Down Low, Too Slow: Mobile Marketing to a Quick Culture

Seventy-nine percent of shoppers who experience slow speeds on online retailers say that they will never return to that site again. And 44% of those people say they would share their distaste with their friends.

Yikes.

But you already built an entire website that you're proud of, why should you have to build another version?

Mobile marketing, a simple concept on the surface, rapidly became an integral part of the way people conduct business. The ComScore Mobile App Report illustrates 87% of consumer’s time on the internet is spent on mobile devices, and only 13% of usage happens on desktop apps. For all this mobile traffic, you must provide consumers with engaging experiences that won't drive them to the brink of frustration. You don't need that bad publicity.

Slow and Steady Stinks

Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, allows businesses to create web pages that are smooth, engaging, and fast. According to their data, they report that 75% of consumers leave sites that take more than 10 seconds to load and more than half of consumers leave sites after only three seconds. They also provide ways in which businesses can choose the best ad experience for their users. The ad servers, demand servers, and formats of the ads are the three ways in which they optimize and improve the websites they manage. Also, they allow companies to segment their audiences so that they may advertise to interested people.

TUNE, Influence Mobile, and Wompmobile are all noteworthy players in the emphasis on mobile marketing. The services they provide companies are designed to create clean, fast, and seamless experiences for the people visiting their site.

TUNE identifies as a self-service performance marketing platform. By measuring app and website performance through analytics, businesses are able to identify their performance and improvements from the changes TUNE implements. They are able to see results from every platform, primarily mobile. TUNE emphasizes the importance of goals in KPIs and allowing businesses an accessible way to measure their progress.

Influence Mobile gives businesses a way to advertise to niche markets and gives customers a meaningful incentive to engage with the companies for which they advertise. Following AMP’s model, Influence Mobile segments their audience and advertises to people more likely to become leads. Their audiences remain relevant, as they can only see the ads if they sign up on the app.

Wompmobile emphasizes their mission for websites to gain profit and grow along with their businesses. They see website’s acquisition of speed and fluency as the key to a profit. Equipping businesses with engaged audiences who receive content at their demand, they help businesses grow.

Although they accomplish this in diverse ways, these three companies have the long-term goal to improve business operations.

SEO and Smartphones

"Wait, SEO again?"

They all play together!

There are multiple ways in which websites may improve their ranking on Google’s search engine results pages. Mobile-first indexing is Google’s response to the wave of consumers and internet users who typically grab their phones to search for information instead of using computers. This groundbreaking shift forces companies to change the ways in which they operate in their digital space. A common misconception with mobile-first indexing is the notion that Google creates a mobile-based index and a desktop-based index in tandem. Rather, Google’s search engine is actually crawling and indexing mobile sites rather than desktop sites.

Simple ways to improve site rankings is by configuring websites to adjust to the needs of consumers. In this context, this could mean that the website adjusts to the device the user is using to access the internet, by changing image formats to fit on the screens on which they appear. No matter what mobile device people are using to access a site, they must be given a seamless, attractive page.

Another improvement is ensuring that the content on a website is optimized for mobile devices. To expand upon this precaution, companies may create a native app to extend a user’s activity with your company beyond the website, itself. An advantage of using apps instead of sites in a mobile browser is the higher quality of interactivity users have with the app. On apps, it is much easier to make interactions smooth, even though websites are easier to update in the long run. Apps also provide users with easy access, allowing them to open and utilize the app more frequently. Companies who use mobile sites, alone, demonstrate a lower degree of convenience than companies that also utilize a mobile app.

For example, Shutterfly provides its website visitors with an aesthetic display whether they are on their computer or mobile devices. There are multiple differences between the two platforms, but they provide similar feelings.

The big ads that look great on my MacBook are far more difficult to read on my phone when I switch to the desktop version. Also, the buttons midway down the page are harder to navigate when using the desktop version on a mobile device.

The mobile version is quite engaging on my phone.

MyWestern is an online dashboard that gives Western students access to resources. On its desktop version, it’s easy to differentiate between icons and drop-down menus when attempting to register for classes, check grades, and access email. However, MyWestern’s mobile counterpart is quite different and frustrating to navigate. The two versions are hardly recognizable from each other.

I often check my phone to access ClassFinder around registration season because I think of solutions to schedule conflicts and need to access the course list ASAP. However, ClassFinder is inaccessible from MyWestern mobile version. To access the widget, I must either search for it in Google, or I have to switch to the mobile version on Safari.

The Bottom Line...

Mobile marketing is so necessary because people increasingly want things on their demand. If it doesn't work for them, they'll move on and find something that does. Just as people are using computers less frequently, they may show this trend with their phones as well. 

The future of mobile marketing includes more accessibility and a higher relevance of the content consumers are being shown every day. Businesses will continually be able to fine-tune their efforts, and be able to communicate with consumers in ways that work best for their own lifestyles. One of the ways to accomplish this is by wearing devices with access to voice assistants.

The Google Assistant has pulled ahead and is now the most popular voice assistant for shopping. Chatbots Magazine named 2017 as the "Year of the Voice" as the competition for space in the vocal marketplace has increased dramatically. Thirty-percent of people report the use of voice assistants when shopping, between Google, Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, just to name a few.

Going back to SEO, when optimizing for search engines, businesses must keep voice assistants in mind because consumers are only being fed one result when they ask their voice assistant a question. In the same way, voice assistants must be considered when businesses target mobile devices.

The near future might be people screaming questions and requests to their invisible voice assistants. For businesses to maintain their status in the marketing world, they learn how to adapt.