Smartphones are popular. Those three words sum up exactly why no business can afford to ignore mobile marketing in 2018. Of course, you didn’t need us to tell you this, as you only need to walk through downtown Frederick, MD (or any street across the country for that matter) to confirm that as the truth. Countless people walk around staring at their phones throughout most of the day, thumbing from one app to the next. If you want to position your business in front of those eyes, you need to have a strong plan for your mobile marketing efforts.
In this article, we are going to break down some of the keys to a quality mobile marketing campaign. Incredibly, it is expected that more than 80% of all traffic across the web will be mobile traffic in 2018 – a statistic which highlights the importance of marketing specifically to mobile users. Successfully businesses rarely reach their heights by ignoring huge segments of the market, which is exactly what you would be doing if you failed to market in a way that suited those on mobile devices.
While mobile marketing can be an intimidating challenge to tackle, we hope it seems a little more manageable after you read through the four sections below.
Mobile-Friendly Design Is an Obvious Step
For starters, you need to make sure the site you are presenting to the world is designed in such a way that it will work nicely on a mobile device. At this point in the development of the web, this is something that most businesses have under control. Not all have taken this step, however, so be sure to catch up as quickly as possible if you are one which is lagging behind.
What does it mean to have a mobile-friendly web design? Here are a few keys –
• Mobile search optimization. The SEO that you use to appeal to desktop computer users might not apply directly to the mobile world. For instance, a long meta description will take up a lot of screen space on a phone, harming the user experience.
• Easy navigation. Do users need to thumb up and down on your site in order to find what they are looking for? That’s a bad sign. Design your mobile pages such that they are easy to use and easy to read.
• Quick load times. No one is going to wait around for your slow site to load up on their mobile device. If your site is too slow, they’ll just tap the back button and go somewhere else. Do your best to make sure that your site is loading quickly in the mobile world.
Think Local
When do people use their phones as opposed to their desktop computers or laptops? Simple – when they are on the go. For example, if someone is sitting in a local restaurant looking for somewhere to have dessert, they may pull out their phone and quickly search for ‘ice cream shops in Frederick, MD’. As the owner of an ice cream shop, you need to be sure you optimize for local search!
Continuing this line of thinking, you want to make sure that your mobile pages display your contact information – address, phone number, etc. – in a way that is easy to find. As a business, it is your job to make the consumers’ job as easy as possible. Don’t put any hurdles between you and the customer when they are searching on a mobile device.
Master Paid Search
Depending on the competitiveness of your market, it may be necessary to enter the paid search advertising world while trying to draw mobile traffic. Paid mobile search is different from paid search for desktop traffic in a number of ways. For one thing, you’ll want to use keywords which speak to the mobile audience, and you’ll also want to consider incorporating ad extensions.
If you already have found success with PPC marketing in the desktop world, it would be tempting to just copy/paste that approach over to your mobile bidding. Don’t make that mistake. While you don’t necessarily need to start over from scratch with your bidding, you do want to make sure that your plan has been designed to take advantage of what mobile has to offer.
Content Still Rules
There are plenty of details to think about when working on mobile marketing efforts, but sometimes you just need to keep things simple and handle the basics appropriately. With that in mind, remember that content is still incredibly important from a digital marketing perspective. Quality content goes a long way, whether it is delivered on a desktop or on a phone.
With specific regard to people reading your content on their phones, make sure it is easy to do just that. Don’t present them with large blocks of text or anything else that will be difficult to consume on a small screen. Write your content intentionally with the mobile market near the top of your mind.
Mobile marketing is extremely important. If you neglect to serve this portion of the market, you are destined to come up short of reaching your business goals. We hope the information presented above will help you thrive in the mobile market for the rest of 2018 and beyond.
