How Brands Can Measure and Improve Mobile Marketing Success Things to keep in mind while creating a marketing strategy for your mobile brand

Designing a mobile marketing strategy is both an art and science. You need to take many factors into account, listen to your hunches about your audience, draw on your experience, and put new tactics into place.

But how do you know if your strategy is working?

You won't unless you measure it. Here are five steps you can take to measure the effectiveness of your mobile marketing strategy.

1. Start with Goals

Measuring your mobile marketing strategy starts before you begin your first campaign. It starts with your goals. When creating your marketing strategy, choose goals that relate to your business KPIs. For example, if your marketing strategy is focused on demand generation, you might measure things like the number of app downloads or the number of impressions you get on specific ad campaigns.

If you're trying to increase lead generation, you might measure the number of downloads from your lead magnets or in-app signups for your newsletter. Conversions will likely be measured by purchases, though this depends on your business model.

No matter what your goal is, make sure to identify it before you run your campaign. And use the SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) to ensure your goals are effective.

For example, you could set a goal to increase the number of daily app users by 50% in the next quarter. Or to have 500 new sign-ups to your premium service by the end of the year.

When your marketing campaign has an achievable and measurable goal, you can use analytics to see how effective it is.

2. Monitor Analytics

Mobile analytics is the backbone of your measurement efforts. The main point of collecting analytics is simple: see if you're meeting your goals.

With a robust analytics tool, you can see how many people are using your app, what they're doing with it, and when they stop using it. You can measure and track every stage of the user lifecycle: usage, conversions, churn . . . analytics shows it all.

But mobile analytics can do more than that. They can also show you new trends to capitalize on when you set your next round of goals.

For example, you might find out that users aren't using a particular app feature. Your next goal might be to get more people to try it. Or you could see that usage tends to drop off at certain times in the day or week. You might want to investigate and incentivize users to use the app during those times.

With effective analytics, you'll be able to measure whether your marketing strategy works and see where to make improvements. It's that simple.

3. Get Qualitative Data, Too

Analytics can give you a tremendous amount of quantitative data. But when measuring the effectiveness of your mobile marketing strategy, it's a good idea to get qualitative feedback too.

You don't need to run focus groups to get this kind of data. You might do something as simple as asking for feedback through a simple in-app notification. Or email a few of your users and to ask what they think of your app or mobile site.

Qualitative data gives you insight into your user experience. And that can open up new avenues for exploration in your marketing strategy. You might be surprised at how insightful your users are when asked for their opinion.

4. Make Changes & Experiment

This is an important step: once you measure your mobile marketing strategy and see how well it's working, you'll want to make some changes.

You'll find parts of the strategy that aren't working as well as you'd hoped. And some unexpected parts that are performing really well.

Once you've effectively measured your strategy, you can make changes to both of those areas to improve its efficacy. For example, if a particular email offer leads to users being more engaged with your app, you can send that offer to more users.

Don't be afraid to experiment! While most of your actions should be guided by your analytics data, there's something to be said for a marketer's hunches. Sometimes you just need to be creative and go out on a limb.

5. Re-Measure

After you've made some changes, you'll need to measure your key performance indicators again. For the most part, you'll want to measure the exact same things that you did before to get a fair comparison.

This lets you compare before and after, and gives you a clear idea of how your changes have affected your metrics. You may want to include some new metrics if your tactics have changed.

But the important part is to keep your metrics up to date. Keep measuring and looking for patterns. That's what results in a continuous improvement to your mobile marketing strategy.