There’s no limit to the ways consumers utilize their mobile devices today. From streaming movies, to one-click shopping and connecting with friends and family on social media, the capabilities of mobile devices have made a major impact on daily life.
Customers are engaging with brands across an increasing number of touch points: websites, social media, in-store, mobile, and tablets. However they interact, customers expect a customized and personalized experience that is optimized specifically for them. This has in turn shaped the way marketers connect with their customers; they need to be dialed-in to their audience’s mobile strategy in order to provide the experiences consumers expect.
Mobile marketing offers a major opportunity for today’s digitally-connected brands; in fact, more than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices. However, despite these numbers, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop.
The reason? Many businesses fail to prioritize mobile properly because they’re unaware that their current mobile strategy isn’t working. Before diving into the world of mobile marketing, here are a few questions today’s marketers need to consider:
Are you thinking like a customer?
Before constructing a mobile marketing strategy, it’s important to conduct proper research on how consumers utilize their mobile devices. Consumers today average more than 100 minutes of active mobile screen time per day, but how can marketers grasp their attention with the sea of other online experiences also at play?
Starting from a consumer perspective and building strategy from there is an airtight solution for developing a mobile marketing strategy that succeeds. Here are a few qualities that consumers expect when interacting with a brand on mobile:
Mobile-Responsive Sites
Having a site that is able to adapt to the smaller screens of smartphones and tablets is the foundation of a mobile marketing strategy. A site that doesn’t convert to mobile forces consumers to zoom in and out of a product image or struggle to locate a navigation bar, which can be extremely frustrating. This will likely lead to the consumer exiting a site to find a simpler alternative. However, when a website is responsive, the layout and content adapt to fit based on the size of the screen they’re presented on.
Although many sites are already optimized for mobile devices, those that aren’t may be missing many sales opportunities. Businesses that are unsure whether or not their site is mobile responsive or not, can enter their site’s URL into Google Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Not only will this demonstrate what a site looks like on a mobile device, but Google will also make recommendations to improve the mobile design.
Site Speed
A site’s loading speed plays a major role in creating a great customer experience. Kissmetrics recently found that 47 percent of a site’s visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds. Fast-loading sites perform better on all fronts: better user experience, higher conversions, more engagement, and higher search rankings. Site speed becomes even more important when businesses are after mobile traffic. If a page doesn’t load quickly enough to meet customer expectations, they can simply move on to a competitor’s whose does.
If a brand notices its page is loading at less-than-optimal speeds, there may be a number of contributing factors. A few simple resolutions include: upgrading to a faster web host, optimizing the site’s images, or using a content delivery network.
Tailored Content
Just because a digital strategy works for desktop users doesn’t mean it will perform for mobile users. Creating a strategy that is unique to the capabilities of mobile devices is more engaging for consumers and also puts a creative spin on traditional marketing tactics. Mobile devices can perform a ton of capabilities that desktops can’t execute to their full capacity.
Location-based marketing is a great example of a tactic that can be tailored to mobile devices. Marketing Land lists four primary methods of location-based marketing: geofencing, geotargeting, geoconquesting and proximity marketing. Simply put — there is immense marketing value in knowing an audience’s location. Because mobile devices can take advantage of a consumer’s geolocation, they can be used to fuel these marketing tactics with targeted ads or promotions.
How do you get users coming back again and again?
To make your mobile experience truly successful, it must become an essential part of a user’s life, solving a problem, making something that needs to be done on a routine basis easier, or providing such interesting and helpful content that users come back frequently. Although it’s a major feat to get consumers to interact with your mobile site, it’s an entirely separate accomplishment to get them to use it over and over again.
A brand must be able to consistently deliver value to its customers via its mobile capabilities, which is often in the form of incentives or promotions. Take RetailMeNot for example, as they consistently feed customers with discounts from local retailers and provides them with easy-to-use smartphone coupons they can show to save money at checkout. From a consumer perspective, the RetailMeNot mobile experience is easy to use, convenient and provides measurable value.
Is mobile strategy a company-wide priority?
It’s not enough for a business to assign just one team member to manage its mobile strategy. Enhancing the customer experience via mobile touch points must become the responsibility of the entire organization.
For example, marketing and analytics teams should be constantly measuring and optimizing for new revenue opportunities. Developers need to be up to speed on the latest mobile development tools and techniques. Designers should be vastly familiar with mobile UX best practices and work closely with developers to create the best possible experience. These efforts should also be extended to executive leadership, who should invest in the proper technologies and resources to meet these expectations.
With more options than ever, people demand a mobile experience that’s fast and friction-free. Ensure you’re meeting customer expectations — and your mobile growth goals — by leaning into these principles and investing where it counts.
Author Bio: Maddie Davis is co-founder of Enlightened Digital and a tech-obsessed female from NYC. She lives by building websites, running marathons and reading anything and everything on the NYT Best Sellers list.