If you pay attention, you’ll notice a quiet revolution happening in the world of marketing. Mobile is quickly becoming the go-to channel for a variety of strategies designed to reach your customer. If you’re not using mobile yet, you will soon be. Here are 7 trends to take notice of to start developing a strategy to add mobile to your marketing mix in 2018.
- Mobile Video
It’s been predicted that in 2018, people will spend about 36 minutes watching videos on their mobile devices, where they’ll spend just 18.5 minutes on non-mobile devices. That’s reason alone to invest in mobile video content and mobile advertising for your brand. With different formats for mobile video ads, there are a variety of ways to engage with your audience, as well as get them to click to your website from the device that has their attention throughout the day. Remember less is more, keep videos under two-minutes to gain traction.
- Mobile SEO
This is far beyond having a responsive website. It’s a given that your website design will adapt based on the device it’s being viewed on. Mobile SEO is about how your mobile website focuses on core ranking, indexing and leveraging mobile keywords. Keys to success are the following:
- Focus on relevancy, usefulness and authority
- It must download quickly
- Create a mobile index
- Fix mobile-friendly errors
- Do mobile keyword research and content creation
Also know that in 2018, Google will rank search results based on the mobile friendliness of websites too, so if you’re planning on updating your site keep mobile top of mind.
- Mobile Search
You may have optimized your website for desktop searches, but you’ll need to take another gander to make sure it’s mobile friendly in terms of search, too. Because so many searches for local businesses happens on mobile devices with intent to buy, it’s imperative that your website content uses keywords to attract local customers. Consider long-tail keywords, that include the neighborhood your business is located in within those keywords.
Also know that voice search is huge with mobile, so people are searching differently. Rather than typing in “restaurant best steak Philadelphia,” a user might voice search with Siri, Amazon Echo or Google Home “What’s the best place to get a cheesesteak in Philly?” Knowing this, you can use these semantic search phrases in your SEO to better reach your mobile audience.
- Mobile Apps
Mobile apps have been all the rage for years, and they’re not going anywhere. While not every business needs to invest in the expense of designing an app, they can be beneficial for many industries including restaurants, lifestyle bloggers, fashion, art, health and fitness, and of course productivity/software businesses. But your app better be worth it. People aren’t willing to give up precious data to a hog app that runs in the background.
Before diving in, ask yourself what your purpose is in building an app. How will it better serve your customers? Are you prepared to invest in marketing the app to boost users? What’s your end goal? Having a mobile app strategy will help you be successful in this endeavor.
- In-App Mobile Content
You may be focusing on creating great content on your blog, but you need great mobile friendly content too. Why? Because Google now searches apps for content and shows it in search results.
Having valuable and up-to-date content in your mobile app may help you attract more app users and customers simply because Google will acknowledge it, so divert some of your content marketing efforts to that mobile app.
- Mobile Gamification
Whether you want to boost use of your mobile apps, get people to redeem mobile coupons, or have users share your content on social media, mobile gamification can help.
People like challenges. Imagine a marketing campaign where you enter anyone who opens your app every day for two weeks into a drawing for a vacation. Or giving a coupon to anyone who shares your content on Facebook. By requiring people to make tiny efforts, you can have a huge impact on your mobile marketing.
- Mobile Ads
Mobile pay-per-click ads can help you connect with the millions of smartphone users who are searching on their phones for businesses — especially local ones. Beyond mobile video ads (which should be no more than :15-:20 seconds) are growing in popularity. There’s growing interest in Google shopping ads which are pay-per-click ads that allows you to show up in Google search results even if your target is blocking ads. Facebook ads, are now mobile friendly, and can help you boost engagement of your Facebook page through mobile use. With over two-thirds of Facebook traffic being mobile, there is far more available inventory to optimize.