Smartphones have fundamentally changed life as we know it. From a consumer standpoint, it’s hard to imagine life without a phone. Browsing social media, checking email, looking at gifts on Amazon, and consuming our favorite content on the go has become a regular part of our lives.
Now let’s look at the mobile situation from a business owner and marketer perspective. About 4.33 billion people are using the internet, and 3.7 billion of those people have smartphones. It’s clear that if we want to expand brand visibility and customer loyalty, we have to reach smartphone users across all platforms.
Mobile marketing, by definition, is the process of adapting your marketing strategy to meet the needs of mobile users. Today we are going to take a look at several tips that will help you improve your mobile marketing strategy in 2020. Our tips will cover your email marketing campaign, WordPress website, and social media channels.
Let’s dive in!
Focus on a Simple, Mobile-Responsive Site Design
When someone visits your website, are they greeted with a phone-friendly version of your site? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to convert mobile users into subscribers and customers.
Your website design should change to match the screen of the mobile user. Due to small size and assorted shapes of phone screens, it’s essential that the text on your mobile-friendly website is larger than your desktop counterpart. Users should be able to read your home page without pinching and expanding their screen multiple times. Always use responsive themes on your WordPress site if you want to cater to both a desktop and a mobile audience. (Hint: you do!)
Now you’re going to want to look at your contact forms and the call-to-action (CTA) buttons you use on your site. Normally, users can use their mouse or touchpad to navigate to your form and click enter.
On a mobile device, there’s a little more precision involved. Consider increasing the size of your CTA buttons to encourage users to click-through, regardless of the device they are using. Additionally, keep your contact forms short and sweet to avoid form abandonment.
Improve Your Website Speed
The speed of your mobile site can have a tremendous impact on how many users bounce from your site. Research shows that 40 percent of people will leave your website from their phone if it takes longer than three seconds to load. After 10 seconds, you can expect around 97 people to hit the back button.
There are several ways to improve the speed of your website. Consider optimizing all of the images you upload to your site. Depending on the file size and type, you could slow your website down to a crawl if you’re not regularly checking and optimizing images on-site. As a general rule, try to keep all non-pillar images under 500KB.
Caching plugins will also help give your website a performance boost. When someone lands on your site, all of the resources need to come together to show the user your homepage. If more than one person is on the page for the first time, your site could slow down or crash. Caching resolves this problem because they create a “memory” of a page the first time it’s gathered. Afterward, all future users are shown the copied page. As changes are made, the master memory updates. This process reduces the amount of bandwidth used and can improve loading times for your mobile and desktop users.
Optimize Your Content for Voice Search
By now, we all know how important it is to have a good SEO strategy. If your traditional text keywords and phrases help you bring in traffic by improving your search ranking, stick with it!
However, adding voice search SEO to your existing strategy can help you draw in even more people that are interested in your products, services, or brand. It’s estimated that by the end of 2020, half of all searches will be spoken instead of typed. In other words, consumers are using devices like Amazon’s Echo or programs like Cortana for Windows to search and research companies.
When people search Google with a voice-activated device, they tend to say things a little differently than how they would type. For instance, someone looking for tips about building their email list might type “Build email list fast,” but someone using a smart speaker might say, “How can I grow my email marketing campaign?”
Understanding the nuance in language when deciding on voice search keywords to mix into your content can help you rise to the top of Google while pleasing your mobile users.
Fine-Tune Your Social Media Strategy
There are over 3 billion people on social media, and it’s hard to deny the influence mobile has on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. In fact, If you want to create a successful mobile marketing campaign, you have to think about the way you’re uploading content and engaging on these platforms.
For example, video content is viewed as highly shareable across all social media platforms. Consider taking some of your most shared blog content and repurposing them into a video series for your followers on YouTube or Facebook. Mobile users are more likely to share, comment, and like your update, if it’s quick, informative, and works on their device. A short video checks all three of these boxes.
Customer support is vital on your website, as well as your social media accounts. You’ll have mobile users direct messaging you on Instagram to ask a question about shipping, or when you’ll have an out of stock product available again.
Having a customer service representative working on your social media profiles can help you convert both desktop and mobile visitors that frequent your account.
Back to You
There are plenty of ways you can improve your mobile marketing campaign. The tips we went over today will help make your website, social media channels, and contact forms more mobile-friendly. As a result, you could see a significant increase in subscribers and traffic. Make sure you’re reviewing your Google Analytics reports over time and examine trends involving your mobile users.
Understanding their goals and pain points will help you build better products for your mobile users, but you need a strong foundation before you can get to that point. Now you’re ready to take the first steps towards mastering mobile marketing in 2020.
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.
