Mobile has become the starting point for consumer engagement. As per a recent study published on Similarweb, around 56% of consumer traffic comes from mobile devices. As a marketer, you must be making a huge mistake if you are not concentrating fully on the potential of conversion from traffic through mobile devices.
Every visitor to your site is important. Calculate the value per visitor and focus on having a mobile centric organic marketing strategy in order to generate maximum traffic through mobile devices that converts well.
1- Have a Mobile Responsive Theme for Your Entire Site Including Your Blog
It is important to have a complete responsive website (including your blog) so that you don’t break the customer journey. Visitors visiting your site through any channel should be able to have a uniform experience irrespective of the device.
Apart from improving the overall user experience, it helps to improve SEO rankings which in turn helps to increase traffic to your website. The Mobilegeddon algorithm aims to improve rankings of websites that are mobile friendly. Here are some great resources to get started:
Responsive Menu Plugin – The plugin creates a nice three-lined mobile menu button. It is fully responsive and can be used as a responsive menu, mobile menu, tablet menu or full dedicated menu for your main site.
RICG Responsive Images Plugin – This plugin works by sending the smallest image to the browser for each upload. Whenever an image is uploaded through the media uploader, the sizes are included in the image tag via the srcset attribute.
Mobile Responsive Themes – An impressive collection of mobile responsive themes for your blog divided by categories.
2- Replace Text Links with Tappable Buttons
Users find it hard to click on text links when they are surfing using their smartphones. Replacing the text links with tappable buttons makes it easier for the user to browse through the site thereby enhancing time on site, time on page and decreasing the bounce rate. This in turn helps the site to move up in rankings.
As per the Apple user experience guidelines, “everything should be tappable by the size of a fingertip, which it defines as 44 points square, or approximately 57 pixels square. This is a lot bigger than a link in a text-based menu, which might be only 14 pixels high. Thus, the clickable area of a link on a mobile website should encompass not only the text but the area around the text, and ideally this would be apparent to the user.”
3- Use Vary HTTP Header to Serve Different Code to Each Device But on the Same URL
The Vary user agent is an http header stating that different content is served to different users. It helps Google and other search engines determine the mobile version for a page.
Nowadays, webmasters prefer using content delivery networks in order to improve the caching process. A CDN works by reducing the latency time and by improving the caching speed. In order to ensure the user gets the right content, Vary HTTP header should be used as it helps to display web pages even if the caching system does not cache your page at all.
4- Make Sure Videos or Content are Playable on Mobile Devices
Multi device optimization has become a necessity. You need to follow the below guidelines to ensure that your videos are properly optimized to be playable on mobile devices:
- Ensure that your video players are responsive.This means your video content should be visible on both an iPhone (640px wide) and a large monitor (1920px wide).
- Create responsive video splash screens.
- YouTube annotations don’t work on mobile devices so it is recommended to add information in the video description or use the featured content
- Include a Call to Action on the video itself.
While preparing content, it is necessary to identify the audience persona and create content that exactly matches the targeted demographic. Achieving branding utilizing the power of content marketing should be your top priority. View these magical branding lessons adopted by the Game of Thrones that helps to effectively diversify your branding efforts. In order to make your content mobile friendly, use the following guidelines:
Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and redirect your mobile users automatically to the mobile optimized versions of your webpages. Mobile friendly webpages are a minor ranking factor and this will give a boost to your mobile organic rankings.
People view images more than they view text so consider adding images and videos without breaking the overall user experience.
Front load your most powerful content and use short paragraphs.
Don’t use Flash or pop-up’s but use Structured data to better present your content.
5- Use Personalized Mobile Interaction to Increase Engagement
A one-to-one approach with your customer proves to be very successful.
Personalize your customer experience by interacting with them in their exact micro-moment.
Make use of technologies like push app notifications and in-app messages to target the consumers.
Utilize tools like Mobify which provides dedicated Engagement Engines that aims to deliver highly personalized content to customers in real-time using contextual information such as location, behavioral data, 1st party data, and integrations with third-party systems such as CRM or personalization engines.
6- Leverage Mobile Influencers in order to Target Mobile Savvy Demographic
Having popular faces to market your brand is always great. For app marketing and attracting mobile audiences, influencer marketing is a boon. It involves 4 main activities:
Identifying and ranking influencers as per their importance or popularity.
Marketing to influencers to raise brand awareness.
Marketing through influencers in order to promote a brand through them.
Marketing with influencers includes the step of turning influencers into brand advocates.
You can make use of the following tools to effectively promote your content using the power of influencers:
FollowerWonk: Allows you to find and connect with new influencers in your niche. You can search bios, compare users, analyze reports and track followers.
BuzzSumo: One of my favorite tools. It helps you to find influencers according to your niche. You can easily create alerts, apply filters and export all the relevant data.
Klout: One of the oldest players in the market. It allows you to measure the ‘True reach’ which is the measure of the number of people you influence such as the people who are acting on your content. Moreover, it lets you identify the ‘Network’ which is the influence of people within your ‘true reach’, such as how often top influencers respond to or share your content.
Mobile marketing has now become a necessity and brands that are still lagging behind in terms of having an optimized mobile experience for the end user need to revamp their existing strategy and must include mobile as one of the top priorities.