Secrets of making your business/brand marketing mobile specific

Jul 16, 2016 0 Comment

Word count: 1,898 Reading Level: College Student Reading time: 6.9Mins

How to pivot your business marketing to a mobile audience

In the past few years, in Australia (Also the world), media and content consumption has pivoted significantly towards mobile being the first medium for consumption. Stats from Google (Thinkwithgooglecom, 2016), Illustrate most people in Australia search and consume content from their mobile phones, even when at home and it has been on the rise sharply for the last 4 years (Searchenginelandcom, 2015), with search from mobile devices exceeding desktop over last couple years. Most interesting is the rate of conversion, with 81% of these mobile searches ending in action and a high rate of conversion to sale. Googles statistics clearly illustrate the lions share of your content should be highly consumable by mobile users. We have compiled a list of most excellent means to find success with sharing your content marketing strategy with the huge mobile users segment.

Authors Note: The key ingredient to take home, as a small business owner, is to just break ground and do something. Good or bad, don’t hold off for perfection, just get in and get your feet wet on something. From there you just need to strive to be better with each offering. Something can truly be better than nothing if your heart is in the right place. Enough fluffy talk lets get into the meat and potatoes 🙂

Mobile Responsiveness:

If your website and content is not using a responsive design you seriously might as well take the site down. The disgust from mobile users when they meet a non responsive site can be ever lasting and give a very negative impression of your business. Additionally, ensure that mobile users do not need to zoom in or double click on the screen to read the content on your website or blog. This is especially important with those great looking infographics, as many of them fail the mobile test and leave mobile users feeling cheated/frustrated trying to read tiny text and zooming in and out.

You can work smart, not hard to achieve this goal. For instance, if your website is a WordPress design, you can make it mobile responsive just by using a plug-in WPtouch. Though the preference should be to a proper responsive framework, such as, flex box, bootstrap or similar (Personally I would stick to the most popular frameworks only). Take the time to clean up the little details that sometimes don’t quite work. However it’s more important to be 60% right and need more attention, than 0% and zero fucks in the eyes of the mobile user.

Be social on Mobile:

If you wish you to be legendary with your mobile content marketing campaigns, it is imperative that you make it easy for the users to take positive actions. For instance, if you have a blog post on an excellent topic, but the page lacks social share buttons or the share buttons appear; too small to tap, obscure the content (because the are desktop focused, such as those side margin ones) on mobile screens, then you will miss out on interaction and important engagement rankings.

Likewise if users are unable to comment easy you won’t get comments and miss out on the all important engagement metric. The interesting thing about mobile users is they have less patience for mobile friendliness faux pas by content providers.

Optimized Mobile Content:

The content that you present on your application or website should render fast and well, irrespective of the screen size. Always make sure that you have variants of visual content ranging from images to videos that are optimized for the social web. This means; The are trimmed to size to fit the social platform, You are using OG tags to control what images and descriptions are being shown on different social platforms, your images are compressed, preferable progressive.

If you are publishing videos, make sure the serving source of those videos is up to the job. Can it server to the volume you anticipate and to the location of the audience, keeping in mind the restrictions of mobile users. I personally never recommend hosting your video content on your own servers. Your content will always be more accessible from YouTube than anywhere else. Second to YouTube, Vimeo and JWplayer can give you some visual control over the player with only slightly compromised availability.

For me YouTube is the preferred medium, as it is also one of the largest search engines (YouTube, 2016), in general and for mobile users. As an added bonus you can rank videos in Google SERPs.

As usual know your market. If your market does not like long videos on mobile, either create shorter videos specific for mobile or Cut longer videos in to short snippets easily consumed, by mobile users.

Mobile Applications:

I probably differ on this point from other developers, as I am not trying to sell something. Don’t bother with a mobile app until you have enough scale to warrant one. Having a mobile app for you business can be fairly expensive, relative to a well planned and executed responsive website.

However, when you get to the point that having an app download on your website or having an app in iTunes or Google play store is warranted develop one. How will you know ask your users, check your analytics and do the sums for cost benefit.

Mobile Specific Social App and mini Blogs:

The reason to produce content for these mediums is because most of your users are consuming content on them in vast amounts. The stats are mind blowing. Forget TV, Print, etc Facebook app, Instagram are proven mediums for making money. So figure out an angle and produce content specific for those mediums. The best way to do this is to actually look at what your creating on those mediums. Then test and measure what is picked up the most and has the best ROI and refine it. Ghosting (following) your competition or content leaders can be a great way to get a head start on what will work. If you have no clues, go with your gut and use a shotgun approach and see what sticks and refine it.

  • Snapchat – The fast growing sleeping monster of social(Expandedramblingscom, 2014) is one of the fastest and highest engaging social mediums of all time (Convinceandconvertcom, 2016). Paraphrasing Gary Vaynerchuk, from his latest book #AskGayVee, it is a must right now, for all targeting all demographics from the Tweens to the Boomers(Vaynerchuk, 2016). I also really believe if you can find an angle to work your business on Snapchat now it will play huge dividends, short and long term, during this time of land grabbing. Much like YouTube, earlier adopters can learn the medium and get a head start on the real estate grab and technical aspects of producing on the medium. One thing I really like about Snapchat is it can be incorporated into your daily routine of being in business without to much production. You can just candidly take a Snapchat on the fly and share your brand, most importantly while engaging, with your followers.

    As a new customer this candid content could easily close the sale, during their research. Snapchat is only a very short distance from live interaction, except it is massively scale able. There is also further potential for support services, tutorial, vouchers, specials etc. Just imagine having having a bricks and mortar store that published a coupon every day on Snapchat. Just one of millions of simple clean ideas to grow your business.

  • Musical.ly, Vine are similar to Snapchat and if you can work an angle on them for your business you should! The demographic is mainly female, but surprisingly 18-45 year old females make up the largest segment, and they are highly engaged and spending a lot of time on the app. Massive potential for a smart operator for creating original content or leveraging influencers.
  • Medium, is a mini blogging platform and a nice mobile friendly way of producing smaller snippets of blog content. Its biggest selling point is its purported(because how do you really measure this) high read rate compared to other platforms(Kissmetricscom, 2016). It is sort of like a literal medium between the micro blogging of twitter and a full blown blogging site. The nice thing is you can produce, blogs with punch and detail that are highly consumable for mobile users(Medium, 2013). There is little more off putting than a text wall of a 1000 words when using a mobile(Coschedule, 2014).

    Video on mobile:

    Video is far more compelling than blog posts alone (Lindsay kolowich, 2016). On most occasions, video posts will get more engagement and more click through than picture and text alone. The entry level is exceptionally low anyone with a smart phone can publish pretty good content and users are fairly accepting of low quality visual footage if the content is good.

    Videos do not need to be long, I have done well with videos as short as 60-120 seconds long. However test and measure and see where your market wants to be. Personally, I love to wind down in bed watching videos over 30 minutes plus most being around 60-90 minutes. However in the morning I like shorter videos I can watch in between getting ready for work.

    Live streaming Video:

    This medium is really quite cool I think. It is generally very candid, due to its live nature. The barrier to entry is low, only requiring a smart phone. The potential for high pickup is huge with some 10 million + users just on

    One little experiment I personally did on the fly was Whale watching on the Gold coast. I had 400 something people live with me engaging actively for some 40+ minutes on a Wednesday Morning (Brisbane AU time). The potential is huge and well work a little planning before execution and easy to do for just about any business. I plan to use this actual content providing strategy for a local Gold Coast tourist focused business.

    This medium is highly consumable for mobile users, sense twitter/periscope and Facebook are highly mobile friendly. It also ticks the box for the instant fix mentality of mobile users. Most importantly, it can be easily and readily shared via social mobile users.

    Engagement:

    While this isn’t specific to Mobile, getting consumers of your content to not just consume but engage is key to succeeding online. Not only is engagement a strong metric used by Google Search, Facebook and Twitter also use it. Also users are more likely to click through on highly commented or liked content, than something with zero or little engagement. If your lucky enough to have comments get involved, don’t automate it. Nothing more sucks for a user than putting themselves out there by commenting on a post and never getting a reply. Nothing more sucks than, seeing lots of unanswered questions, spam, abuse or a generic automated reply on the blog/post.

    If your not getting engagement, then ask for it at the least. Tell people if they comment you will reply and that you want to hear from them. I have to say it is gold to engage with your customers if you are truly into what you do.

    To this end I would like to invite any readers of our blogs or posts to comment, email, tweet to us. We will respond and treat all your questions and comments with respect and respond in detail, without the fluff. I’d also be really interested in whether readers find the reading guide helpful at the top of the page, please let me know if it was helpful or even if you found it patronizing.

    One last thing I’d also like to thank all the authors in the reference material below, there was some great detailed and researched content on this subject. We are grateful you are all as passionate.

    Bibliography:

    Vaynerchuk, G. (2016). #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness. USA: HarperBusiness.

    Searchenginelandcom. (2015, 5 May 2015). It’s Official: Google Says More Searches Now On Mobile Than On Desktop. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369

    Thinkwithgooglecom. (2016, no-date). Hold the Phone: Millennials in Australia Lead the Way on Mobile Usage. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/hold-phone-millennials-in-australia-lead-way-on-mobile-usage.html

    Thinkwithgooglecom. (2016, no-date). Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile in Australia. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/infographics/micro-moments-your-guide-to-winning-shift-to-mobile-in-australia.html

    Toprankblogcom. (2014, 14 January 2014). Mobile Content Marketing – What You Need to Know: Pros, Cons, Examples, Best Practices. [Weblog]. Retrieved 3 July 2016, from http://www.toprankblog.com/2014/01/mobile-content-marketing/

    Jeff bullas. (2014, 19 December 2014). 10 Ways to Succeed with Mobile Content Marketing. [Weblog]. Retrieved 3 July 2016, from http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/12/19/10-ways-to-succeed-in-the-new-age-of-mobile-content-marketing/

    YouTube. (2016, no-date). Statistics. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

    Surveymonkeycom. (2016, no-date). What’s behind Musically’s $500M valuation. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from https://www.surveymonkey.com/business/intelligence/musical-lys-500m-valuation/

    Expandedramblingscom. (2014, 2 February 2014). 80 Amazing Snapchat Statistics. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/snapchat-statistics/

    Convinceandconvertcom. (2016, no-date). 5 Snapchat Statistics That Prove Its Power. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/5-snapchat-statistics-that-prove-its-power/

    Medium. (2013, 21 May 2013). Statistics. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from https://medium.com/@Medium/statistics-2971adaa615

    Coschedule. (2014, 7 March 2014). Why A High Read Ratio On Your Medium Blog Matters. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from http://coschedule.com/blog/medium-blog/

    Kissmetricscom. (2016, no-date). The Marketer’s Guide To Medium. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from https://blog.kissmetrics.com/marketers-guide-to-medium/

    Expandedramblingscom. (2016, 18 January 2016). 12 Interesting Periscope Statistics. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/periscope-statistics/

    Lindsay kolowich. (2016, no-date). 31 Video Marketing Statistics to Inform Your Strategy [Infographic]. [Weblog]. Retrieved 16 July 2016, from http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/video-marketing-statistics