
6. SMS campaigns (also know as text message marketing)

Why Does Mobile Marketing Matter?

As we shift toward becoming a mobile-first society, businesses across the board are seeing mobile as the place where customers are not just browsing, but engaging. In the retail space, mobile commerce—when people shop on their phones—now accounts for nearly half of all sales. In the content and media landscape, people now spend more time on their phones than they do watching TV.

For just one example of how investing in mobile marketing can pay off, take the case of Delivery Hero. When the on-demand food delivery brand adopted a cross-channel marketing strategy that focused on mobile marketing, it saw sales increase by 85%.

How Mobile Marketing Supports Overall Customer Engagement

While mobile's popularity is growing, it's not the only way to reach customers. And for some customers, other channels may provide a more effective platform for outreach. That's why brands that invest in a cross-channel strategy—developing campaigns for customers wherever they're most likely to engage, whether that's email, SMS, or web channels—see customer engagement increase by more than 800%.