The Era of Mobile: Capitalizing on Mobile Growth

Mobile devices are no longer a rarity or a luxury; mobile phone owners are expected to spend nearly 200 non-voice minutes per day on their devices by 2017. To keep up with these consumers, marketers have begun to ramp up ad spend on mobile and are expected to spend over 70% of total digital ad spend on mobile in 2018.

As activity continues to shift to these devices, mobile-only platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat have materialized. Opportunities to advertise on these new channels have arisen, and marketers must take advantage of the vast mobile audiences available and leverage them to connect with these key targets.

As B2B marketers ourselves, the Skai team saw a great opportunity to reach our clients and prospects when Instagram opened advertising to all. We thought that Instagram would be a great venue to highlight our holiday content, specifically our 12 Tips of Christmas.

Instagram prides itself in having a highly engaged audience in a creative, high-quality environment that drives action with its ads. Because of the inherent creativity among Instagram users and in the platform, we decided to create interesting and visually appealing ads that drove to an interactive landing page (shown below).

We published one ad on Instagram per tip (12 in total), each driving users to our interactive landing page for our 12 Tips of Christmas, which allowed users to click through each tip in an interactive way.

Prior to launching this Instagram ad series, we wanted to be sure we were tailoring our advertising strategy to the platform and adjusting our technique to produce the most positive outcome. We adhered to the following best practices to guide us:

Deliver Relevant Calls to Action

When browsing on a mobile device, consumers usually don’t have quite the same intent or online capabilities as they do when searching on a desktop. They are typically on-the-go and aren’t doing heavy online research. Considering this context, as a marketer, you must adjust your call to action to make it something easily accessible by this type of user. For example, instead of urging your audience to fill out a long form (which they may not have the ability to do easily on their mobile device), simply suggest “Learn More” and drive them to a concise landing page.

Share Digestible Content

Similar to the first best practice, marketers must be cognizant of the types of content they are sharing via Instagram as users are viewing it on smaller screen. While many marketers would like to showcase thought leadership articles and long reports, this may not be the ideal type of content to share via Instagram ads. Instead, we suggest you drive users to mobile-friendly landing pages with concise yet compelling content.

Look through a Mobile Lens when Developing Messaging

As with any ad, the messaging that is paired with an image is just as important as the image. In this particular instance, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of the “mobile consumer” you are targeting. In our case, we chose to highlight one quick tip for our audience to take away from each ad. We didn’t expect them to read through an entire whitepaper and come to conclusions on their own, but wanted them to be able to take away something valuable quickly. Be sure to look through this mobile lens when developing your ad messaging.

By adhering to the best practices above, and having the “mobile consumer” in mind when developing ad copy, we were able to drive over 2,000 incremental clicks to our 12 Tips page and increase awareness of our brand. You too, can test mobile-only advertising on channels such as Instagram to meet your business goals and drive performance.