I recently returned from a trip to South East Asia visiting Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand - The picture above is my Plan International sponsored child of ten years whom I finally got to meet in her homeland of Cambodia. It was a very rewarding experience that makes a person proud to be helping not only one child but an entire community who struggle with poverty. A helping hand and smile means the same thing in every language.
What does this have to do with marketing in a mobile world?
A few years ago I wrote a post about a visit to Tanzania in Africa and how it inspired me regarding the resourcefulness of people when they have very little. Despite living in very simple conditions with few possessions most people had mobile phones. The same can be said of South East Asia and I imagine the majority of the world these days. It's incredible how mobile devices have changed the way we communicate in just the past ten years. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010 he predicted we were moving into a post-PC era, and after travelling many places since then I have to agree he was absolutely right.
When I first visited South East Asia in 2006 there were internet cafés on almost every street corner where locals and tourists could get access to the web. Fast forward to 2017 and I think I only saw one internet café - They have mostly disappeared because almost everybody seems to be now accessing the web through their smartphones at wi-fi hotspots. The mobile web experience has become the web experience. We now live in a mobile-first world and this has serious implications for your marketing strategy.
If you have analytics hooked up to your website I'm willing to bet that 50% or more of your traffic is coming from mobile devices. If so, there are certain things you should be considering to mobilize your marketing, so to speak. Here's a few things off the top of my head:
- Have a mobile responsive website that automatically arranges its layout depending on the device accessing it. Google also favours websites with a mobile responsive layout so not only is it good for customers it's good for search engine optimization.
- Ensuring contact information (telephone, email, address, map, and hours) are easily accessible on every web page since people in the mobile on-the-go context are often looking for this information.
- Allow people to contact your organization through text (SMS) messaging. Despite the popularity of smartphones, using them to actually phone people seems to be on the decline as people have begun to favour sending text messages. Go figure?
- Start collecting people's mobile phone numbers and consider text messages as a future communication channel. There's lots of rules around this so just don't start sending people text messages willy nilly or you could end up with a fine.
- Hyper-location based advertising to reach people when they're near or searching for your business from a mobile device. You can accomplish this with both Facebook ads and Google AdWords.
- Make sure you have a Google My Business listing that is up-to-date and contains contact information. When people search for your organization using Google one of the first search results will likely be a Google My Business Listing whether you created it or not. You need to own/control this.
- Keep promotional emails short and ensure their layout is mobile friendly. If you think a three paragraph email looks too long on your desktop then consider it looks like a novel on mobile devices.
This is a short list and there are likely many other things that people should consider. If you have experience with mobile marketing and examples of things not listed above I'd appreciate hearing about them. The more I travel the more I realize the less I know. Thanks for reading.
