There is no doubt that marketing can make a difference when it comes to an enterprise’s success. But these days it seems like we’ve seen it all. Marketing companies and businesses looking to advertise their products are always on the look for new ways of advertising their products, and although mobile marketing is anything but new, it’s still the latest trend.
Among the several methods for implementing a mobile marketing campaign, we can find landing pages, QR codes, NFC, viral videos… and hashtags.
Although it’s nothing new, hashtag marketing has come of age to drive marketing opportunities in the mobile environment. But, how exactly does it work?
Hashtags were first used by social networks users, especially Twitter, as a means of categorization for the shared content. Studies found out that these users were open to marketing campaigns built around hashtags. A study in particular, carried out by RadiumOne, found out that 51% of regular social media users said that they would share hashtags more often if they could win rewards from advertisers, like discounts. This made marketers aware of the opportunity of using hashtags for their strategy.
Among other things, RadiumOne’s study found out that 30.5% of respondents found hashtags good for discovering trends, and 20.6% said they are useful for finding brands and products. Imagine the potential when Twitter hashtags generated more than 11 million mentions last year.
Also, this means a huge opportunity for advertisers if we take into account location. Being able to identify users’ tastes and preferences in an accurate way and geographically located means that advertising campaigns could be much more segmented and focused, and therefore more potentially successful.
Mobile Marketing Trends
But hashtags are not the only mobile marketing trend. There are quite a few that can be used to implement a mobile marketing campaign. Here are a few ideas to use for a mobile marketing campaign:
- QR codes: You can easily generate a scannable QR code that takes users to your website when they read it. It is an easy way to engage customers, asking them to take action to go to your website by promising them some kind of reward (extra content, discounts, promotions, etc.). But remember that users read QR codes with their mobile phones, so it may be a good idea to send them to a mobile website or to a responsive website, because otherwise the experience can be ruined by a bad website experience.
- Landing pages: A landing page can be easily created with a mobile websites editor, like Onbile, and since the most usual way of sharing this kind of sites is through SMS (which means that they will be accessed from a mobile device), it makes sense too.
- Augmented reality: Similarly to QR codes, augmented reality is a way of engaging the mobile audience that will be curious to know what this can reveal.
Real time marketing
Last Sunday the United States lived one of its most popular events: Super Bowl, which attracted the attention of millions of spectators. Advertising during the Super Bowl is known to be the most coveted and effective, and all eyes are on those companies that can afford to be one of the 53 products advertising during this event. This year was no exception, and results for those companies are sure to be very effective. But also something was noted this year: more than half of those ads included hashtags.
Hashtags are a great symbol for brands to include in their ads, because they work on many social networks. Twitter has been so far the favourite tool for real-time discussion of live events, but Facebook is slowly catching up (in this year’s Super Bowl ads, four specific references were made of Twitter, and five to Facebook). So there is no doubt that social television is a phenomenon that’s here to stay and advertisers are taking good advantage of it.
But Twitter and Facebook are not the only social networks that are being used while watching TV. Music recognition app Shazam was also present in this year’s Super Bowl, recognizing all of the adverts broadcast, as well as Burno Mars’s performance. As the firm revealed, advertisers received more than 700,000 Shazam tags, which led to millions of interactions from users.
Twitter Ecommerce Strategies
Nobody doubts that Twitter is one of the biggest social networks in the world. Especially for business, it is a very lucrative platform and should be seriously considered within any business´s ecommerce strategy. The only trouble is that promotional tweets are everywhere and they have been classed as spam by many consumers in recent years. So how can you generate interest in your products? Stand out from the crowd!
Value proposition
Every tweet should benefit your followers. Show your potential clients, how your product will benefit their lives. Simple and to the point information will make you succeed. You have a new product range. Very good. And what? Tell your audience how fabulous this product will look on them!
#hashtags
This is the way you can categorise tweets. Having started as a way to create a cleaner experience for users, now it has become a sort of communication between users. Define trends with hashtags and include them in your tweets. Then make a list of common hashtags your followers use.
Twitter tools
Twitter has a good website and app available on all OS, on iOS and Android you can manage multiple accounts. There are also tools that can automatically update your Twitter handle with new blog posts pulled from your own RSS feed.
Re-tweeting
If you talk only about yourself, nobody likes you. It´s failure. Look out for tweets from your followers and retweet them! They wil not only appreciate it but can also develop into a future customer. Retweeting is social, make good friends on Twitter. Just play your cards right!
