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Mobile is the New Cilantro

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Mobile MarketingIn the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s, cilantro, a previously little-used herb, became the trendy haute cuisine item, to the point that seemingly every restaurant had to have cilantro on practically everything. After a while sun-dried tomatoes became the new trend, then superfruits, then green tea, dark chocolate, fresh ginger and now kale. Turns out chefs are a lot like marketers. We like the trendy, new thing.

For a while now, the trendy new channel in marketing has been mobile. As affiliate marketing, RSS and pay-per-click once were, now it’s mobile marketing. The phrase, “We need to develop a mobile strategy” is to 2014-5 what, “We need to work on our SEO” was to 2010.

However as mobile devices become faster and more powerful, and PCs become more touch, app and user-friendly, the line between desktops and mobile devices gets blurrier every year. Which means for all intents and purposes, you don’t need to develop a mobile strategy – you already have one. It’s just a matter of recognizing it as such.

The vast majority of marketing-related activity on mobile devices isn’t mobile-specific anymore, because virtually every digital communication channel has evolved into a mobile channel. In other words, it’s time to stop thinking of mobile as a separate channel to deliver messages and recognize it as the new norm in which people are consuming content.

Consider this – a study released in Spring 2014 showed that 66% of emails were opened on a mobile device, which is  nearly a 40% increase over the prior year.1 And that’s all the more impressive when put into the context that 78% of smartphone users use their device for email, by far the most popular use for a smartphone.2 Email is now a mobile channel.

But what about good old-fashioned search engines? It turns out that while more than half of all searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo among others are done on mobile devices. Furthermore,  a full 4 out 5 consumers conduct local searches on a mobile device.3 So if you’ve got a brick and mortar location you’d like to drive traffic to, you’re 4 times more likely to reach those consumers on a mobile device.

Video? YouTube reported in 2014 that over 50% of videos viewed were on a mobile device4, a statistic that will only grow as most new smartphones come preloaded with the YouTube app. So like email, video content consumption is a mobile channel.

The bottom line is that traditional outbound marketing channels (email, video etc) are becoming primarily received and consumed via mobile devices. It’s time we stopped thinking of mobile as a separate, meek channel for simple SMS/MMS text messaging and started treating it as the new sandbox. Because it is. So what does this mean? It means we start with tailoring communications efforts to the mobile viewer first, and a desktop viewer second.

Responsive Design – Life on the internet moves pretty quickly. Just a few short years ago, an entire industry of mobile web designers cropped up, touting the benefits of “m.” and “.mobi” mobile sites, feature-poor mirrors of your current site built for your smartphone’s smaller screen and more limited capabilities.

Nowadays, the internet has evolved past the need to treat smartphones as lesser devices than desktops. Mobile sites are becoming more and more a thing of the past in favor of responsive designed websites – websites that will reformat themselves to fit your device, screen and platform and improve the customer experience.  If your website and emails aren’t responsively designed, you’re going to have a harder time reaching and keeping the attention of your hard-earned customers.

Apps > Mobile Sites – A mobile site is still a better experience than having to pinch and drag your desktop website on a four inch screen, but ultimately, the best mobile experience for consumers is often an app. If your business’ relationship with a customer is transactional in nature, relatively frequent and important enough to a consumer to be a bookmark, it’ll probably be important enough for them to download your app.

Apps increase top of mind awareness by occupying a share of a very limited amount of real estate on a consumer’s screen. They allow for more direct communication through push notifications. And, they increase customer stickiness by making transactions easier and quicker.

Analytics – Being aware of what devices your customers are opening your emails and clicking through to your website on is vital to knowing how to speak to them. Knowing if your customers use an iPhone or an Android, whether they prefer the Gmail app or to open it within a browser, whether people using a tablet are more or less likely to open your email or bounce from your site – all of this is our customers telling us how they’d like us to speak to them.

Testing – All of the analytics and message crafting in the world isn’t going to make a difference if your customer can’t read your email or website. Between major email service providers, browsers, apps and devices with varying screen sizes and operating systems, there are literally hundreds of ways customers can consume your message.

Testing your emails before they go out will assure maximum deliverability of your messages and that, when received, they will have the look and feel you intended.

Mobile is an engaging and viable method of marketing to our clients and prospects, even more so when we recognize it’s full potential. Because when you get right down to it, it wasn’t the cilantro we came for in the first place. We just wanted better tacos.

Sources:

1. http://marketingland.com/34-percent-email-opens-now-happen-pc-83277

2. Always Connected How Smartphones And Social Keep Us Engaged An IDC Research Report, Sponsored By Facebook

3. http://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/how-advertisers-can-extend-their-relevance-with-search_research-studies.pdf

4. http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-mobile-traffic-50-per-cent/

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