The toolkit for mobile ad buyers: Steps to scaling your advertising on mobile

Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, a professional speaker and freelance writer. This post originally appeared on Adknowledge.

Whether your business is focused on mobile gaming or travel, it’s essential that your organization continue to scale your advertising on mobile devices year over year.

This growth is critical to your business in order to outpace competitors, reach a larger audience, engage your customer base where they are most active and to increase your relevant messaging at different points in the purchase funnel.

This year alone, mobile ad spending is estimated to reach $31.45 billion, according to eMarketer. The time is now to start scaling your mobile advertising before your business is left in the past, far behind your competitors.

Here are four considerations for mobile ad buyers when trying to grow their advertising campaigns:

1. Control a substantial budget

It’s a no-brainer that your budget is a huge part of scaling your mobile advertising, which is why it’s so important to begin positioning yourself (or your team) toward managing a larger budget on behalf of your company.

To begin to scale your mobile advertising to a much larger audience, you’ll need to enlist the services of a social advertising partner, as well as an increased budget to fuel this partnership effectively.

According to Erica Ruzicka, a marketing manager at Adknowledge, a decent mobile advertising budget is approximately $50,000 to $100,000 a month in order to see results from a campaign centered around increasing mobile app installs, for example.

Working with an advertising partner is the only way to increase the reach of your campaigns on a much larger scale since you aren’t able to manage these campaigns yourself to the same capacity. Constraints on technology, staff and ongoing optimization required to make them cost effective are all better handled by the people who deal with those issues day in and day out.

2. Understand where you’re targeting ads

Start understanding where you’d like to target your mobile advertising campaigns on a larger scale than what you’re doing today.

What buyer personas make up your audience? Answering this question will help better guide your marketing for the future by giving your team insight on who your audience is, how your messaging is interesting to them and what messaging will compel the audience to take action.

Once you’ve got these buyer personas in mind, it’s time to decide how you’d like to target a larger segment of your audience by location, demographics, interests, behaviors, relationship status, education level, employment, financial circumstances, ethnicity, generation, political opinions and more.

When targeting these personas on Facebook and elsewhere on mobile, this requires much more extensive budget and campaign management to properly optimize these ads across markets to get the best ROI for your efforts.

3. Define the type of mobile apps you’re promoting

The type of mobile app you’re promoting greatly affects the nuances of your campaigns, especially when you’re focused on creating volume with your advertising.

Be extremely clear about the types of mobile apps you’re planning to promote on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere to help increase mobile app installs at the right price for your budget.

For example, a mobile gaming app has different user base then an e-commerce app and therefore, the approach to driving an increase in app downloads to one versus the other is completely different.

4. Focus on the goals you’d like to achieve

As a mobile advertiser, it’s likely you’ve got a firm grasp on the goals you’re looking to achieve with each campaign. Not all installs are created equal, which is why it is so essential to understand the goals of your campaign and match your tactics for reaching them, especially as you scale.

The advanced targeting capabilities of a social advertising partner can help ensure your company is practicing intelligent user acquisition practices that drive quality results.

To better understand if these results are affecting the goals you’ve set, consult the reporting functions you have in place to monitor the success of your campaigns.

Work with a social advertising partner to better manage the measurement of your campaigns as your business continues to increase the volume of your mobile advertising.

What’s influencing your organization’s decision to grow your mobile advertising to the next level? As you continue to scale, what are you biggest concerns? Share your insights in the comments below.