Glossary

What is mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing is the practice of reaching and engaging consumers through mobile channels — in-app advertising, push notifications, SMS and mobile web.

Marketing practice

All 220 terms

What is genuinely different

Not that mobile is a smaller screen. Three properties actually change the practice.

Attention is fragmented. Mobile sessions are short, interrupted and frequently secondary to something else happening around the user.

The device is personal. A phone is carried, checked constantly and associated with private life, which makes intrusion feel different from an advertisement on a shared computer.

Permissions are granular and revocable. Push, location and tracking each require consent that can be withdrawn permanently.

The channels

In-app advertising — banners, interstitials, rewarded video and native placements.
Push notifications, the strongest re-engagement channel and the easiest to destroy.
SMS, high open rates and heavily regulated.
Mobile web, where most discovery still happens.
App store presence — see ASO.

The constraint that shapes everything

Every high-value mobile channel depends on a permission the user can revoke. Push, location and tracking are all one setting away from being unavailable, permanently, with no route back.

That asymmetry is the discipline of the medium. The cost of overusing a mobile channel is not a poor response rate; it is losing the channel for that person forever. Frequency and relevance decisions on mobile are therefore about preserving an option rather than optimising a campaign.

Common questions

Is mobile marketing still a separate discipline?

Less than it was — most digital marketing is mobile-first by default now. The permission model and the measurement constraints remain genuinely mobile-specific.

How has ATT changed mobile marketing?

Targeting and attribution degraded substantially; creative, first-party data and contextual relevance became the levers that still work. See ATT.

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