Mobile Distribution Strategy

Mobile Distribution Strategy

Mobile messaging has rapidly caught up with social media usage and is now equal. Looking at WeChat, Viber, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, they have 2.125 billion monthly active users globally (users who accessed the apps at least once in a 30-day period), the same as Twitter, Linkedin Instagram and Facebook combined.

 

“SMS marketing has a 99% open rate on average”

So what does that mean to you as a business that wants to reach customers with your marketing communications and digital messaging? You need a mobile distribution strategy.

 

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Mobile Content Distribution

No doubt by the time I have finished writing this post there will be a new mobile messengering app hitting the download stores, however below is a few ideas to how you can leverage mobile content distribution.

Common features between the below is their one-to-one / one-to-many communication capabilities and the ability to share multi media simply and easily and usually for free (other than data).

Many of the mobile apps are actually open to businesses – although many are not taking advantage of it. Imagine an email list where you had a 99% open rate and 90% of it was opened within 3 minutes – that is what you will get if you set up a distribution list on WhatApp.

The best thing about it is that this is free to set up -business SMS can be expensive and is often seen as spam as you often end up on a list by checking a box and not realising.  If set up properly these lists can be gold dust for content distribution and feeding brand evangelists.

A great example is the Huffington Post – I opted into a list months back, their rules were simple. They promised not to send more than two WhatsApps a day – the set up took less than 2 minutes – I now read more Huffington Post content than ever before. Easy.

The fact that you can easily distribute media as well as text is another great benefit – imagine being able to distribute your latest video content / blog at the tap of a button.

OK – this is good for general posting, segmentation would get messy, however it is a simple and easy method of brand communication.

Why is a mobile distribution strategy important?

You have got to go where the market is – people are using messaging apps more than ever before and if you want to get ahead of the curve you need to dive in now. Not many brands doing it, that doesn’t mean it is a bad idea, just a new one.

‘Dark Social’ sharing is a new buzzword / term for sharing that is hard to attribute in analytics, usually done via email and … you guessed it – messaging apps! It is said that traditional social sharing that we see in RT’s and shares on the likes of Facebook and Twitter is only the tip of the iceberg and in reality much more is done via dark social.  Give people a simple and easy way to share in this way on your site – add a whatsapp and email share option. Also allow them to sign up to your mobile messaging distribution.