By Tom Bishop, Principal Strategist, BackBeat Marketing
Today we’re watching the biggest industrial shift since the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. Or, maybe even since the airplane replaced the ocean liner.
Mobile devices — including handheld phones, tablets and now watches — are rapidly becoming the primary platforms for Internet browsing, online shopping, reading, news-gathering and interacting with businesses.
By Tom Bishop, Principal Strategist, BackBeat Marketing
Today we’re watching the biggest industrial shift since the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. Or, maybe even since the airplane replaced the ocean liner.
Mobile devices — including handheld phones, tablets and now watches — are rapidly becoming the primary platforms for Internet browsing, online shopping, reading, news-gathering and interacting with businesses.
In some sectors it has already happened, as mobile beat desktop in online retail by 55% to 45%. It won’t be long before you box up your old desktop computer and LCD screen and bring it to the dump or, better yet, recycle it.
As a marketer responsible for generating demand, this shift affects you. Demand Gen Report has reported on the trend of lead generation going mobile. How can you capitalize on the unstoppable adoption of mobile technology by consumers and business users?
Are You Ready For Mobile?
Increased mobile usage means more people will find your site for the first time on a mobile device. Their next step is to get more information, fill out a form or make a purchase, so you have to focus on these areas to optimize their experience and your results:
Make it easy. The user experience is critical. We’ve all seen ad banners, images, forms and other elements that fail to align themselves on mobile the way they were designed for desktop viewing. Even sites that appear well in a mobile window are still tiny, requiring the user to “pinch” the screen to zoom in.
Today there is no choice but to design a mobile alternative site for the m. subdomain, or rely on a content management platform that automatically adopts a mobile layout when it detects a mobile browser. This goes for mobile email as well. That means you have to test the mobile experience on multiple devices to make sure clicks, images, videos and forms behave correctly.
Make it immediate. A mobile site should be fast. You never know whether a user is standing in a mall looking for our store, or sitting in a restaurant with slow Wi-Fi while they search our keywords. That means the site shouldn’t be cluttered with incompatible dynamic graphics and huge images.
This places a premium on design as stated above, and also on the structure and storage of your mobile site. The first few sites users find will be the ones they check out, so all the rules of SEO still apply. The sites that load quickly will be the ones they keep reading and interact with.
Make it sharable. A good mobile site makes sharing easy, without pop-ups or counterintuitive behavior when trying to share a link. On the other side, the link should appear to make sense when shared to sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. We’ve all seen shared links that automatically include irrelevant images or confusing headlines and descriptions. This is usually because the app or site it was shared from was not optimized.
When you want users to share a site link, such as an article or e-Commerce product page, make sure the share icons are prominent and intuitive, quick to use and produce a sensible display in a social news feed.
Make it findable. Your mobile site follows the same rules of SEO as does your desktop site, so don’t neglect your keywords, titles, descriptions and content relevance. There’s also no need to focus on keywords for mobile-use-only, since this is about optimizing for the future of browsing. People aren’t going to use their mobile devices for different searches than they would on the desktop.
Also, if you offer a mobile app, as opposed to a mobile site — but why not both? — each of the major mobile platforms features a “store” where you can offer your app to users. There are many online discussions to help you determine whether an app is right for your marketing efforts.
Make it measurable. Ultimately, it’s all about data gathering so you can reach out to your audience again, whether in a sales or lead nurturing capacity. When people find your mobile site, it should be easy to contact you or ask questions, and it should also be easy for them to fill out a simple form.
It’s unlikely that you’ll get the same rich information you can get with a 15-field desktop form, but if you ask just name and email, it should be enough to get started. And it’s not too much to ask your readers, provided you have offered them something of value.
A strong mobile web site design is the key to raising the level of engagement and getting results. Mobile is soon going to be the primary format for interacting with your business and bringing in online leads, and it may someday be the only one. It makes sense to use the time you have for optimization to focus on the mobile experience.
Tom Bishop is an experienced marketing professional focused on brand strategy, campaign management, market segmentation, research and data analysis, and business development. He has helped numerous startups and established companies to position them for rapid growth. Connect with Tom on Twitter @myleftone or LinkedIn.