Why Isn’t Your Marketing Mobile-ready?

by Mary C Long

​Customer experience should be at the top of SMBs priority list, and it is for many. According to Wasp Barcode’s Small Business Report, 43% of small businesses recognize that improving customer experience and retention are top strategies for revenue growth.

But they (somehow) don’t recognize that mobile is huge part of the customer experience equation. That’s a big mistake. Huge.

Mobile search continues to explode, and mobile social users more likely to interact with brands than desktop users, mobile isn’t just one touch-point of many –it’s arguably the most important touch-point.

So if you really want to focus on customers, your marketing MUST be mobile ready. Here’s how:

Mobile users are masterful multi-taskers

Wasp’s report shows that 80% of small businesses are using social media – so they’re mostly a savvy bunch, but that doesn’t mean they’re keeping pace with mobile users who are are often multi-tasking in ways that threaten their already meager attention spans.

They’re tweeting, watching TV and planning dinner while folding laundry. Your interaction has to pop to have a chance. And any experience you offer must integrate seamlessly with technology they’re already using. They need to be able to make reservations, order items and access info using menus and controls that are intuitive and responsive. If they can’t do that with your brand, you can bet they’ll do it with your competitor instead.

And while having a mobile-friendly website or a useful app is a good start, you also need to understand how mobile changes consumer behavior.

Mobile makes video more important

Text is harder to read on small-screen-surface devices, leading brands and consumers to rely more on visual content to communicate. Video accounted for 55% of total mobile data traffic in 2015 – a figure that’s predicted to rise to 75% by 2020. Platforms like Vine and Periscope make video more accessible to DIY marketers, and there are plenty of free online tools that can help with visual content creation.

Should your brand consider video? Definitely. It’s not hard to do it well these days. Read up! ⤺ Tweet This!

​​The right experience for all customers

Busy consumers want to complete an activity as quickly and easily as possible. Only by understanding the kind of experience your customers want – be it entertaining and engaging, quick and painless, or somewhere in the middle – can you make sure you brand is providing it. Amazon has this locked up as it’s the “brand for everything” offering a one-stop-shopping experience for pretty much everything, and free streaming music to boot. But Amazon sets a standard you can’t (and shouldn’t try) to compete with as the “everything to everyone” model typically fails.

Rather, you need to mind the details. Every potential client online, every B2C prospect, has unique expectations and you need to have a pretty sophisticated understanding of those segments to make a mark in your niche. Social listening make a difference when it comes to making sense of, and keeping pace with, mobile users, particularly when it comes to sorting through sarcasm, which is the primary language online these days.

As NetBase shares, “tweets that mean the exact opposite of what they say are more common than you might think. But getting to the heart of sarcasm can be difficult. Why? Some actual humans don’t even understand sarcasm, so teaching a processor to sort it out takes time.”

Sarcastic Twitter users aren’t your entire online universe, of course. But mobile IS. Over 70% of executives under the age of 40 say their mobile device is their primary communication tool, so if you’re not engaging them on the go, your brand’s visibility and sales will suffer.

From researching to reaching out, decision-makers are going mobile – and if you’re nowhere to be found, you can be certain you won’t be!


This post originated from Business2Community.

Image Credit: Thom