What is mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing relates to any promotional activity that takes place on smartphones and other handheld devices, including tablets and other cell/mobile phones. Mobile marketing aims to reach an audience of mobile users through methods such as mobile-optimized ads, push notifications and mobile applications.

In the US, 77% of Americans own a smartphone, according to Pew research. This research also highlighted a year-on-year surge, with the growing trend predicted to reach 6.1bn users by 2020. As such, mobile audiences are so numerous and active (with many only using mobile devices) that to ignore them would be a missed opportunity. Mobile marketing is a core component of an overall advertising strategy.

Mobile marketing ad formats vary, and appear on a range of different platforms, from social media to mobile-optimized websites and mobile apps, all offering unique mobile ad options, such as:

• App-based marketing: Mobile advertising which involves mobile apps. Ads hosted on apps can differ, from banner ads to video, and increasingly advanced demos of other apps too.

• Social media marketing: Both organic and paid ads which appear on mobile social feeds can be great drivers of traffic. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram often boast the largest user bases or highly specific use cases.

• Location-based marketing: Mobile marketing takes advantage of the fact that many users of mobile devices carry them wherever they go. As such, mobile marketers can create ads that appear on mobile devices based on a user’s location relative to a specific area. For example, some advertisers may only want their mobile ads to appear when users are within a 1-mile radius of their business.

• Mobile search ads: Search engines often offer specific ad types built for mobile. These can create unique benefits to offer an improved user experience, such as click-to-call functions or instant directions.

• SMS: SMS marketing involves texting a user’s phone number with specific offers or notifications of upcoming deals. Note that SMS marketing can also be location-based.

From accurate analytics to best-in-class mobile attribution, Adjust helps track performance to help you identify what works, and what can be improved. Adjust can track all of your in-app advertising activity for you while providing app marketers with extremely powerful features that not only make life easy but actively build on what your targets.

With an estimated increase to $87 billion lost to ad fraud by 2022, this is a widespread issue among the mobile industry. In particular, click spam, click injection and SDK spoofing threaten to steal marketing spend and ruin the accuracy of a marketer’s data. As leaders in fraud prevention, Adjust also offer the Fraud Prevention as an additional package, preventing fraudsters from stealing your ad spend and compromising your data.