Why Your Sales and Marketing Stack Needs a Solid Foundation

Imagine the best pancakes you've ever had. What made them work? They likely started with a solid recipe of core ingredients, then added just the right blend of proprietary variations to make an unforgettable short stack. But it all started from a solid foundation – flour, eggs, whole milk, baking powder, salt, cooking fat, and sugar.

Your marketing and sales stack is no different. The foundation will make it or break it. Luckily, the ingredient list isn't nearly as long as the pancake mix.

What are the core ingredients that make up a solid sales and marketing foundation? It starts with a strategy focused on the customer and your content, and the right tool to whip it all together.

Constructing the Stack

The right recipe will help ensure you deliver the right message to the right person at the right point. An effective sales and marketing strategy starts with the customer and content at its core, and is further refined by understanding the journey that customer makes. Glossing over this part often results in half-baked strategies that fall flat.

It's critical to understand what the buyer's journey looks like – the stages of awareness, consideration and decision, and the transitions in between. Each phase or stage will be specific to your buyer, which means getting to know your buyer is imperative.

Enter: The buyer persona. These are detailed accounts of your target customer. They go well beyond basic demographics like age, gender, and occupation. A good buyer persona will detail what their motives and priorities are, how they determine success, what their perceived or actual barriers are, where they search for solutions, and who impacts their decisions.

While surveys and reviewing analytics from online behaviors can provide some level of insights, one-to-one interviews are the best way to gather in depth details. You can conduct phone interviews or in-person visits with existing customers, or use industry events and trade shows as opportunities to talk to prospects, current customers and even the customers of your competitors. You're looking for answers to questions such as:

• What priorities/problems prompted them to search for a solution?


• Why did they choose your brand over another? Or why didn't they?


• How do they determine success and what are their goals?


• What barriers (perceived or actual) might stand in the way of their decision?


• Where do they look for solutions?


• Who influences their decisions?

In depth buyer insights are the bedrock of customer success-focused content.

With this level of detail, you are better equipped to understand and interpret their actions, and the questions they might ask within each stage on their path to purchase. At this point, the recipe will start to come together as you determine how to align your sales and marketing strategies to harmonize with the buyer's journey and be there with the relevant content they need to answer their questions or solve their problems.

Understanding the framework – the customer, their journey and the desired outcome of the content you produce – you will be able to identify what parts of the recipe can be changed as goals change or you learn more about buyer preferences. These three ingredients – the customer, their journey, and the content – will be staples, but how that content is delivered or the type being created can be substituted.

In-depth buyer personas and a map of the customer journey is almost like cheating the system. Marketing and sales teams armed with these are better equipped to make a calculated, winning recipe – serving up the right stack (authentic content), at just the right time and in the right place.

Serving Up the Stack

Now that you've got a solid foundational recipe in place, there's one final element – a solid platform to serve it from. Today, there's a near endless supply of sales and marketing tools to support with everything from automation to customer relationship management and sales enablement, but even the best stack of tools can become unstable without the right foundational platform.

Just some of the tools that can be added to the marketing and sales tech stack. Without the right foundation, this stack can quickly become unstable.

How do you identify the right platform from which to build the recipe? First and foremost, it should support you in building a solid foundation. In other words, it should enable visibility into your customers, the purchase journey they go through, and the delivery of your content at the right place and time. Internal portals, analytics and collaboration amongst the various players on your team is also essential.

(Image Source) How much do you know about your customer? What they're reading, where they're reading it, what social channels they use, and what they do?

Try to avoid a cobbled together “Frankenstack” of sales and marketing tools. This creates silos within your team and makes for an unstable strategy that lacks cohesion. Instead look for a primary platform to serve as the hub. It should play nice with a variety of tools – everything should work in concert. Before you commit to a platform, consider the following:

• What is our desired outcome?


• Will this platform support our goals?


• Does this platform integrate with the apps we need for our team to work seamlessly?


• Does this platform help us fulfill the goals of our customer, and ultimately ensure they continue to move through the funnel?

If you are working with an indirect sales channel, that platform should also support them with the training, marketing and sales tools they need to do their job and nurture their customers.

Conclusion

Before you start throwing together sales and marketing recipes, be sure to understand the role of each of those core ingredients and how they can be used to direct all recipes that follow. This will enable you to create far more effective strategies rather than hoping something will work.

The customer and customer journey, and content that originates from those two ingredients, produces a winning recipe and helps ensure your efforts won't be lost in a sea of marketing messages.

About the Author: Jen Spencer is the Director of Sales and Marketing for Allbound, an innovative SaaS platform that helps companies empower their resellers and distributors to be more customer-focused through content and collaboration. Jen loves animals, technology, the arts, and really good Scotch. You can follow her on Twitter @jenspencer.

10 Must-Know Facebook Ads Tips & Features

It's no secret that paid social is drastically on the rise. Social advertising spend jumped 50% year-over-year in the last quarter of 2015. Social media ad revenue is expected to reach $35.90 billion by 2017, reaching a staggering 16% of the total global digital ad market.

Facebook (including Instagram) unsurprisingly comprises a big piece of this pie, making up an estimated 65.5% of all 2015 social ad spend. This is driven by changes in their CPC model, launch of Instagram ads & the addition of powerful new features.

This post will arm you with 10 important tips & features to ensure you're getting the most out of this channel.

1. Facebook Lead Ads

One of the most recent campaign types added by Facebook are Lead Ads. This campaign type allows advertisers to collect lead data without a landing page and directly through a form without leaving Facebook.

Some early advertisers found Lead Ads to result in a 4x reduction to their CPL (according to Facebook).

Example experience on mobile

To get started with Lead Ads, simply:

1. Create a new campaign with the “Lead Generation” objective

2. Build out your campaign/advert set, as you would for any campaign

3. Create your lead form at the advert level

4. Choose the questions you'd like added and optionally add up to three custom questions

5. Link to your privacy policy, add your disclaimer and destination URL

6. Customize your form

7. Preview then create your form

Now you're ready to get started with Facebook's newest and most powerful lead generation tool.

Tip: Twitter has had this campaign type for years, they call it Twitter Lead Cards.

2. Reporting, Reporting, Reporting

Some of the biggest wins are always found within the reporting section. One of the most important parts of reporting is the 'Breakdown' section.

• Are your mobile placements converting?


• What age group has the strongest CPA?


• What regions aren't converting?


• What gender is responding to your adverts?

These are all important questions that can be answered under the 'Breakdown' drop-down.

In this example, the Instagram placement converted a near 500% better than mobile news feed placement, at a fraction of the CPA. Knowing this, we'd shift more spend to Instagram and remove budget from the mobile news feed placement to maximize performance at our budget (if there's volume available).

3. Attribution models

It's important to understand Facebook's attribution models, where to change the view and what makes sense for your conversion goal. These are the 'rules' for how each conversion is counted, in regards to the timeframe after an interaction with your advert and the method of the interaction (click or view).

This is important to take note of so you have a clear understanding of the value of your conversions and how they compare to the other networks you may be running.

Within 'Manage adverts', the option to change the attribution model can be found under 'Columns' > 'Customize Columns…' > 'Change Attribution Window'.

4. Test Instagram

Since September 2015, Instagram placements have been made public in 30+ countries within the Facebook Ads Dashboard. Getting started with this is as simple as connecting an Instagram account and choosing the Instagram placement.

Break out some test budget and see how this placement compares.

Tip: Here are some helpful best practices when running Instagram Ads

5. Lookalike audiences

I've found lookalike audiences to be one of the most effective targeting methods on paid social.

A lookalike audience is a targeting criteria where Facebook generates an audience of user who are similar to your current customers or audience.

This audience can be based off an email list, segments of your Facebook Pixel or any conversion goals you have set up. Facebook matches these users with Facebook profiles then finds similarities in demographics, interests, behaviors, etc. Lastly, Facebook uses these finding to generate a list of similar Facebook users which you can target in your campaigns.

Learn how to create a lookalike audience here.

6. Keep an eye on Facebook's location options

An often overlooked targeting criteria is Facebook's more granular location targeting options. It's important to keep this in mind while creating your campaigns and use the targeting option that makes the most sense for your business.

Are you trying to target people living in a specific city, or all people within this city? These are two very different targets.

Take for example, a local service business operating only in downtown SF. You wouldn't want to be targeting people visiting for the weekend, or commuting in for work.

7. Speak to your audience

With Facebook's granular targeting methods, in most cases you know who you're speaking to (at least the interest, behaviours, etc. that define your audience).

Use this knowledge to tie copy and creative closely with each specific audience you're targeting.

Targeting a recent homebuyer? How about something like “Your new home would be complete with [Brand Name's] contemporary/ modern furniture line”.

8. Remarketing

All digital marketers know the importance of remarketing, so don't level this out of your Facebook Ads strategy be left out.

Make sure to take advantage of Facebook's audience segmentation options, where you can include/exclude specific pages & domains, as well as choose the remarketing window length.

Tip: Did you know Facebook now offers Dynamic Remarketing?

This feature allows advertisers to remarket specific products to users who've previously viewed or added them to their cart. The creative and copy of your ads will dynamically change based on what products your visitors have viewed.

9. Test multiple creative and copy

Always test many creative and copy variants to see which ones resonate best with your audience. Facebook will optimize ad serving based on performance and your conversion goal.

An interesting and relatively new creative type I recommend testing is the 'Carousel', which allows you to fit multiple images and links into a single creative.

This creative type has been found to reduce your CPA by about 30-50% & decrease your CPC by 20-30% (according to Facebook).

Use this creative type to:

• Showcase multiple products


• Highlight multiple features


• Create a larger canvas


• Outline benefits


• Tell your brand's story

Tip: Don't forget to run a statistical significance test to see if the improvement you're seeing is indeed valid and not just by chance.

10. Breakout campaigns by placement

The different placements offered by Facebook perform very differently. It's important to keep an eye on their performance and where your spend is being directed (details of how to do this are found in #2 above).

When optimizing for clicks, I find most of your budget will get pushed to mobile or audience network (since these have the most effective CPC), however these placements may typically not have the best overall performance.

In most cases, I find it makes sense to break out your campaigns by placement (or at least mobile vs. desktop). This is especially true if you're setting manual bids, or if your campaign is set to optimize for clicks.

Conclusion

I hope you find these Facebook Advertising tips & features useful. If you have any questions or additional tips/features that you think merit discussion, let us know if the comments section, or email me at jacob@cleverzebo.com.

About the Author: This guest post is written by Jacob Young, world-traveling digital nomad and Senior Manager, Ad Operations at Clever Zebo. Currently writing from the Co-Work office in Sayulita, Mexico. To learn how Clever Zebo can jumpstart your paid social efforts, shoot us a note at igor@cleverzebo.com or Tweet us at @CleverZebo.

Integrating SEO and PPC for Multi-Channel Success

Whether you work at a small business or a fortune 500 company, obtaining and utilizing data for your search campaigns is crucial. Conveniently, Google is making you pay for this data by forcing you to use AdWords to get conversion data at a keyword level.

The struggle gets deeper though. Because whether you're in-house or you are working at an agency, the PPC and SEO teams struggle to communicate with each other. They operate isolated from each other, unable to properly leverage their most important assest: first party data.

We are going to dive into actionable ways you can correctly utilize data from both SEO and PPC to ultimately increase your conversion rate and decrease your cost per acquisition.

We will touch on the following three techniques for practical takeaways on how to integrate your search channels:

• Using Keyword Rankings as a Signal for Dataless PPC Campaigns


• Leveraging PPC for Content Marketing to Answer User Intent


• Using Google Display Ads to Hack Key SEO Terms

In the end we are going to wrap all of these tactics together and provide a gameplan for cross-channel success.

Google Stole The Data. Now What?

Google is an ad engine. They are not a search engine operating without a financial objective. As Google evolves, they are constantly taking more SERP real estate.

As Google daily takes more room above the fold, they also have restricted the availability of free keyword data. While there are plenty of tools that allow for keyword tracking (Moz, SEMrush, Advanced Web Ranking, etc.), none of these tell you the most important piece of data:

Which keywords are converting…

In order to obtain this data, we have to pay. Pay Google via AdWords to be exact. By having access to Google's keyword data, we can prioritize our SEO efforts correctly.

For example, imagine you are an online retailer selling men's shorts. How would you traditionally choose your keywords? You might analyze search trends, scope out the competition that is currently ranking and analyze how well they are answering the searchers intent. You may even just look at the search volume and go for it. Unfortunately, these approaches leave you operating in the dark without the ability to quickly understand what keywords convert best historically for your own target market.

By beginning with paid search and then integrating the data into our SEO efforts, we are able to align search volume, rankability, and other traditional SEO metrics with the keyword conversion data from our PPC efforts. We can then correctly prioritize our content marketing and on-page SEO.

Unfortunately, as search engine marketing has grown into a science, departments have become isolated and more specialized. General practitioners knowing both SEO and PPC are a rarity. Instead, search professionals are focusing on a specialty: technical SEO, local SEO, international SEO, AdWords display, remarketing, Google Shopping, local PPC, etc.

As things become hyper specialized and fragmented, the data is lost in communication and SEO departments optimize in the dark relying on frustratingly futile metrics like keyword rankings, page views, overall organic conversions, and time on-site.

When marketing struggles like this arise, the silver lining is that tight knit teams and agencies are able to leverage the data from both the organic and paid search channels for collaborative success.

3 Dynamic Ways to Integrate Paid and Organic Traffic

There is no universal magic wand for search success. Instead, best practices exist. Below are best industry practices on how to integrate your paid and organic traffic for multichannel success.

Using Keyword Rankings as a Signal for Dataless PPC Campaigns

Google search ads are expensive. For some industries (plumbers, lawyers, etc.) cost per clicks (CPC) can exceed $100. It is difficult for most businesses to justify this high of an advertising expense on even one visitor let alone a lead. Instead, these businesses will often focus their efforts solely on SEO.

As they do so, they begin to build models of varying certainty that particular keywords are what generate their revenue.

Thus, when launching a new PPC campaign and there is significant organic traction it is essential to audit not only competitors and CPCs, but also, the Google Search Console report.

Here is a practical step-by-step process for launching a campaign for an account with organic rankings.

1. Go to Google Search Console


2. Click on Search Traffic > Search Analytics


3. Add impressions data by checking the box


4. Analyze impressions report for top queries most related to their buyer intent keywords


5. Launch campaigns around keywords receiving the most impressions and clicks


6. If these keywords are driving new business let's take more market share above the fold and add search ads to the marketing mix

Lastly, if you are using a keyword ranking tool then simply mine your top keywords driving the largest percentage of qualified traffic and take additional market share with search ads: build, launch, test, measure.

Leveraging PPC for Content Marketing to Answer User Intent

As search marketers, it is our responsibility to interject ourselves into our target market's online buying journey. Specifically, we need to strategically position our business within SERPs at all stages of the search funnel from ideation to retention.

When our target market searches for what we offer or sell online, they need to find us within the search engine results page (SERP). This can mean that we are advertising on sites that rank for our keywords meaning we show up via AdWords, in the local pack and Google Shopping, etc. The possibilities are endless, but we need to strategically execute.

One essential way search is not integrated enough is content marketing and PPC. These two services are treated far too often as distant planets operating in their own solar systems.

It's time to end that. No longer shall these services/departments operate in their own silo. Instead, there needs to be a practical intersection of the two services. But first, a basic understanding of both areas of expertise is needed.

In the example below, you will find shopping ads, search ads, and a highly relevant piece of content. Imagine if the PPC team and the content team were on the same page and your brand was in all three spots!

In the discovery stage of PPC, the specialist is looking to design an account architecture that allows them to position their keywords in different areas of a target buyer's journey through the SERPs.

To fully understand what their target market is searching for, they will often begin with broad match modified keywords. This tactic will show your ad in any search that contains your keywords. For example, “+blender +smoothie” will show your ad for any searches containing both keywords regardless of the order.

By mining the search term reports, we are now able to see the user intent of our target market based on the keywords they are searching for when they click on our ads. We can now provide this data to the content marketing department with all of our highest converting longtail keywords.

With this information, the content marketing team can analyze search volume, rankability, and brand fit to create content around this query.

The end goal is that we are now able to not only show an ad on these high converting SERPs, but also rank organically on this page above the fold.

Using Google Display Ads to Hack Key SEO Terms

Often times, we are not able to take total market share for high performing queries. Let's use my company, Directive Consulting, for this example. We want to rank for “seo company” in our area, but, because “seo company” is localized, we have a greater chance of ranking in our city, Irvine, CA.

If, however, we want to rank nationally and increase our lead volume, it is pertinent that we look at national results and see if any of those results/websites have display ads.

For this exact query, Forbes wrote an article entitled: “4 Tips for Hiring the Right SEO Firm”. The article ranks very well nationally, and is a frequent stop for someone looking to hire an agency. In a freaky intersection of SEO and Google's Display Network, we can take advantage of a site that ranks well for our target keyword and position our business once again within the buyer's journey by advertising with a display ad on that website.

We simply need to go into our Adwords account, create compelling display ads, and position ourselves on the page above the fold! See below.

The goal should no longer be to rank solely organically for a keyword or for pay-per-click advertising. Instead, we need to integrate both channels through remarketing, display, and search.

The key is to place yourself as many times as possible in your target markets SERP journey, while measuring the performance and budget according to results and re-allocating.

Conclusion

No longer are isolated search campaigns an option. The landscape is too competitive and the buyer journey is multi-faceted. Your campaigns need to think beyond isolation and move towards integration.

As mentioned, the following tactics provide a foundational way that you can take a step towards dynamic integration:

• Using Keyword Rankings as a Signal for Dataless PPC Campaigns


• Leveraging PPC for Content Marketing to Answer User Intent


• Using Google Display Ads to Hack Key SEO Terms

The tactics provided here provide a brief look into the dynamic ways you can integrate your campaigns, but the execution will be key.

As Google daily takes more SERP real estate for paid advertising, PPC will play an even larger role tomorrow than today. Furthermore, as the field becomes more competitive, the CPC's will only rise.

The businesses that best leverage content and integrate their efforts with first party data from their paid search department will lead the pack.

About the Author: Garrett Mehrguth is the CEO of Directive Consulting, a Google Partner and MozLocal Recommended Agency serving mid-enterprise level firms.He has been published in Moz, Ahref, Convince and Convert, Wordstream, Raven, Local Search Ranking Factors, and more. He has spoken at MozCon Ignite, General Assembly, PeopleSpace Innovation Labs, SoCal Code Camp and others.

How to Create a Buyer Persona Map (Even if You Have No Idea Who Your Customers Really Are)

Buyer personas. Creating potential customer profiles is often enough to make even the best marketer freeze in their tracks – and realize how little they really know about their prospects.

If this sounds like you, don't worry. And even if you've never created a buyer persona in your life, today's article will help make sense of the process by giving you a sort of “map” to follow.  Let's take a closer look.

Starting Fresh: Getting the Basics

The very first step in your map is going to be the core information about your customer. Things like:

• Gender


• Age range


• Job title


• Job responsibilities

You can likely get that much from the data stored in your CRM.

I'd also recommend “humanizing” the persona with a name and image. Doing so tends to bring out more of our emotional, empathetic side rather than looking at the potential customer as a number to slot somewhere into a sales funnel like a puzzle piece.

Learning from Example

For our example here, we've chosen to work with “Lucy”, a marketing director in her late 40s. Her job primarily entails lead generation, sales management, and gathering competitive intelligence. She organizes and prioritizes campaigns. She's a pro at gathering competitive intelligence and using it wisely to help reinforce the brand and cement customer loyalty in a very competitive marketplace.

Because of the huge growth in social media, Lucy's looking for a way to streamline the interaction process on social media without losing the “personability” of the brand. She's in the market for a system/solution and wants to make a confident decision quickly.

So with this in mind, our persona map is going to look something like this so far:

Now, to liken this back to a map concept, we've got our starting point. Next, it's time to look at the journey.

Our first stop along the map is the buyer's needs. She has the basic research to know what's out there. If we were looking at this from a traditional sales funnel point of view, she's at the “comparison shopping” stage.  She'll be looking to make a decision soon.

Understanding the Buyer's Needs

Buyers are eager to tell you what they need. All you have to do is ask. Basic lead follow-up and nurturing questions can reveal quite a bit. Simple polls and surveys can often reveal a great deal about where the buyer actually is in the process (and whether they have an urgent need for your product or service versus basic curiosity). Even if we don't know specifically what they need, we can make some blanket statements to apply them to our persona. What would someone in this job typically need from our solution?

For starters, the buyer likely needs the product to be well documented. She'll be managing dozens, perhaps hundreds of staff members – some of whom (based on age) may be more technically savvy than she is. Some of the staff may pick it up quickly, others may need more time.  We'll add the needs and the persona's place in the decision-making process (one persona can have multiple roles in the decision process - they can be a user and initiator, for example)

There's also the fact that whatever solution needs to be adaptive and flexible to accommodate existing platforms and tools. The company itself likely has certain procedures and requirements of its own that need to be added to the mix, like cloud-based access and certain security protocols. These kinds of factors can influence and even conflict with what the primary buyer wants. Never mind that decisions like these are often made by committee, which lengthens the time needed and the requested features.

Dealing with Common Objections

Like all maps, there are roadblocks that are likely preventing your customer from taking action.  There are constraints and concerns, frustrations and issues that affect their decision.  You can brainstorm these obstacles and add them to the map to ensure that sales knows how to address the most common objections before they become major pain points.

You also have to decide where this buyer falls on the scale of decision-making. Will they be using the product? Influencing the decision-maker? Initiating contact with the company? A mix of all of these? Make a note of these objections and the buyer persona's place in the decision-making cycle on your map.

Following our example, we end up with something like this:

Here, we've managed to discover (and brainstorm) the buyer's potential:

• Needs


• Concerns


• Frustrations


• Urgency/Timeframe to Buy


• Place in the buying cycle


• Requirements

All the kinds of sales-propelling information needed to acknowledge objections, concerns and frustrations while concentrating on needs, requirements and urgency.  We've not only learned core demographics about our buyer, but key information that may be preventing them from action, or details that could move a sale into the next stage.

Our buyer persona map is less of a neatly-organized, bulleted list and more like a mind-map that's always being added to and revised.  It may not be as tidy, but our map is more authentic, and closer to the actual customer experience.

Think about the last time your company made a major purchase. It's seldom a “beginning to end” one-time shot, isn't it? There's lots of details to hammer out, lots of presentations to sit through, lots of suggestions and sign-offs to gather. It's a big process and a fancy list of bullets just doesn't cut it anymore – not in today's two-way communication world.

The Bottom Line on Understanding Buyer Behavior

It might seem counter-intuitive to go through this entire process with every type of buyer your company encounters. After all, you've likely got a lot more than just one type of customer. And if you're in retail, you've got suppliers, wholesalers, resellers, and a whole avalanche of personas out there.  Don't panic, prioritize. Focus on your best customers and find the unifying threads that tie them together, and then build on that persona.

And remember that buyers are multi-faceted human beings. Sometimes they make decisions that go against the grain of even the best, most well-developed persona. It happens. But here, it pays to remember that the journey is just as important as the destination, and the easier you make that journey, the more receptive the buyer will be to taking the action you want them to take.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

Secrets For Choosing the Right Mobile Messaging Channel

Have you ever deleted an app from your device because it sent you too many push notifications? Or wondered why your latest flight info is popping up as a text message, rather than in your digital wallet?

Bad messaging channel choices, that's why. Mobile devices offer you a huge number of different ways to connect with your users and customers. Each channel is best suited to convey different types of messages. Pick the right one for what you want to say!

If you don't have an app…

Even without an app, you have a few options for getting messages to your users on their mobile devices.

Text messaging

The original mobile channel. SMS and MMS can reach anyone who's given you their number, and your messages arrive right away. You're limited in how nice you can make your message look, and text messages aren't very interactive. But all you need is a phone number to get started.

Text is best used for simple, urgent messages, particularly transactional ones, like flight status updates. (But only if you don't have an app!) They're often used for discounts and another infrequent announcements as well, but you'll have much more success with messages sent through an installed app.

Website

Marketers often don't think of their website or web app as a communication channel. But it is. It's just passive; mostly, you have to wait for your users to come to you. This makes it difficult to provide timely updates, and you lose a lot of context, like your visitor's exact location. But you can closely track what your user is doing, and let them immediately take many different types of actions.

Your website is best used for messages that aren't urgent, and that are meant to be acted on when your user is on your site. For example, a month-long sale is useful to promote through your site, since many of your regular visitors will see it, and you can link them right to sale items. Shipping notifications are much less useful to send through your site, since your user won't see them right away. As another example, it's hard to re-engage dormant users on your site, but it's a great channel for acquiring new ones.

Digital Wallet

Apple and Google are constantly adding features to digital wallet passes. It's appropriate to think of the digital wallet as a lightweight version of an app. Passes are easy to distribute, easy for a user to add, and can have some branding that helps users recognize and remember you.

They can pop up at certain locations where they're most useful, for example, near your store. And they can be updated with new information as needed.

Use a digital wallet pass any time you would otherwise hand your user a piece of paper or plastic. Tickets, loyalty cards, payment cards, and coupons are all great uses for digital wallet passes. Specific messages about product updates, promotions, and transactional communications are not as good a fit.

If you do have an app…

If you have an app, your options broaden considerably.

Push notifications

Everyone's received a push notification. If you get a user to install your app, you can send one at any time; your user doesn't even have to be in the app to see it. They're easy to brand, and you can even specify actions for the user to take with a single tap.

Push notifications are great for delivering small amounts of real-time information (like sports scores, notifications, and news), and also for getting a user to take an action, such as learning about a special promotion. However, they only reach people who have opted-in, which is usually less than half of your users. They're also high stakes; users will notice immediately if you send irrelevant content, and they'll turn off push access off for your app, or even uninstall it.

In-app messages

In-app messages are similar to push notifications, but they're delivered to your users while they're active in your app. You can put real-time updates in them, and, unlike push notifications, they don't require opt-in in order to be received.

In-app messages are great complements to push notifications for users who haven't opted in, and can be used to send similar, highly-targeted messages, such as real-time information that's relevant within the context of your app.

Message center

This is a completely passive channel inside your app. The message center archives messages that have been sent to your users in the past, and makes them accessible later. This is a great channel for storing things that don't require immediate action and that might be most useful when a user is already in your app.

What should you send?

No matter what channel you use, your user's attention is a precious resource, and you have to make sure that what you're sending is valuable to them. Answer these questions before you use any of these channels:

What's the purpose of your message?

What action do you want the user to take when they receive it? Figuring this out will make it easier to decide on whether you need a channel with interactivity; it will also help you figure out how truly urgent your message actually is, and how to measure its success. Is there a call to action, or is this purely for brand awareness?

What context does your message matter in?

Mobile messaging is all about context: time, location, user preferences. Deciding what context is truly important will help you pick the right channel. For example, if something matters in real-time, you'll want to use push. If it matters when the user gets to it, you could try an in-app message.

Will your user care?

Worry about whether what you're sending is useful. If you're Twitter, it might be OK to send 20 push notifications a day, if your user wants to keep a close eye on their followers. If you're Candy Crush, maybe you shouldn't even send one push notification a week, because your user is a casual gamer who doesn't care about new features. If you focus on delivering what your user wants, you'll have to worry a lot less about everything else.

Conclusion

As a mobile marketer, you've got lots of channels to choose from. We haven't even touched on emerging channels, like chatbots and wearables, which will play an increasingly large role in delivering useful content to your users. The key with any channel is to match the characteristics of the message to the medium. And don't forget to listen to your users, too - if you pay attention to their responses and preferences, they'll tell you how and what they want delivered.

About the Author: Justin Dunham is Lead, Marketing Technology and Analytics at Urban Airship, the leading mobile engagement platform. Urban Airship helps leading brands engage their mobile users and build high-value relationships from the moment customers download an app. For more, follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.