Description: Mobile penetration in India continues to grow at a rapid pace. While they were classified as a luxury not a long time ago, mobiles have become a ubiquitous part of a given consumer’s life. This article explores the tenets of mobile marketing in 2020.
Mobile marketing
The numbers suggesting the rise of mobile usage in India are often predictable. TRAI data released this year showed that the total number of active mobile network subscribers went up to 1.026 billion as of December 2018. According to various studies, the number is only expected to grow as network coverage improves and internet reaches interior parts of India.
Leaving the numbers aside, the rise of mobile has been a cultural and societal phenomenon too. It is no longer viable for a person living in an urban or suburban area to live without a mobile phone.
This rise of mobile phones has, in turn, influenced many other lines of work, marketing being one of them. Mobile marketing has developed into an entire branch in itself. As has always been the case, marketers go where their audience is, and so mobile marketing becomes an obvious avenue for growth.
An effective mobile marketing campaign can help in a lot of ways, from helping website SERPs to growing traffic and increasing engagement with leads. New technologies such as voice search have already ingratiated on mobile platforms.
The future of mobile marketing thus is also predicated upon assimilating with new tech changes in the future. AI, machine learning, AR, VR, and so on will join the mainstream only through the reach of mobile. Mobile marketing campaigns would have to adapt to these changes to continue having useful engagement with users.
In this article, we will go through some mobile marketing guidelines which would help marketers in 2020.
Mobile Marketing Guidelines
There are a few mobile marketing guidelines every marketer should adhere to. These guidelines are not meant to restrict, but instead, help in bringing in new leads and prospects.
Build Mobile-Friendly Websites
A majority of online traffic goes through mobile. The time when users managed to navigate through desktop versions of websites on mobile is now gone. People expect modern websites to seamlessly provide content on mobile in an easy-to-consume medium.
But what does mobile-friendly mean? Does it just mean content should fit properly on a mobile screen?
There are a number of factors which go into a making a website mobile-friendly. One of the obvious ones is working on an efficient mobile UI and UX. Bloated designs generally do not work on mobiles as users prefer simple UIs with easy navigation. Web designers work with digital marketers to make sure the UI and UX of a website are perfect for mobile. A mobile marketing campaign can go into disarray if users
Mobile search adaptability involves compressing heavy images, cutting down or eliminating pop-ups and removing any animation which takes a lot of time to load on mobile. Featured snippets are highly preferable on mobile search.
This means digital marketers have to improve the data markup so that the website content shows up on featured snippets. Other changes to improve mobile search come down to optimizing a site’s meta description for mobile. Shorter descriptions usually work better on mobile. Since search makes up for a lot of traffic on mobile, its optimization becomes a key part of any mobile marketing effort.
One of the key factors to make a website mobile-friendly is improving its load time. Most people tend to use phones on cellular networks which are not as fast as Wi-Fi. Thus, websites which want to mobile-friendly have to be very fast and responsive. A slow website tends to have a very high bounce rate, which is not a desirable position for any digital marketer. Thus, improving load time is a major priority in any mobile marketing campaign.
Give Preference to Local Content and Search
A large portion of mobile searches tends to be about local queries. Thus, optimizing local search is an essential mobile marketing tip.
Digital marketers can optimize websites for local search by focusing on short local keywords for mobile search. Since audio searches on mobile tend to be longer and specific, digital marketers can choose longer keywords for the same.
Using shorter articles and blogs is another example of working towards a local search-based mobile marketing strategy. Use of local keywords in content title, meta description, header, and other on-page entities is also a good option.
Mobile-Focused Content Optimization
The main point of having content on a website is to attract potential customers and turn them into leads. The entire point of SEO is based on this simple premise.
Content on mobile is viewed is a slightly different light compared to desktops. Digital marketers thus have to work with content creators to make sure it is optimized suitably for mobile users. As of now, there are two new trending ways digital marketers are using to optimize content for mobile.
The first method is implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on a website.
AMP was a template initially brought to deliver news to mobile users instantly. It was adopted by news media companies for the same purpose. However, the success of AMP to deliver content to users at a rapid speed made it a hit and was subsequently adopted by many other websites from other domains. Tech companies, e-commerce behemoths, and even advertisers are now using AMP to improve user experience and successfully convert prospects and leads to customers.
AMP is generally used by websites with heavy content and slow load time. Both these problems become a headache for digital marketers and have the potential to disrupt well-planned mobile marketing strategies. Websites with fast load times do not need AMP.
At the crux of AMP is making sure the content loads without waiting for other plug-ins, images, and extensions to react and load. This makes sure a normal mobile user can get on with consuming their content without waiting for other website resources to load.
The second method to optimize content is ingratiating audio-based services on the website.
People are getting more and more comfortable with using audio search as a tool. With an improvement in audio technology on smartphones, users have begun to accept and even use audio as a major part of their mobile experience.
To adapt to this change, digital marketers have to optimize websites to facilitate audio search and navigation. Text-to-audio software has already begun finding its place in mobile browsers. The key to unlocking audio on mobile lies in creating audio-oriented content. This means content creators have to write content keeping in mind the end consumers will be listening to the content. This will require them to be very creative with their words.
Audio is set to go big in the coming years and will play a vital role in helping mobile marketing campaigns achieve success.
Content optimization doesn’t simply stop with website content. Content sent out on e-mail newsletters, push-notifications, and SMSs also play a crucial role in bringing new customers and leads to a business.
New technologies are already making content consumption change, and mobile marketing will have to keep up to find new prospects and leads.
Use SEM and SMM to advantage
The dynamics of SEM and SMM change on mobile as well.
In the case of SEM, the chances of a mobile user clicking an ad improve significantly as mobile phones do not display as many organic results at the same time as desktops. Thus a well-planned mobile marketing plan which incorporates SEM and PPC strategies can pay great dividends.
To use PPC ads to their potential, digital marketers have to create short and crisp ad copies with an intuitive CTA message. Other mobile tools like click to call or map locations can also be used. Further, keyword research for mobile also comes into the picture. People have different search tendencies while using desktops and mobile. For an SEM strategy geared towards mobile users, suitable keywords have to be chosen. Appropriate bidding plans have to be made to make sure a PPC ad lands at the top of a search result.
In SMM, the biggest trend is video. According to data from this year, 80% of mobile traffic is attributed to videos. YouTube marketing is already on the rise. The biggest play in mobile marketing for SMM is video. People grasp video much faster than textual content.
Other platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are also seeing a rise in video consumption. Live streaming is already quite the rage. Many firms have even begun conducting webinars across all their social media and online channels instead of creating textual content. Any SMM campaign conducted with an eye on mobile marketing is more likely to succeed if it’s based on video.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, mobile marketing has become a key part of any digital marketing team’s arsenal. Any campaign conducted either by large MNCs or small startups, the need to focus on mobile is apparent.
Mobile marketing brings its own set of challenges and opportunities. The key often comes down to user experience in general. If a mobile marketing plan is focused on providing the users with a holistic experience, the user is more likely to become a customer.
Mobile marketing cannot be viewed as a separate field of marketing itself. It is an amalgamation of various other forms of marketing. The challenge lies in how to make every experience better on mobile.
About the Author – Gaurav Heera is a well-known content strategist and digital marketing entrepreneur. He currently heads operations at DelhiCourses.in, a place ranked #1 consistently for its digital marketing course in Delhi. The institute also offers courses in other fields such as cyber security, business analytics, and cloud computing.
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