Mobile usage has exploded in the past five years, especially among younger generations. Understanding mobile — especially mobile content marketing — is a must for anyone who wants to stay ahead in digital marketing. Laptop and desktop computers are still largely responsible for online engagement, however, mobile content should not be ignored. Pay attention to how people engage with your brand on their mobile devices. You are likely to find mobile trends on your website, in your social media and on other websites that your brand is involved with.
Understanding Mobile Engagement
In business to consumer markets, 55 to 65 percent of users are more likely to see your content on mobile devices, as opposed to desktop computers. On the other hand, business-to-business markets average around the 50/50 range for mobile vs. computer usage.
Thomas Young believes understanding these percentages is critical in order for mobile content to be effective. Through Google Analytics, you can see how many people use mobile on your website. You can also see what kind of devices and mobile browsers they are using. Through all of this, you can really understand how people are experiencing your brand.
The bottom line is that you have to understand your users, and you have to be able to prepare content for them in the mobile world. You will want to consider the many ways in which people are currently using their mobile potential. People respond to online content through the conversion points that engage users. These conversion points can basically be anything — photos, networking opportunities, convenience, written content — so it really helps to be creative with your approach, especially for mobile devices.
People are generally less likely to engage with mobile content because of screen size, navigability, and other factors. Nonetheless, people use mobile as a part of their overall research. Young finds it very interesting that when somebody wants to buy a product such as a guitar amp, they might spend hours upon hours looking at their phone as they search through various amps. They might search through several retailer sites, social media and forums before just going to a store and buying an amp! Consumers also will commonly switch to desktops just before making a purchase.
So essentially, people will use their mobile devices to research you across several online channels, but they are much less likely to take action through mobile. It is important to note that you should have mobile conversion points in place, nonetheless! Companies continue to discover new and ingenious ways to appeal to their customers through mobile, and this approach can be very successful.
Creating Mobile-Ready Content
Mobile conversion points can include email, feedback opportunities, on-site social networking and phone numbers. Young suggests phone numbers are the most important mobile conversion points because mobile customers are holding a phone in their hand! It should be very easy for them to call you, and you should have hyperlinked phone numbers in your mobile content.
When you write and prepare your content for mobile, keep in mind that big blocks of text are very difficult to read on small screens. Keep your sections of text within one or two paragraphs, and use headers for these sections to summarize the text. When the goal is to appeal to customers who are using their phones to do research, mobile content should be clean, simple, and helpfully informative. This approach applies to desktop content, as well.
In your website design, you absolutely must use a design template that is responsive! Responsive templates adapt to mobile devices and any other configuration that the user may have. People can go from experiencing your website on a two-inch phone to looking at your content on a twenty-foot screen. It is not uncommon for this to happen with users in the span of a single day. Presenters often project websites in front of an audience, and many people use TV screens as computer monitors. So, it is really important that your site has a responsive theme! WordPress offers an extremely wide variety of responsive themes to choose from at reasonable prices.
It is also beneficial to maintain a single domain name across all devices. Watch out for domains like www.yourbusiness.mobile.com when it comes to your mobile content, or your SEO will be negatively impacted. Additionally, remember that the average time someone spends on a website with their mobile device is quite short. If you ask people for more than a few minutes of their time, you won’t see results. People have short attention spans. So break everything into bite-sized pieces in terms of content, photos, and videos.
Action Items
Let’s go over your action items for making sure that your content is mobile-friendly.
- Go to Google Analytics and see how your users are engaging with mobile. Get a sense of the kind of devices, browsers, and platforms they use to access your brand.
- Understand your mobile conversion points. Make sure that your mobile content pieces include phone numbers, emails, and simple forms.
- Discover how your brand is being used to complement other channels, and vice versa. If you can, make sure that your mobile content supports these channels. For example, customers will appreciate the opportunity to see your retail locations on a map from their phone. People also like to see pricing on their phones, even if they intend to go to the store in order to buy.
- Design your site and write your content with mobile devices in mind. Keep all text neatly organized, with summary headers and brief paragraphs. Most importantly, make sure that your site is designed with a responsive template so it can be viewed easily on all devices.
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