It goes without saying that mobile marketing has seen some huge boons over the past 2-3 years. At the start of 2017, 70% of U.S. adults own a smartphone and Americans consume 60% of their digital media content on mobile apps. The dethroning of the desktop computer is leaving marketers in a scramble, trying to find better ways to maximize their mobile capabilities. To achieve mobile marketing success in 2017, we must adopt strategies that focus on the user experience. An emphasis on visual content, coupled with predictive analytics and agile testing, are three steps towards a victorious mobile strategy in 2017.
Moving away from written content
Despite what Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, said in 2014, guest blogging and traditional blogging are not dead. But in 2016 alone we’ve seen a significant migration towards other forms of content that are more mobile-friendly. Visual content is now more popular than ever, as it attracts a more discerning audience interested in gifs, memes, videos, infographics, and images. In fact, posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement than posts with only text.
In addition to creating for the mobile web, mobile apps are driving a more immersive consumption of content. Thanks to artificial intelligence, users will start to interact with their content. It may be something as simple as spending less time typing text into the app and relying on voice commands instead. We’re already seeing changing consumer behavior with the success of Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service, Google Now, and recent updates to Apple’s Siri. Marketers who focus on the peripheral experience (visual, audio, voice recognition capability, etc.) will come out ahead in 2017.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation has proved to be a productive approach to nurturing leads in email marketing campaigns (the #1 driver of conversions, online), and 2017 will continue to push sales forward. Automation helps alleviate your manual workload by establishing a set of preprogrammed responses to your buyer’s journey. These responses may be prompted by opting into an email newsletter or contacting support, and the messaging that follows is scheduled ahead of time to scale your operations and provide personalized support.
Where you can really get a leg up on the competition is by implementing an intelligent marketing automation strategy. In addition to using intelligent email campaigns targeting subsets of users, based on open-rate or click-through rate as examples, you should also incorporate chatbots to intelligently automate your customer service and create a sms text messaging support model befitting mobile users.
Ultimately, intelligent marketing automation is designed to lead consumers through the sales funnel and beyond, aiming to increase your conversions and retention rates during and after a sale.
Predictive analytics
Mobile data used to be hard to procure, and oftentimes wasn’t very accurate. It’s since improved tenfold on both accounts. Not only are traditional analytics companies adapting to mobile platform, but there’s an emergence of a new technology called predictive analytics that is vastly altering the way marketers target their leads.
Rather than creating spreadsheet after spreadsheet full of handpicked customer data, predictive analytics uses machine-driven technology to make conclusions about each customer’s buying habits based on factors like search history. The more you know about a lead, the better you can respond and we know that consumers behave differently on mobile than desktop. Predictive analysis provides you with more actionable data to target specific customers based on a number of data points, thereby increasing engagement rates by creating content tailored to the individual and altering user experiences based on that user.
Mobile friendliness/responsiveness
Improvement of the user experience will be accomplished on a few fronts. First, it’s about load times. For every 1 second delay in page response, the average reduction in conversions is about 7%. It’s crucial to test load speeds and responsiveness across ALL mobile devices, especially across the iPhone, Android, and Samsung Galaxy smartphones. A landing page might load quickly on iOS devices, but might take an eternity on Microsoft and Samsung devices (or vice versa).
There are a number of great coding classes, software tools, and technologies for cross browser and app testing. Most important is to review each page as it would appear across mobile devices: quality assurance checks are most often achieved using Selenium WebDriver testing frameworks to facilitate the automation of browser testing. No matter your approach, it’s important to test, test, and test. You can’t improve the user experience until you’ve experienced it for yourself, right?
Conclusion
The robots are taking over! Automation in digital marketing has arrived, and it’s actually really exciting. 2017 is ushering in a new era of real-time mobile analytics and analysis that can present many positives for your brand. Among them? Better content and user experiences to increase the success of your mobile marketing strategy, device by device. Now that’s something we can all get behind.
