Go Mobile or Go Home

Mobile advertising dominates marketing messages

Being social today doesn’t necessarily mean you get face-to-face time, but it does mean you’ve got to meet your friends, associates, and followers where they’re hanging out. And where they’re at these days is on mobile devices. Of the 2.6 billion social media users online in 2016, about 80 percent of them are mobile users.

So if your content — meaning your website, blog, social posts and special offers — aren’t geared to mobile advertising formats, then you’re barking up the wrong tree. If you can’t make your message small enough to fit the screen of the smallest cell phone and still be effective, then you may as well put your tail between your legs and go home.

Meet the Apps

According to the 2016 U.S. Cross-Platform Future in Focus<https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2016/2016-US-Cross-Platform-Future-in-Focus> put out by comScore, nearly one in five minutes of Internet usage worldwide is spent on social media sites. And research is showing that the lines are blurring rapidly between delivery systems. In other words, regardless of the devices consumers are using to get their messages, your marketing strategies have to cover them all.

What that means is that even your targeted mobile advertising has got to be able to play across television, desktop and smartphone apps. Conversely, TV programming, email, games, web surfing and messaging has all gone mobile.

Howling at the Clouds

After you’ve formatted your mobile advertising for a variety of mobile devices, your next step is to figure out which social media platforms best reach your target audience. You can start the whole neighborhood barking with help from your friends at Barking Dog Social Media. They make it their business to know the who, what, where, when, why and how of this social mania.

Or you could continue howling in a vacuum by giving it your best shot and hoping for the best. Or by spending your limited marketing resources on your own research. To that end, consider where your mobile advertising may do the most good for reigning in your customers:

• Facebook dominates the social media landscape in 2016 for most all age groups and demographics.
• Snapchat is one of the best social sites to reach the under-34 crowd; 76 percent of its users are in that age group, devoting an average of 400 minutes per month of their mobile time to it.
• Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger parlay an astounding 60 billion messages per day.
• Google+ touts about 300 million users (compared to Facebook’s 1.71 billion).
• LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram count close to 400 million users each.
• More than 90 percent of retailers maintain a mobile advertising presence on two or more social media platforms.
• And there are more than one billion users signed up for YouTube.

Pay to Play

While you can rely on your social media posts to generate a significant amount of organic hits (those who find you because of your content), it’s vital that you put your mobile advertising dollars to work in the right places with paid ads.

Logically, where you place your ads correlates effectively with where users are hanging out. But you may need some help learning what kind of ads work best for your target audience. B2C marketers, for example, believe that boosting posts is the most effective way to pay for social media ads. Meanwhile, the B2B crowd typically prefers to stick with banners and more traditional social media ads.

Where you end up paying to play may indeed be in the neighborhoods with the loudest barking. Consider an enlightening walk around the block before you jump in with all fours, however. Your mobile advertising dollars are not, after all, limitless —are they?

Remember, if you are not the lead dog, the scenery never changes!