Think Mobile

In early 2014, internet usage on mobile devices surpassed PC traffic, irreversibly transforming the marketing landscape.

The busy modern lifestyle has consumers almost constantly on the move. Your marketing has to keep up with them in order to have an impact. In order to hit all of your consumer touch points, your marketing must meet them in the mobile sphere. It’s essential that your marketing is portable, and easy to absorb on-the-go.

Develop a mobile-friendly interface.

According to a Google report, 40% of mobile consumers turn to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile website experience — and 57% wouldn’t recommend a business with a bad mobile site. A mobile-friendly interface will keep you from frustrating and losing prospects.

A mobile-friendly website interface with a responsive design will enable your existing site to adjust its dimensions to fit the size of the device it is displayed on. As a result, you will avoid losing the new-business opportunities generated by searches on mobile devices.

Because many conventional conversion points such as a downloadable white paper or newsletter signup are better suited to a desktop, make sure your website includes mobile-friendly conversion points such as simple forms with auto-populated fields and drop-down menus on your website. With more than 50% of searches now originating on mobile devices, and 77% of executives using smartphones to research products and services for their business, these steps are imperative.

Gear your content to people on-the-fly.

Your content strategy should also be geared toward the mobile consumer.

Short, active content is best to reach today’s busy consumers. This should form the basis of your website content and social-media posts. Longer content should also be divided into sections with clarifying headlines and subheads, in order to allow viewers to glean the main points without reading the entire text.

You should also focus on localized content. A recent Google and Nielsen study found over 40% of all mobile searches were performed with local intent. Consider using Google Trends to look into local search trends to discover which keywords would be most productive to incorporate into your content.

Leverage social media to fuel interaction.

Last but not least, consider the fact that mobile allows constant contact with social media. Social media gives you a more direct channel to engage with customers and prospects, and it is becoming a constant accompaniment to the mobile consumer. This makes it increasingly important for building your business persona and reputation, as consumers turn more and more to their phones when make purchasing decisions.

To maintain and grow your follower base, focus first on one or two social media platforms. Invest the time needed to use them well — instead of spreading your time across every platform and doing a poor job on all of them. Once your first platforms are running smoothly, you can continue to branch out to use additional platforms.

In the Trenches Takeaway.

Assemble various devices (e.g. Android phone, iPhone, iPad) and explore your site on them. Chances are that you will see the need for responsive design if you don’t already have it. If you do have responsive design, look for any elements of the page that still don’t quite work, such as buttons that are too large or too small, and make sure they get fixed. Mimic your customers’ actions on a mobile device by performing a test purchase or submitting a form. We guarantee you can find something to improve about your experience, which your customers are already experiencing.