Mobile Marketing Tools to Boost Your Readership

By Mitzi Perdue

You’ve just written a piece that you’re proud of. What tool is available in 2021 to help you do the following:

• Boost the article’s readership

• Drive readers seamlessly and easily to where the content is published

• Enable loyal readers to press a “share with” button to get still more readers

The answer is mobile marketing. “As a member of the press, you need to go where your audience is. Today, 58% of people use their mobile devices for reading the news,” According to Jennifer Gutschmidt from MobiPop.

She goes on to explain that mobile marketing can help with any kind of marketing campaign. However, it’s a particularly valuable and underused when it comes to members of the press.

Let’s suppose you’d like to use mobile marketing to increase the reach of your columns. What would you need to do to use your smart phone for mobile marketing? And what would the end result look like?

Steps for Mobile Marketing

1. Find a text message provider. Do this by googling “Text message provider” plus the name of your country. Your search might look something like this: “Text message provider, Spain.”

2. Purchase the service.

3. Set up the service and learn to use it. “Plan to invest at least three hours and probably more to do this,” says Gutschmidt.

4. Make a note of the “short code,” and “keyword” you got when setting up the service. As an example of a keyword and short code, Gutschmidt invites you to “Text Mobi to 55312.” The keyword is “Mobi” and the short code “55312”.

5. Learn the texting laws for your country. These vary from country to country.

6. Get people to sign up for your mobile marketing system. You can send your keyword and short code to everyone on your social media and email list, inviting them to sign up. You may want to advertise it. Also, put your keyword and short code on your business cards and the signature line for all your emails. As an example of how this might look, here’s what I use for my anti-trafficking website, WinThisFight.org: “Text WTF to 51555.”

Mobile Marketing Tips

Gutschmidt has some additional recommendations for taking advantage of this new awareness tool: “Usually, you have only three seconds to get someone’s attention. Have your call to action at the top third of your screen. You don’t want people to have to scroll to get to the most important part.” She also suggests, “Avoid having information that takes more than two scrollings to get to the end. If your material is longer, have a ‘read more’ button.”

Have an enticing but brief message. Instead of your message being, “I wrote an article, and here it is,” craft a teaser that will make them want to know more. As a hypothetical example: “Suppose you’re in France and you’ve just written a story on COVID-19 vaccinations. You send out a message to your mobile audience with a link to your story, along with a teaser message, ‘Here’s the latest on vaccinations and where you can get yours!”

You may benefit from doing internet research to see if mobile marketing would work for you. Potentially, it could boost your impact and influence.