Six Trends Your Small Business Needs to Know about Mobile Marketing in 2018
Mobile continues to dominate the marketing landscape in 2018. If you own a small business, you must incorporate mobile marketing into your 2018 marketing strategy.
Each year mobile becomes more important. In 2014, mobile web traffic surpassed desktop traffic. Today, we spend an average of 5 hours a day using our mobile devices! That trend will continue to gro
For business owners, this trend means that if someone is looking at their website, consuming digital content, or looking at an online ad, it’s probably happening on a mobile device. Mobile has changed consumer habits. If your business isn’t using mobile marketing in 2018, your business marketing strategies won’t just fall flat — they flat out won’t work at all.
To help you prepare for a mobile-mad consumer world, make sure you take the following six 2018 small business mobile marketing trends to heart:
People Increasingly Demand Mobile-Centered Website Design
Just over half (51%) of all website visits now come from mobile devices. This means that your website must be easily read and navigated on the tiny screen of a cellphone.
To do this, make sure your site uses a reliable mobile responsive design. Mobile responsive design automatically adjusts and rearranges site elements to look presentable on mobile phones and tablets. This is the 1st step to your mobile marketing program in 2018. It’s non optional.
To check if your website fits responsive design recommendations, you can use Google’s mobile friendly test.
1. Optimize Your Website For Mobile
Mobile is so important in 2018 that I recommend you go with a mobile-first strategy when designing content.
Nearly 70% of media consumption now occurs on mobile, according to Comscore. Your customers are 2.3 times more likely to be viewing your content on a mobile device as opposed to desktop.
This means that you need to make sure your content strategy and design is easy to read on mobile in 2018 and beyond.
For example, all of your blog content layouts should use a responsive design that looks good in a vertically scrolling format. Your photos should be big and bold on small mobile screens. These simple changes will help to engage your reader and encourage them to share and comment on your content.
Always think about how your content will be viewed and interacted with on a mobile device. Your business depends on this as a central element of your marketing strategy in 2018.
2. Good Mobile Experience Tops SEO Demands
A good mobile website design does two things:
- keeps your visitors on your website longer.
- It tells the search engines that your page is worth visiting and helps your SEO.
Good mobile design has potential to boost your search engine ranking above competitors. Ignoring mobile marketing in 2018 will hurt your business and make it more difficult for your customers to find you.
To increase your customer experience and get the search engines to like your site create:
- Simplified site layouts that have no more than 5 main page categories. Your goal is to reduce the number of clicks needed to navigate
- Create an always-present navigation menu. This is normally a classic “hamburger menu” positioned in the top corner, although having a few additional icons helps.
- Present your content in an “inverted pyramid” approach with the most important details shown first. You want your visitor to know what you’re about right away. Make it easy for them.
Kimberly de Silva of BiznessApps puts the approach best: “Cut your copy and content down to the bare essentials.” She stresses that you will want your design to, “seamlessly guide [visitors] to conversion without any distractions.” To improve clarity and directness, you can put non-essential information in side menus or in-text links within content.
3. Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to Boost Site Speed, UX and SEO
Accelerated Mobile Pages (abbreviated “AMP”) is a project from Google and dozens of other tech collaborators. It’s goal is to Using it will make your website load faster on your visitors phones and mobile devices. That’s a good thing. Make sure that your website developer Developers code AMP pages to have as little getting in the way of quick load times as possible.
Fast-loading pages matter to mobile device users. They usually want answers now. Statistics show that people will be 90% more likely to abandon a page that takes five seconds to load compared to one second.
Google also offers a small search engine ranking boost to pages that use AMP guidelines.
Even if you don’t have the resources to switch your pages to AMP, you can still reduce your load times and improve user experience (UX) in other ways. Take Google’s PageSpeed Insights test for tailored suggestions.
If your goal is to engage and convert more prospects in 2018, content marketing can easily become your golden ticket.
4. Huge Shift Towards a Video-Centered Content Strategy
Videos are easier to watch on mobile compared to reading text — or even trying to digest colorful infographics. There are many reasons for this: video is passively consumed while text or large images have to be nudged around. Motion is easier to detect on small screens compared to discerning tiny static details.
For whatever, reason, people can’t get enough of mobile video. A third of online activity is now spent watching video. And video content gets snatched up quicker compared to non-video. For instance, adding a video to your landing page can increase conversions by over 80%. Blogs incorporating a video get three times as many inbound links.
Put simply: if you want more clicks, then try switching more online ads and organic-style content to video. You will accommodate your mobile audience better and you will drive improved engagement all around.
5. Micro-Moment Approach to Content and SEO
Not only is mobile-centered content moving towards video, but it’s also moving towards satisfying what Google calls “micro-moments” of need. A micro-moment refers to anytime you pull out your smartphone of tablet to answer an immediate question.
One common example is that people will search for a business name followed by “…near me.” So, instead of searching for “guitar store”, they might search for “guitar store near me.” Search results will display according to the user’s last known location. Ranking for “near me” requires a localized search keyword focus, so using “guitar store in Utica, NY” as a keyword emphasis on your website can help improve “near me” search rankings.
Other micro-moments include times people need answers. So, someone might search for “how do I repair a broken peg on my guitar” and expect to find a quick video on the topic. Businesses can capitalize on this need by providing helpful content in addition to keywords mirroring the intended search, like “guitar repair in Utica, NY.”
When trying to satisfy micro-moments, there are two additional things to keep in mind: people may be searching for very specific content (long tail) and they may be asking their phone’s voice assistants to make the search for them (semantic search).
In response, try to offer a lot of quick, to-the-point articles and emphasize titles that reflect sentence-style questions people may ask. Using a music store example again, a semantic, long-tail search would be “where can I rent a trumpet near me?” compared to someone typing “instrument rental, Utica, NY.”
6. Forming Attribution Strategies and Tracing ROI
As a final note, small business owners must take care to track how their efforts in mobile-centered marketing are doing. Yet, one in four retailers say they have no method for attributing mobile marketing interactions to final purchases.
Using an attribution strategy like having people redeem coupon codes in-person can help connect a mobile ad to a final in-store purchase. Other times, business owners estimate how many percentage of impressions and click-throughs generate to a final sales conversion. So, if 5% of web page visitors are spending an average of $42 in the next week at your store, then each page visit is worth approximately $2.10.
Ensure that, at the very least, you are setting marketing goals for your content and paid ads in the form of hard metrics. By tracing return on investment (ROI), you can optimize the amount you spend and chase better and better results over time.
Paying attention to mobile marketing in 2018 will have a huge impact on your business. If you focus on only one marketing trend in 2018, focus on mobile. It’s the most important..Period.
If you need help implementing a solid content marketing strategy in your business schedule a complimentary Phone Session where we can lay out a plan and strategy that’s right for your business.
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