People rarely go anywhere without their smartphone, making mobile is a powerful tool for real-time marketing. But beyond that mobile allows you to take advantage of location, allowing you to customize your message to a user’s location. These users are also using their mobile devices to research products when not on the go. In fact, 93% of consumers who use their smartphone to research a product will go on to make a purchase (Facebook).
After several years of meteoric growth, mobile ad spending will reach the $100 billion mark in 2016, an increase of 430 percent from 2013 (eMarketer). Clearly the businesses that can adapt to mobile will reap the rewards as because mobile is an environment where users are more likely to engage with brands that with other medias.
Before you start your mobile app development project, here are a few tips to help you succeed:
1. Target your message
In ways marketers never could before, mobile allows you to target your message to your users. Are you allowing your app users to set preferences that allow you to target based on their wants and needs? Are you asking them for demographic information that you can use to target your messaging? If not, you are missing out on a real opportunity to engage your users. Mobile users are often quite willing to give you the information you need to target your messaging and improve engagement and effectiveness. Plan ahead when building your app to be able to leverage this powerful tool.
2. Measure
Old school metrics like views and clicks are not representative indicators of engagement. Mobile is a perfect platform for measuring engagement, as mobile users can check out a product, make a purchase, share or tweet with a touch of a button. These customer behaviors can all be tracked allowing you to review progress.
3. Prioritize mobile
While many large brands responded to the industry’s mobile surge and embraced mobile, many have yet to properly engage their customers via mobile. A lack of a mobile marketing strategies can result in poor results. Additionally, mobile must be seamlessly integrated into existing marketing strategy to keep the brand’s message consistent.
4. Personal connection
Did you know smartphone users twice as likely to feel a sense of personal connection to a brand (Google). The sense of connection inherent with mobile makes it the perfect tool for brands to build a personal connection with their users.
Closing thoughts
The businesses who have been the most successful have found ways to blend their mobile strategy into their existing marketing. These companies are treating mobile as its own channel and not an extension of desktop. Marketers who embrace mobile can enjoy the benefits.
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Whether your business is paying attention to mobile or not your customers certainly are.
Recent research from comScore shows mobile is now the leading digital platform, with activity on mobile devices accounting for 60% of U.S. digital media time.
For this reason alone your business must have a strategy for engaging customers via mobile.
At a minimum this means businesses will need to make sure their web site and email perform on mobile devices. Web design companies in Phoenix are generally utilizing responsive design to fulfill this need.
Responsive design know the size of device is displaying the content and delivers content optimized for that screen size.
How important is it that your web site be responsive? Google has recently changed its rankings so that if your web site is not responsive it will affect your ranking.
While mobile should be part of your marketing and business communications plan, you should begin by developing a strategy before jumping in feet first. A key component of this is developing an understanding with how your customers want to interact with you via mobile.
A simple way to start doing this involve reviewing the analytics from your current web site, look at where your traffic is coming from by type of device. You will see patterns of how your customers engage with with your web site.
A common way to analyze the data by creating customer profiles for various customer segments that engage with your web site, these are called personas. By understanding how these groups engage with your brand via digital you can tailor your web site and marketing campaigns to them. Your customers will let you know how to engage with them.
Remember that your site must be simple to navigate. Modern mobile users a quick to abandon a site if they cannot navigate your site quickly and easily. Navigation is one of the key factors for a web sites success on mobile devices.
Customer’s generally expect mobile web sites to load quickly. Pay attention to your site’s load time. Customers will give up on slow loading sites. One way to help with this is by not having an over-abundance of graphics on your site. Images should improve your user experience, not just be there for aesthetic reasons.
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In 2015 businesses simply cannot ignore that their users are viewing their web site on mobile devices. Responsive web design has emerged as the de facto trend as it allows sites to adapt to smaller screens.
This makes the need for responsive design critical, as it adapts your web site design to both the size and connection speed of smaller devices.
A few handy tips can greatly improve the performance of you responsive web site.
Mobile First
A mobile first strategy involve designing the mobile site first and then scaling up for tablets and desktop computers. If your web site looks good and is easy to read on a mobile device it won’t be hard to read on a desktop. Starting with mobile allows you to work down your site to its essentials elements. This allows you to streamline and focus your message. Once you have locked down a design that excels on the small display of a mobile device it can easily be expanded to fit larger areas.
Navigation
Navigation is one of the most critical elements of a responsive web site. Success and failure often depends on the user experience created by the sites’ navigation. Users no longer will stumble around web sites trying to find what they are looking for. In this day and age users expect interfaces to be intuitive and easy to use. Good sites typically have self explanatory navigation.
Simplify
Desktop sites for the longest time favored complicated visual designs with massive amounts of content and many navigation options. These days streamlined, clean designs with plenty of white space are recommended for responsive sites. Not only to customers tend to appreciate the speed with which these simplified designs load but they the minimal design tends to give sites a modern look that sets them apart from older designs. It is important that sites load quickly on mobile devices and simplifying design is one of the best ways to do this.
Responsive web sites should display a consistent look and feel across mobile, laptops and desktop computers.
You can no longer ignore responsive design. It is necessary for any business.
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