So You Want to Jump on the Next Wave of Marketing? Discover How to Make Mobile Advertising Work for You.
Mobile marketing just hit the internet. Well it didn’t. People in Europe have been doing this for years. But in the affiliate marketing space, it’s like a new buzz. Something like Acai berry first appearing on Oprah. If you jump on this now, you’ll have amazing success in the future.
No one doubts that mobile marketing is the next big thing. More people have mobiles than computers. Mobiles cost cheaper than computers. With progress of technology, they’ll be just as powerful as computers very soon. This is the place to go anyway. Think about all the outside-US countries, poor countries even. You think some kid who just got a cell phone in Zimbabwe would be interested in some free games to download or dating offer? You bet.
At the moment mobile marketing is in its infancy. That’s without exaggeration. Click prices range from $0.03 to $0.15. Hardly you can find such low click prices right off the bat. Now very few are advertising on mobile phones and devices. Mostly company owners. While there aren’t many offers to run for affiliates, there’s a lot of room to play for sure. It’s wild west. Turn your creativity and start to succeed.
Benefits of Mobile Marketing
I’ll just throw you in some awesome benefits of going online as opposed to other internet marketing tactics. I think you’ll soon realize why this is such a great place to start tapping into.
- Low Bid Prices
- Low Competition
- Great Targeting Options
- Huge Open Rates (You know email open rates that shrank due to spam? Well, mobile message open rates are 99% still. Believe that. It’s phenomenal place if you have a well planned campaign.)
- Wide reach
- Small Testing Budgets
Where to Start?
Good question. First you need something to promote. Seconds you need to know where to start. I’ll get back on that a bit later. But first – the product or service.
I focus on affiliates as affiliate marketing is what I do. For product owners, all the same applies except it’s easier. So as an affiliate you need a product to promote. Well, the first place to go is OfferMobi. This is mobile affiliate networks. Probably the first one of its kind. They have quite a few mobile CPA offers. Dating, education, games, etc. You get paid per free signup. What can be better right?
Another place to look for is CJ. It’s probably the largest affiliate network and they also have a few mobile compatible offers. You can look for pay per call offers as well. Pay per call means that instead of asking people to come to your site on mobile ad, you send them to the call center. All they need to do is click the ad and it starts calling automatically. The longer they stay the more money you make. But they need to be on a call for at least a minute, otherwise you won’t make money.
Ok, now you have your affiliate offer. You need to find some mobile ad networks to work with. Where to start? Google Adwords lets you advertise on mobile devices, so that’s one mobile network. Admob (also owned by Google) is #1 network probably when it comes to reach. They serve billions of impressions.
Or just search online for list of mobile ad networks. You’ll find plenty of choices.
Now you have your product and the place to advertise. All you need to do is just set a budget and start trying. As long as clicks are cheap, you can test for $3 to $10 per campaign depending on how many variables here are involved. Don’t expect success immediately. It takes time. But start dabbling in mobile marketing. This will give you a head start for sure.
Mobile Targeting &Tracking
Targeting on mobile devices is not hard. Some networks allow to bid on keywords, but almost no traffic there. Some categories, some RON campaigns. Try to target as narrow as possible. If you know that your demographic uses some particular mobile device more than the other (like Android vs. iPhone), then start with those people. You can target carriers, mobile device models even, operating systems. It’s really amazing.
Make sure you set up tracking correctly. You can use prosper202 for that. Track each ad, device, operating system, country, state. It can take time to set things up, so you can just place the tracking pixel on a thank you page and it will track all the leads for you. Tracking here is crucial. Sometimes, one testing variable, like carrier will convert so much better than the rest. And this means success vs. failure in this mobile marketing world. So track carefully and track everything.
Creativity & Expansion
But you know, every other goofball and his monkey are advertising on these same places with the same offers. Yes, competition is low and even then you can turn profit, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re thinking of getting a few steps ahead of your competition, then you need to become creative.
As affiliate, you don’t have many choices. But one thing your can do and that’s what everyone, and I probably mean literally every single guru tells you to do, is build a list. Why not offer some free ebook and gather people’s email address on mobile platforms?
You can upsell them later some products on your email. Even better. Capture their phone numbers and send them SMS mentioning to check their inboxes. You’ll increase responses and make more sales. This will put you much further ahead of the competition. Creating your own sales paths is the best thing you can do as affiliate. This bumps up your margins and lets you compete on a different level.
Summing Up
I’ll repeat it again; mobile marketing right now is the Wild West. While not every campaign is profitable, it allows you to test more of them. You can definitely find your few thousand dollars a month campaign if you test enough.
With the increasing popularity of cell phones, smartphones, it won’t take long until these will dominate the web traffic. Setting mobile marketing aside. This may be a sign for you to think about making your existing website compliant for mobiles. Amazons sells millions from mobile devices alone. It won’t take long until we all start selling straight to cell phones and iPads forgetting there was such thing as computer.