What Is Digital Marketing?

It’s important to first understand how digital and mobile marketing intertwine and work together. Let’s first look at digital marketing. Digital marketing is an umbrella term that incorporates any marketing that happens on any digital channel to reach your customer. You can think of it as websites, social media, SEO, email, SMS, and many other types of marketing but it is not specific to a device. Digital marketing has evolved as some of the top digital marketing companies in the world find new and innovative ways to use the technology we have at hand today and in the future. As a digital marketer you will be focused on endless areas of digital strategy - app marketing strategy, social media marketing software strategy, SMS strategy, and beyond. Digital marketers have to keep a pulse on anything that is used on any digital channel or device along with staying up to date on the newest trends in the industry so that your company isn’t left behind.

Digital Marketing Agency

If you do not have an internal digital mojo employee who knows all things digital and top marketing platforms, it would be a good idea to look into digital marketing agency services. A digital marketing agency is a little different than a traditional marketing agency because they are completely focused on the digital-world results. Whether you are looking for the best digital marketing agency for a small business or large enterprise, they can help your team develop an online brand and lead generation plans on digital channels. Companies looking for digital marketing services can find help with search engine optimization (SEO), SMS strategy, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media marketing, and many other services that digital marketing agencies can provide. Some of the top digital marketing company names in Indianapolis that you could look into are the following:

• Ratel SEO - Indiana Digital Marketing Agency focused on SEO strategy.
• Hanapin Marketing - specializes in SEO, PPC, and digital strategy.
• Firebelly Marketing - full-service social media marketing agency
• Arcalea - digital agency helping with web development, SEO, email marketing, content marketing, web design, and PPC.

What Is Mobile Marketing?

So we’ve talked about digital marketing but a lot of people wonder what is a ‘mobile marketing platform’ exactly? As we stated above, digital marketing is the umbrella term and mobile marketing sits under digital marketing. Mobile marketing is part of digital marketing but is focused on consumers who use their mobile devices or tablets to access the information. This can be through a mobile device, wearables, voice, tablets, etc. There are many types of mobile marketing such as SEO, SMS campaigns, app-based marketing, location-based marketing, push notifications, QR codes, and more. As you can see the scope of mobile marketing is wide and continues to evolve as trends come and go. (Hello TikTok)

Mobile trends and innovation of new platforms has been nothing new over the past years due to the growth of mobile devices. In just four years, Statista reports that the number of smartphone users increased by a billion users, from 2.5 billion to 3.5 billion users! The question is no longer what are the benefits of mobile marketing but how to take advantage of the mobile marketing growth and be sure to incorporate it into your marketing strategy from the beginning. With mobile marketing statistics as staggering as the fact that over 40 percent of mobile transactions happen on mobile - it is crucial to figure out how your brand will create the best mobile marketing campaigns that outdo the best mobile marketing campaigns of 2019.

Lumavate has created a helpful mobile marketing strategy pdf to download to help answer some of the big questions surrounding how to evolve your mobile marketing strategy based on current trends.  Mobile marketing technology has been on the rise and many companies that use mobile marketing are looking at ways to improve their tech stack while keeping it efficient. You will continue to hear about new MarTech companies in mobile marketing articles you find online or on LinkedIn. It’s important to stay up to date on the new trends and technologies to know what mobile marketing ideas your company may need to test out!

Mobile Marketing Examples

Let’s now look at a few mobile marketing examples of some brands and their mobile marketing efforts.

• Domino’s Pizza Tracker - The Domino’s Pizza Tracker has become an icon and used in many industries and other companies’ mobile marketing efforts. This mobile marketing example shows a great case study of how there was a customer friction point (not knowing when your pizza was going to arrive) to how the brand responded in their marketing efforts to find a solution to that issue. It is now used across healthcare, restaurants, logistics and other industries to help end-users or customers stay in touch with the delivery process.
• Burger Kings Burn That Ad - Burger King is known for not shying away from advertisements that poke at their competitors. This rival ad campaign allowed consumers to open up Burger King’s app and use it to burn competitors’ ads and receive a free whopper. It created an environment that felt like a mobile game marketing tactic where you play a game to win free whoppers!
• Pinterest PWA - Pinterest was having a difficult time having users sign-up, login, or download the native app. So they decided to do a complete makeover and rebuild their mobile web experience through a progressive web app (PWA). The PWA increased metrics across the board! Medium noted that “time spent is up by 40 percent compared to the old mobile web experience, user-generated ad revenue is up 44 percent and core engagements are up 60 percent.”
• Starbucks Loyalty App - Starbucks in the shining star when it comes to app-based mobile marketing and Starbucks mobile advertising. Starbuck’s mobile marketing team created a loyalty app that has gamification tied to it and it makes such a difference than a silly punch card. For example, when you are fifty stars away from a free drink you may start a star dash that if you spend $10 in the next three days you receive fifty extra stars and thus hitting your free drink. It’s all about those endorphins.

You can also listen to our Mobile Matters episode with Patrick Flanagan to hear some great social media and mobile marketing ideas and examples as well. There are many mobile marketing ideas that range from apps to SMS campaigns, to just having a mobile website. It can be overwhelming with all the mobile marketing technology out there but pull in the reigns and understand what makes sense for your brand voice first and figure out where to capture your target audience. Then trial and error until you find what works best for your brand!

Mobile Marketing Companies

Most often the most successful mobile marketing is not happening without the best marketing software. Working with a mobile marketing agency offers you the experts who know all of the mobile marketing companies and mobile marketing technology is available to use for your company. When looking for a company that can help you with strategizing your mobile marketing efforts - it’s important to know what your goals are to know what niche of mobile marketing services you’ll want to look at. There are marketing services companies that can help in the realm of all the different mobile marketing types. Let’s take a look at one of the top mobile marketing companies that specialized in marketing analytics software. (Besides Google Analytics!) HubSpot is a great marketing tool to use for growth strategy on a mission to increase inbounds. Their dashboards are built out for marketing, sales, services and other CRM tools to help your company understand how to run an effective inbound marketing campaign. HubSpot’s VP of Platform and editor of chiefmartec.com, Scott Brinker, spoke with us on a Mobile Matters episode speaking all about how marketing, technology, and management are intersecting.

What Is CleverTap?

We’ve discussed some of the top mobile marketing companies above but now we are going to speak real quick about CleverTap. CleverTap is a mobile marketing software or a marketing SaaS company. CleverTap is a mobile marketing tool used by many large named companies (Sony, DC Comics, BookMyShow, etc) to analyze their user engagement and mobile app analytics. They help you understand how to not only gain app users but also build loyal customers who will drive higher revenue growth. Out of 121 reviews on G2 CleverTap has approximately a 4.5-star rating. If you are looking to find the up and coming mobile marketing platforms, Gartner is a great place to find insights on trending, successful, and up and coming marketing technologies.

Using Gartner and G2 Software Reviews

Speaking of Gartner and G2, let’s discuss why you may look at these two places for information regarding SaaS and up and coming companies. G2 or also known as G2 is a peer-to-peer review site that allows users to review business software so others can understand the pros and cons to the software. Leaving a software review can help many small software companies begin to be noticed and trusted due to the social proofing G2 offers. You can search for software by what you were looking for: G2crowd email marketing, G2crowd SMS marketing, G2 mobile marketing, G2crowd marketing analytics, and many other categories.

Gartner is another important company to keep in mind when reviewing software. G2 is a peer-to-peer review site whereas Gartner has analysts that will review certain software within different industries and rate and analyze them. Instead of the users of the product reviewing, Gartner has professional analysts who will help potential customers understand what software has to offer and what may be up and coming. They have many annual reports, such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant, that will go through leading companies, up and coming companies, and will summarize the companies based on set evaluation criteria.

Content Marketing Strategy

Finding a good content marketing strategy could end up saving you a lot of money with advertisements if you become known as a thought leader in your industry or focus on SEO ranking. People will need to think of you when looking for the best content marketing though. There are a few content marketing companies that can help you with your strategy (especially if you are focused on SEO) but there are also some best content marketing brands that are doing it on their own and are kicking butt. Let’s look at a content marketing example of a company that used content marketing to its full advantage and now is what they are known for.

Drift is known for chatbots, Account-Based Marketing (ABM), and conversational marketing but they are also known as thought leaders in the MarTech and ABM space because of their content that is pushed out every single day. This is driven quite a lot of traffic to their website just based on content produced. Their website visitor traffic grew from 198 in October of 2015 to 27,369 in June 2016! One of the keys to a content marketing strategy is consistency.

Marketing Automation Software

Content marketing is crucial to bringing in traffic and upholding a thought leadership position but marketing automation software can be just as crucial to the success of your digital marketing efforts. Mobile marketing automation can range from email to SMS, to social, to chatbots, and so many other channels. You can find some of the best marketing automation software through Gartner or G2 reviews. Marketo has over two thousand reviews under G2 marketing automation software. Automation software can offer your sales and/or marketing team to be more efficient in every stage of the sale cycle.

Mobile Advertising

While mobile and digital marketing trends have been on the rise so has mobile advertising. There are many types of mobile advertising your team could use within the mobile advertising industry. You could run banner advertising, video advertising, app-based advertising, gamified mobile advertising, and many other types of cell phone advertisement ideas. What’s important with mobile marketing advertising is knowing where your target audience is (what platform are they on more often?) and then understanding how to make an advertisement on mobile phones to connect and engage your audience.

Let’s look at one type of mobile advertising to better understand the ins and outs of it. We will look at app-based mobile advertising. Advertising on mobile apps is a strategy that app developers have been using for mobile ad monetization within their apps to earn money. Developers use this in their free and paid-for apps. Some of the mobile advertising trends you’ve seen over the past couple of years are short video clips. We first saw these types of ads on Youtube but now you are seeing them across platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. Business of Apps reached out to a few top advertising professionals to figure out what they believe to be mobile advertising trends 2020 and below are a few snippets:

• Mobile advertising is moving from web to in-app ads
• Local and hyper-local advertising will become more abundant
• Consumer privacy is going to play a pivotal role in how ad targeting will evolve

These mobile advertising insights can help you figure out what might be the next thing to look into for your advertising spending. Many advertisers will use ad servers for mobile apps to help budget, strategize, optimize, and analyze their ad campaigns.

Mobile Advertising Companies

There are some mobile advertising companies that are well known and can help you with the best mobile advertising for your company. These companies will range from helping with video ads, to in-app advertisements, website display ads and more.

• AdColony is one of the largest mobile advertising and monetization platforms in the world. They are well known for their Aurora HD Video mobile advertising platforms that help your company advertise through video with exceptional speed and graphics.
• McCANN - is a well-established advertising agency that has helped top brands. You can see mobile advertising examples on their website for brands like Microsoft, IKEA, Verizon and many more. McCANN creates competitive and captivating advertising campaigns for their clients and they are obsessed with telling the brand truth to use it as a catalyst to generate their most powerful ideas.
• Disruptive Advertising - Is known for their expertise in AdWords and Facebook Ads, website experience testing, and analytics reporting. If you are looking into ads companies for social media advertising help they may be a good place to look.