Mobile is the future of the internet, you’ve heard it a million times and we’ve said it enough on EDM already but guess what? It looks like it’s true. You can try and stick your head in the sand and ignore it, but someone will probably take a Snapchat or Vine of your exposed posterior and it will be viral before you’ve cleaned the sand out of your ears. It’s time to wise up about mobile publishing. Follow these easy four steps and you’ll be able to maintain your website and social profiles via your mobile device, wherever you might be.
1. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
First off you need to read our article from February explaining how to make a mobile-friendly site. You should also take a look at our top 5 mobile SEO tips to learn how your mobile-ready site can draw in more traffic from mobile users. Making sure the site is responsive to mobile devices and also looks like a mobile site is very important if you want mobile users to stick around. You should also consider conversational search terms and other forms of SEO that target mobile users. Check out those two links!
2. Offer Unique Mobile Only Assets
Once you’ve started attracting more mobile traffic you need to reward them with some bespoke mobile-only content. This means you need to develop a stand-alone content experience that can only be accessed via a smartphone or tablet.
Many major brands use this tactic to combine diverse content assets that have worked well elsewhere, into a new and unique mobile product. It’s a great way to provide your followers with a valuable online experience. You should also combine social efforts (Facebook, Twitter, blog feeds, YouTube video feeds, etc) so that they all drive traffic to other similar content or a specifically intended destination in order to increase conversion rates.
3. Web is Better Than Apps
A lot of developers go crazy for apps and many businesses think they have to build an app or they will lose sales. This is rarely the case though. Although apps have a novelty factor and can be far more convenient, most people don’t necessarily want to have to browse the app store and download an app just to perform a simple action, this means that the main bulk of site functionality has to be web-based.
Apps don’t always provide the service that users are looking for and once located on the app store, users have to click a number of times and wait for it to download. Not efficient. For this reason, it makes more sense to go for mobile-optimized web content rather than wasting time and money on a native app. A really well-designed site can provide just as slick and impressive a user experience as any app.
4. Use New Mobile Social Channels
Whether you’re talking about Snapchat or Instagram, there are an array of new social channels available only through mobile and these should be capitalized on for publicity and traffic. Savvy marketers figure out ways to take advantage of seemingly frivolous apps which young people mess with all day long. Check out our guide to Snapchat for business to get some ideas. The same principles apply to Vine and Instagram. Identify which kind of apps and social channels your audience is most likely to be using and come up with some fun and innovative ways of engaging with them, so they will learn about your brand.
