Seven Tips for Creating a Mobile-Aware Marketing Culture
Can your company afford to ignore
the rapidly expanding mobile marketplace?
A recent poll from the Mobile Marketing Association confirms that
disregarding the mobile market is a mistake that marketers want to avoid, and
tech research firm Gartner finds that global sales of smartphones and
tablets will surpass 1 billion units in 2013. ("Smart device sales to hit
1B next year," Mobile World Live); sales estimates for 2012 exceed
800 million.
As a marketer, are you ready to ease your organization into yet another
cultural shift related to online marketing?
Yes, most of you have just finished with the social media shift and many are
still working through the integration of analytics with your marketing
programs. But, as noted by Pete Christothoulou, co-founder and president of
Marchex, "Executives are demanding that their marketing departments have a
mobile strategy."
The next cultural shift must be to ask that your organization pay attention
to mobile marketing—at the strategic planning level (while building your mobile
digital road maps) and at the tactical level (while you pick "low hanging
mobile fruit").
With mobile culture-building and mobile
leadership in mind, here are seven tips to consider within your organization.
1. Understand the
context: mobile apps vs. mobile pages
In the most basic terms, mobile devices—smartphones and tablets—come in many
forms; but, essentially, you have two main approaches to mobile for using those
devices in marketing.
"Mobile Web" refers to browser-based access to the Internet or Web-based
applications using a mobile device. "Mobile app" refers to a software
application (it could also connect to your website) that usually resides on a
smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps take considerable time and money to develop and maintain. And
after a mobile app has been created, you will most often need third-party
infrastructure to help deploy (e.g., the Apple or Google app platforms).
Mobile Web development also has time and dollar costs associated with it;
however, you can often use your website as its content and infrastructure base,
allowing for a quicker deployment to your market.
2. Commercial Web
services drive mobile visits
Today, various commercial Web services present/provide information in a
mobile-compatible form. Visitors can navigate large service providers such as
Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, and Amazon with browsers on their smart
devices. Accordingly, the information your organization places within those
services is also mobile-enabled, including organic search results pages commonly
found from searches on Bing, Yahoo, and Google, or from your listing on eBay
and Craigslist.
Finding your Web page should be just as easy for a Mobile Web user as it is
for a desktop computer user. However, unless your Web pages are mobile-enabled,
your visitors may not be receiving the experience you want them to receive when
they click through from one of these services to visit you.
3. Your Web pages
are a good place to start
Making your Web page "mobile-compatible" is a more practical way
to join the mobile evolution that creating a mobile app. Many website content
management systems offer responsive-design features that detect mobile device
visits and display Web pages in a mobile-compatible manner.
Services such as Mobify and Duda Mobile allow you to create mobile versions
of your Web pages if your website does not have responsive-design features.
Take these considerations into account as you make your Web pages
mobile-compatible:
- How visitors surf on smart devices is different from how they surf on a personal computer. Define the navigation and content of your mobile-compatible pages accordingly.
- Not all phones support technologies such as Flash, and visitors would prefer not to increase their data-plan bill due from downloading graphics that do not provide value.
- If you plan to use a third-party service to create your mobile pages, check to see the type of HTML standards your pages should be compliant with (such as those of the WC3).
- For page access, will your pages have their own mobile URL (for example: m.NAME.com), or will you will use the existing URLs of your Web pages?
Mobile does not end at a website. Many device owners read their email using
their smart phones and tablets... and some of those device owners are most
likely subscribers of your email communications.
Ensure the email you send out as newsletters, notifications, marketing
messages, etc. are formatted for mobile phone or tablet viewing and
interaction. Your subscribers also share the emails you send them, so ensure
that your new-subscriber forms also support mobile devices.
5. Mobile can
provide a new set of metrics
Mobile analytics offer a new way of looking at how customers interact with
your products and brand. You may gain a deeper understanding of visitor habits
that help you grow your business, so ensure that you isolate mobile visits on
your analytics to see whether new patterns emerge.
6. Mobile opens new
doorways
After joining the mobile evolution, you may find that new marketing options
are available to you. Among the activities that organizations consider after clearing the first
mobile hurdle are segmenting email to mobile and non-mobile campaigns; using
quick response (QR) codes within advertising campaigns, packaging, or at
tradeshows; and delivering new information services to customers via SMS (text messaging).
Mobile marketing can open up new doorways for "out of the box"
thinking that enable your business to better apply "traditional" Web
services and offerings.
7. Outbound
opportunities also abound!
Mobile advertising, such as display ads, can build brand exposure and
heighten awareness. Display advertising is easy to buy and relatively
inexpensive, so keep an eye on mobile advertising trends to see whether an
opportunity is right for you. As with all advertising, ensure that you receive
campaign analytics validation and make sure your ads are as targeted as
possible.
Without a doubt, the mobile segment is one of the largest and
fastest-growing segments of online growth; better yet, it is being fueled by
consumer and business demand. As Carolina Milanesi of Gartner notes, "the
ubiquity of smartphones and the increasing popularity of tablets are changing
the way businesses look at their device strategies and the way consumers
embrace devices." (Mobile World Live).
Given the market forecasts and trends, "the shift" to mobile seems
like a logical choice for marketers to focus on when building and expanding the
marketing culture within your organization.
Consider a mobile strategy when looking for opportunities to extend your
online marketing efforts and when looking for ways to make your products
accessible to all markets.
If you would like to talk more about how to effectively shift
to using mobile strategy in your buisness,
please give me a call at 440-519-1500 or e-mail me
at john@x2media.us
X2 Media can help you target your content and get your
message to the audience in a way that it is not only seen and heard, but
remembered.
Until
next month….remember, “you don’t get a 2nd chance to make a 1st
impression”. Always make it a good one!
From X2Media I would like to thank you for your time.
John E. Hornyak
X2Media, LLC
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