As a small business owner, you should always be looking for how best to promote your company.
Whether it is through traditional advertising, marketing, public relations or social media, you need to know what works best for you. With that being said, does mobile marketing have a place in your strategy playbook? If the answer is no, is there a reason you have yet to give it a try?
As more and more businesses are discovering these days, mobile marketing is almost a necessity in this day and age as more customers turn to smartphones and other mobile devices to conduct their shopping needs.
According to the Google Mobile Optimization Webinar, “By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCS to get online.” That prediction, by the way, is just in the U.S. Already in places like India, many users utilize mobile devices to connect to the Internet.
So, if you’re still lagging behind when it comes to mobile marketing, there are some reasons you need to get going.
Among them:
* Optimize your website – If you have not already, you want to begin by optimizing your site in order for mobile crawlers to accessed during searches. Mobile crawlers will definitely be interested in the bounce rate for your page, meaning you want your pages to load as quickly as possible on mobile devices, allowing you to attain a better ranking;
* Mobile payments should continue growing – Reports indicate that mobile payments are projected to almost triple in just the next two years. According to a Forrester report, “Among all Interactive Marketing platforms, Mobile Marketing is expected to grow 38% over the next five years with an estimated $8.2 billion being allocated to it by the year 2016.” That figure alone should encourage those businesses not already involved in mobile marketing to get up to speed quickly;
* Google keeps growing – The world’s top search engine pointed out that it was expecting to end the fiscal year with some $2.5 billion in mobile ad revenue. Add in the fact that there is major adoption of mobile devices capable of browsing the Internet and being served advertisements, and you can see that mobile marketing is only growing in importance;
* Think of the user – If you are working on your mobile marketing efforts, always keep in mind how they will impact the user. In order to do just that, keep to a minimum the scope of text a user will be required to read or information they need to share with you. The goal here is to prevent the user from being inundated by content and/or having trouble providing information. You also want your site navigation to be easy in a mobile setting, preventing the user from having to work their way through a maze in order to reach the desired location. Finally, speed is of the essence for the user when loading, as a slow load will potentially turn them away to a faster site, quite possibly that of your competition;
* Be a leader – Lastly, with the mobile market still growing, you are afforded the opportunity to be seen as a leader in this niche. If you are viewed as one of the top players in mobile marketing, it only increases your standing among the players, allowing you to reap the financial rewards of such a position. Not only can you maintain current customers, but there is the ability to land new customers who use their mobile devices to browse and shop.
With mobile marketing on the rise, is your mobility where it should be?
About the author: With 23 years of experience as a writer, Dave covers a wide array of topics from cubicles to properly using social media in the workplace.
