3 Must-Do Mobile Targeting Strategies

Fair or not, mobile marketing’s biggest obstacle is the difficulty behind its attribution. Quantifying the ROAS on a television ad isn’t easy, but that hasn’t stopped (too) many marketers from dropping $4MM on a Super Bowl spot, along with various production costs. Imagine if marketers took similar leaps of faith with mobile – I’m sure there are folks at Google, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, salivating at that thought.

The reality – again, fair or not – is that mobile is generally held against much stricter standards. To increase your chances of success of finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, here are three must-dos when it comes to mobile audience targeting.

It’s easier than you might imagine. (Courtesy: TheNextWeb)

Your best prospects are those who are already familiar with your brand, especially past customers. Load your CRM data into Facebook and create segments based on purchase history, engagement, lifetime value, etc. You can also create lookalike audiences based on those consumer attributes. Then, target these folks in your mobile campaigns – both on Facebook as well as through its audience network. Given that 1 in 4 minutes spent on mobile happens in Facebook’s apps, this is critically important and valuable for any campaign.

There are three major publishers offering scale that have been validated by third parties to be 90% or more accurate when it comes to cross-device matching. Use them to create segments of potential customers who have already visited your desktop site, or have visited your mobile site. Cookies in mobile are challenging, so leverage the advances made with probabilistic methods of device matching to overcome that barrier.

Where someone has been is a big indicator of where they will go. Targeting audiences based on where they’ve been not only increases the chance of us hitting the right person, but also gives us many more opportunities to reach them than, say, when they are physically near a place. For example, if we simply ran a proximity targeted campaign against people who are near Store X, that’s a very short window of time for us to get our message across. If, however, we build profiles of high-potential customers based on where they’ve been, then we can deliver our ads to them throughout the day, regardless of where they are. The match remains just as strong in terms of interest and affinity, but you’re no longer restricted by physical+time boundaries.

There are many more tactics and approaches to pinpointing the right audience at the right time to drive transactions via mobile, but any and all mobile campaigns should have these at their foundation.