It may be safe to say that mobile use has become mainstream nowadays. The coming in of more and more advanced smartphones has seen a rise in various mobile use. Now, people could do almost everything and anything they want to do with the mobile platform. This is a far cry different from the past, wherein mobile phones were used only for texting and calling.
Mobile Phones In Marketing Today
Because of their advanced features, it’s no longer surprising that businesses and marketers have now harnessed the power of mobile phones for their business activities. It’s easy for people now to simply bring out their phone at any time and do whatever they want that’s related to their business. These activities could include performing research, updating their website, and going on their social media account to market their product.
If you want to excel as a business and keep your competitive edge, mobile marketing with the use of automated call and text services from providers like Drop Cowboy and similar companies is something you could use to your advantage. If you don’t have marketing activities on this platform, you may be missing out on potential growth. With the competitive arena that businesses now run in, you wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing a potentially high target market simply because you failed to establish your presence in mobile marketing.
With that said, this article presents you with a comprehensive guide on how you could ace your mobile marketing game. This way, you could be at par with your competitors in business or even stand out among the rest of them.
- Make Use Of SMS Marketing
When it comes to mobile use and marketing, it’s not just the internet that’s a key player. Don’t forget the basics—text or short message service (SMS) marketing through using your toll-free automated 1800 numbers. Since many people nowadays are going through their phones on a daily basis, this could be an opportune time for you to also send out promotions and other announcements through text.
The advantage of sending these through SMS or text is there’s a higher chance these would be read and opened than when sent through email. This is especially true for individuals who don’t open their email accounts regularly, save to check or perhaps ‘mark as read’ the regular social media notifications that floor their inbox folder.
If you want to take advantage of the benefits of SMS or text marketing, here are a few tips on how you could do so successfully:
- Offer exclusive incentives. Your SMS mobile marketing strategy would become more effective if you make it exclusive. This means the offers, promos, discount codes, and coupons you send through text should be exclusive. It’s like offering incentives to customers who’d sign up for your promotions through a link you’d send in the text message. This could make your customers feel special enough to be part of the followers, customers, or subscribers who receive those text promotions and deals from you.
- Make interactive contests. If you’re sending out contests or promotions through SMS, you’d also have to make it interactive. This means including the link to your social media sites in that text. In doing so, it’d be easier for your recipients and customers to be directed back to your business site or social media account. For mobile users, this is a big advantage when they no longer have to keep switching apps just to join a contest or complete a transaction for a promotion.
- Create a sense of urgency. This means you need to entice the mobile recipients of your text to avail of the promotion now or never. They have to subscribe to your offer now, or else the discount code would expire in 24 hours, for instance. This sense of urgency could increase your chances of having successful customers on your website through your mobile campaigns or efforts.
- Ask questions or send surveys. The mobile interface is also the perfect place for you to send out questions or surveys. If you’ve got forms to send out to your subscribers, you could do it through the mobile platform as well, through SMS. There’s a higher chance they’d open that message and proceed to fill out that form, especially when they’re reading the text message during their idle time.
- Increase Your Page Loading Speed
Imagine this situation. You’re browsing through your phone during your idle time at lunch break at work. You’re sitting, patiently waiting for a page to load. Several minutes later, it still hasn’t opened. You’d most likely get annoyed, close the page, and look for another website with the same niche instead.
This situation could happen to any of your website visitors if you’re not cautious about your page loading speed. It doesn’t matter how well made your graphics are or how good the products and services you offer. If your page loading speed is slow, your visitors might not be patient enough to open your website, even from their mobile devices.
In effect, it could hurt your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. To remedy this, here are tips on how you could improve your page loading speed:
- Optimize your media. One of the biggest culprits to a slow page loading speed is images and videos. They could take up so much of your page’s weight size when you aren’t able to optimize its size for mobile use. Remember, you’ve got to make that adjustment, given that mobile devices have a much smaller screen. The media you have would only end up getting distorted when the mobile device’s screen couldn’t handle its size.
- Update your web hosting package. This could have both positive and negative effects on your website’s page loading speed. For starters, your smaller, simpler, and inexpensive web host may still be effective. But once your website starts to receive high mobile traffic, you’d also need to adapt. A high-performing virtual private server (VPS) or web hosting platform should always be a priority for your website.
- Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
This may sound all too obvious, but the importance of making your website mobile-friendly can’t be overemphasized. If you aren’t cautious enough, you may be coming up with a website that isn’t mobile-friendly.
This means when an internet browser goes through your website from a mobile device, the interface gets distorted. It no longer looks as good as it should. Most importantly, some features would perhaps now be difficult to access because of how different your website looks on a smaller screen.
Among all the sections of your website, the two most important ones you’ve got to prioritize to make it mobile-friendly are your menu and content display. As easy as it would’ve been for your website visitors to access them through their big screen, this ease should also be made available even with a smaller screen.
That said, here are simple ways on how you could transform your website into one that’s more mobile-friendly:
- Keep the submit button enabled. Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes when creating websites is leaving the submit button disabled. It’s better to keep that button enabled for ease of navigation and for a more user-friendly experience for your visitors.
However, the submit button should be able to prevent repeat submission problems. Multiple clicking could happen, for example, when after completing the payment process, the Internet goes off or the next page doesn’t load. There are several ways to prevent users from clicking the submit button more than once. They could range from alerting methods or disabling the submit button after being clicked. This is important to prevent multiple charges to your customers’ credit cards, among others.
- Focus on a simple website design. When it comes to website appearance among competitors, it’s not a matter of who has the most detailed and eloquent designs. Rather, it’s about who has the simplest website to navigate. That is, the ease of opening the website should be there. And even with a mobile interface, the website should not be distorted.
So try to make your website’s design as practical as possible. This means minimizing whatever fluff could be around so the focus would be on the content, text, or products and services you’re selling. The simpler your design is, the lesser the chances of your website not opening or being distorted with a mobile interface.
- Use standard fonts. Because your goal is to make your website still comprehensible even from a smaller mobile screen, this also means you have to focus on standard fonts. Keep it as simple as possible. Don’t go for cursive fonts or those with letters that are too close to each other. Otherwise, when opening from a mobile screen, they would appear too small and would even be confusing to read.
- Create A Mobile-Friendly Email
One of the transactions you could do on your mobile phone is sending e-mails to your customers. To be effective and have good recall with mobile users, it’s important to make your email messages mobile-friendly. Consider the following ideas:
- Keep your subject lines brief and concise. No one may have the time and patience to go through a very long subject line. So keep it short, such that it doesn’t look spammy. But also make it concise so the receiver of your email would be convinced enough to open it.
- Keep the email message short. Unless you’re discussing something really important, try to keep your message as brief as possible. As no one would perhaps like to read through a long subject heading, the same goes for the message itself.
- Use a clear and simple call to action. Make sure your email serves a useful purpose. After reading your message, the receiver has to be aware of what they should do next. Should they subscribe to your mobile updates or purchase from your mobile-only flash sale? Whatever it is, your message and call to action should be made clear in the body of your email—all without being too long.
When you abide by the above tips, apart from many others, you could keep your customers interested. You could lower the risk of having your recipients sending your emails automatically to their ‘Spam’ or ‘Trash’ folder.
- Create Mobile-Friendly Content
Apart from the design of your website, another important aspect you may need to get right for mobile users is the content. Whatever content you put out on your website, it also has to be mobile-friendly and mobile-enabled. This would allow visitors to your website who are browsing from a mobile site to go through it even when they’re on the go.
Mobile users wouldn’t probably care about all the fluff surrounding your content. They’d more likely be concerned about the content per se, what it holds and what you have to say. For instance, your post today is about the latest items you’ve put on display on your e-commerce website. Focus on this. Make every single photo of the items mobile-friendly. Your website visitors shouldn’t have a hard time deciphering the color and their overall look. They should also be able to go through the details and descriptions of every product with ease.
If you need some useful tips on how to come up with mobile-friendly content, here are some of them:
- Write good headlines. Your headlines are everything as this could make or break your content. If your headlines are not nicely worded or attractive, chances are people wouldn’t bother reading your content. Meanwhile, if your headlines are catchy and interesting, these would capture the attention of users. It would invite them to go through your content and see what you have to say.
- Optimize your content for search engines. SEO is always king when talking about web content. Therefore, your content also has to abide by the metrics and standards set forth by SEO. Otherwise, there’s no way for your website to rank higher or your content to reach a wider internet mobile audience.
Conclusion
With the increasing use of and demand for smartphones, it may be safe to say that mobile marketing isn’t the future of marketing. It’s the present. For your business to stay afloat and be competitive in the market, it’s important to also establish your mark with mobile users. If not, you may be missing out on a potentially strong market of followers and customers to bring in traffic to your business.
If you haven’t penetrated mobile marketing yet, it’s perhaps not too late to start. The tips above could guide you in ensuring you do mobile marketing as successful as possible.