Mobile phones have, in the last few years, become a sheer necessity in almost everyone’s life. Imagining life without a mobile phone is like imagining a world without air – nothing would function and people would be at a loss on what to do. We use mobile phones for everything, from checking the weather forecast to keeping in touch with everyone – the possibilities with them are endless.
Along with this sharp rise in mobile phones (especially, in the past few years, smartphones), mobile advertisers have found ever more ingenious ways to cash in. Mobile advertising and marketing is big business and, owing to the rise in popularity of smartphones, a growing business. There are many different ways to embed adverts into mobile phones, either through applications or advertisements on mobile-optimized webpages.
Apple was one of the first smartphone manufacturers to focus on the topic of mobile advertising
Up till now, if you wanted to break into the mobile advertising market then you either had to be a whiz at website programming or you had to spend large amounts of money on external advertising campaigns. However, there is another way. ma.rs is a mobile marketing tool which not only helps you create great-looking mobile-optimized websites but can also help you control a successful mobile marketing campaign using QR-codes and detailed statistics.
Let’s take a closer look at ma.rs and its features.
Introduction
ma.rs is a web-based, mobile marketing platform that helps you can create simple, yet good-looking mobile websites without any programming knowledge. For this review, I signed up to the basic, free version which allows 2 marketing campaigns, no collaborators and no SMS functionality. However, plans with more advanced options are available from $19 per month. There is also the option of a 30-day free trial so you can fully experience the platform before committing to buying.
The pricing structure of ma.rs
On opening up ma.rs, you are greeted with the Dashboard, which gives you an overview of your current marketing campaigns.
The dashboard in ma.rs, showing all your current marketing campaigns
Features
ma.rs has all the tools you need to create a successful mobile marketing campaign. Let’s have a look at them in a bit more detail.
Website Creation
Once you’ve chosen a name for your new mobile marketing campaign, you can start getting on with designing the website. One of the best features about ma.rs is that it allows you to create mobile marketing campaigns without any prior programming knowledge – you simply add your required modules to the website and ma.rs does the rest.
Creating a website in ma.rs is nice and simple and requires no programming knowledge at all
Apart from text and titles, you can add a wide variety of “modules” to your website, such as news feeds, comment boxes and SMS modules. ma.rs has two default themes, but you can create your own using the theme creator (you’ll need to know a bit about HTML though).
The theme creator in ma.rs. You'll require a little bit of HTML knowledge here though
Once you’ve finished designing your website, you can view exactly how it will look on a mobile using ma.rs mobile preview mode. If you’re satisfied with the results, then you can publish your website straight away using either your own link or a randomly-generated one from ma.rs.
The mobile view in ma.rs
Managing Your Campaign
On the paid plans (i.e. from $19 per month), ma.rs supports e-mail (including MailChimp) and SMS campaigns right from inside the program, allowing you to spread your campaign to further afield. You can also publish your campaign easily using SMS and QR codes, though for SMS codes you’ll need to buy SMS credits separately.
Managing your campaign is simple using the built-in tools
Analysing Your Campaign
Once you’ve designed and uploaded your marketing campaign, you’ll of course want to know how successful it is. ma.rs has plenty of analysis tools built in to help you keep track of visitor numbers to your website. Every single visit is recorded and charted in a line chart, so you can see how your visitor numbers have progressed over time.
Analysing the amount of visitors to your website is simple and clear
You can also identify which device your visitors are using (useful if you are targeting certain devices with your advertising, such as mobile applications) and, with more expensive plans, you can track the location of all the visitors to your website.
Conclusion
We only had time to dig into a small portion of ma.rs’ features, and every time I used it I could hear it screaming at me to carry on digging deeper. It allows you to manage your advertising campaign with the minimum amount of fuss and allows you to keep an exact eye on what exactly is going on and, most importantly, whether your advertising campaign is successful or not. This, for most people, is a huge bonus and one that is worth shelling out a bit of money for.
For some people looking to break into a mobile marketing campaign, ma.rs may be a little too expensive for their budget ($19 a month for the basic paid plan certainly isn’t cheap). But for any freelancer or small business with a marketing budget, then ma.rs is a definite contender to consider.