Studies show that U.S. consumers spend an average of 3.3 hours a day using mobile apps, according to leading tech analyst Mary Meeker. As a result, mobile media consumption trends are driving commercial growth across the nation.
To help with solving their ongoing plight to find growth opportunities in 2019, more small- to medium-sized (SME) business owners around the world want to know how to develop a successful mobile strategy.
More savvy entrepreneurs wish to capture a piece of the record-breaking mobile market profit forecast for 2019. By answering several key questions, you can formulate a plan to launch a successful bid into mobile marketing.
After mobile optimizing, will our data stay safe?
A 2018 Symantec cybersecurity report reveals that an average of 24,000 malicious mobile attacks occur every day. If you develop an app of any substance, more than likely it will process sensitive customer information in some way. No matter what that information is, you’ll need to keep it secure.
Cybersecurity should be the first thing that you think about regarding your mobile deployment. This means building security into your app during development, rather than having it coded in as an afterthought.
For one, a security-first mindset empowers you to test app security during the build. This attitude also gives you the foresight to ensure that your network is secure before your app launches.
Secondly, if you’re cautious about security from the start, you’ll remain that more cognizant of who has access to project data during the build. Secure development practices make a world of difference in the safety of your mobile application. Accordingly, it would be best if you initiated any mobile deployment with cybersecurity as a priority.
Who is our mobile audience?
When developing a mobile app, you need to take a second look at your ideal consumer. Start by working with your information technology department to figure out what platform most of your consumers use. Furthermore, understanding how your consumers will use your app is critical.
Consumers who use apps have high expectations. You can avoid disappointing your consumers by including them early in the development process.
Just as you would use a focus group for any other marketing initiative, poll consumers to find out what they want in an app. Even after you launch your app, make sure that you include an easy way for consumers to give you feedback and find support.
Make sure that your IT department stays on top of application support logs. Also, you should never launch an app without providing support. At all times, make sure someone is accountable for delivering app support and has the tools and resources they need to do the job.
What are some of the best practices for mobile strategy optimization?
53-percent of consumers will delete an app with bugs, according to the technology marketing research firm Dimensional Research. Even worse, buggy apps account for 40-percent of conversion losses. This outcome highlights the importance of testing.
When it comes to app testing, metrics are your friend. You must make sure that your app continuously meets or exceeds established benchmarks. Accordingly, ongoing and active mobile app testing is a must.
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Who should we include in app development, and what are our mobile strategy KPIs?
Your mobile app strategy needs more than a dedicated team for deployment. Making sure that your customers have the best mobile experience possible is an enterprise-wide responsibility.
Your mobile app deployment will only succeed if everyone is on board – starting with top management. Once this happens, the rest of the organization will follow.
As your deployment unfolds and continues, marketing analytics employees should measure marketing performance, make improvements and continually search for new opportunities to generate income. On the technical side of your mobile deployment, IT stakeholders should stay continuously informed about and deploy the latest mobile best-practices.
Your development team should have a deep and continually expanding understanding of the best practices for exceptional user experiences. You need to keep track of important metrics such as mobile conversion rates.
Your mobile conversion rate should make sense compared to the traffic generated by your app. If, for instance, 70-percent of your customer base uses your app every month, but only 35-percent convert, or make a purchase, there’s a problem somewhere. Also, you’ll need to devise strategies to improve conversion rates over time.
On average, a mobile page takes 15.3 seconds to load. That’s fast. Right? Well, guess what? That’s not fast enough.
The Dimensional Research report reveals that 61-percent of consumers expect an app to start in less than four seconds. What’s more, 49-percent of app users expect apps to respond to input in less than two seconds.
Around 50-percent of consumers abandon mobile websites if they take more than three seconds to load. Another way to look at it is that in retail a one-second delay can reduce conversions by 20-percent. If you don’t have a team dedicated to optimizing your customer experience, you might as well set up a page that redirects them to your competitors who are doing it right.
How do we develop a mobile marketing plan?
Like any effective marketing campaign, your mobile deployment concept must engage consumers and promote them to share your communications with their peers. It would be best if you established a clear plan of action for accomplishing your mobile marketing goals.
An effective mobile marketing strategy consists of six components. These are:
- Asset allocation
- Campaign goals and tracking
- Campaign insights and targeting
- Campaign media planning and budgeting
- Execution
- Key campaign communications and promotions
For each of the six stages, you’ll need to outline essential factors, such as consumer personas, value proposition and other items.
lue proposition and other items.
It’s essential that you understand what you want to achieve and how you will realize it before you launch your app. You can’t serve your ideal consumers if you haven’t defined their needs. Even if you already have an existing consumer persona, now is the time to reevaluate that assessment in addition to reconsidering how you sourced information for the profile.
Furthermore, you’ll need to pin down your current campaign messages and promotions. Once you do, you can figure out what offers will engage and convert your mobile audience.
How will mobile marketing affect our existing channels?
More consumers are adopting a mobile-first strategy. Many SMEs, however, are just mastering the e-commerce customer experience, and mobile optimization isn’t even on the radar of many small to mid-sized organizations.
Highly competitive retailers such as Amazon are perfectly content with this circumstance. Retailers who have yet to embrace mobile marketing give those who’ve mastered the task free reign to capture a rapidly expanding market that yearns to free themselves from PCs and laptops.
Every day, more consumers are using their smartphones to find out information and abandoning other more common devices. As this trend persists, the custumer journey grows increasingly fragmented and complex.
In 2018, eMarketer forecast that U.S. mobile e-commerce would account for 39.6-percent of total retail sales. That was $208.1 billion in revenue for the year for mobile-savvy enterprises.
As online sales increase, the separation between mobile sites and applications is growing unclear. Case in point, Google reveals that 46-percent of online consumer shopping sessions involve at least one switch from a mobile site to an app.
As things stand, 47-percent of consumers will switch from a mobile site to an app because they believe apps are more comfortable to navigate, according to the Google report. 40-percent of consumers think apps are more efficient for making purchases and 37-percent of buyers believe that apps save time during checkout.
Marketing thought-leader Brian Solis expresses that enterprises need to do more than improve their mobile experiences. They need to understand the mobile customer experience from the users’ perspective.
What is SMS, and how will it fit into our marketing plan?
Relatively recently, America’s government has taken steps to ensure that more citizens have access to mobile phones. This development is creating an unprecedented opportunity for expanding the influence of SMS marketing.
SMS marketing is now a marketing mainstay. For many SMEs, it’s an economical, fast and effective marketing channel. Now, a growing number of organizations are leveraging SMS marketing to communicate with potential buyers.
A Retail Dive study shows that brand SMS messages have the highest open rate among any existing form of marketing. The technology empowers small to mid-sized enterprises to reach out for new business, regardless of location. SMS is also a useful tool for reaching communities where internet service is not readily accessible, such as rural areas.
SMS is a no-brainer for increasing consumer engagement. Many of today’s consumers bypass promotional emails, making SMS marketing a highly effective alternative channel. Email marketing, however, is still relevant for the time being.
Furthermore, vendors are starting to offer more features for SMS marketers. From a consumer’s perspective, more existing customers prefer brand SMS communication compared to other channels.
The Retail Dive study also reveals that 78-percent of consumers don’t want to rely only on social media for brand engagement. Consumers want a more personalized experience when engaging with brands.
Dive Deeper:
- 5 Trends that will shape digital marketing in 2024
- Understanding the Modern CMO: A Journey Through Fragmentation and GDPR Challenges
- The Growth Agency’s Guide to Understanding Growth Marketing: Your Top 25 Questions Answered
- About The Growth Agency: Your Partner in Data-Driven, Global Growth Marketing
- GDPR, a marketer’s challenge? Ensure Your Marketing Analytics Stack is Compliant in 2024
How do we use mobile to find more customers?
Google revealed the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) concept in 2011. It was, at that time, a revolutionary concept about the buyer journey. It focuses on the critical moments during the buyer journey when, for instance, consumers look up product reviews just before making a purchase.
Today, advertisers have rebranded ZMOT as micro-moment marketing. On its introduction, the ZMOT concept was pioneering. Then, however, marketers didn’t have the resources to measure the return-on-investment for implementing the philosophy.
Now, the treasure trove of never-ending consumer information is both a blessing and a curse for marketers. Nevertheless, technology has finally caught up with the ZMOT concept.
It’s tempting to try to analyze consumer traffic using last-click reference. While this is a familiar and straightforward metric, it fails to address the complexity of the consumer journey. Today, it’s essential to leverage a robust data reporting system for mobile marketing, just as you would to evaluate any other marketing channel.
How do we rank higher in mobile searches?
As of 2018, Google rolled out a mobile-first index. Now, it’s not enough to develop a mobile friendly site. You must also consider how you optimize digital assets for mobile, voice and visual search.
Google’s new standards prioritize mobile search indexing. When you maintain both mobile and web assets, the indexed content that determines your rank originates from your mobile content.
Your rank won’t drop off the face of the earth if you don’t optimize your entire website for mobile. However, mobile indexing will grow increasingly important as time goes on.
The best practice to start optimizing for mobile is to update your most highly trafficked pages. Over time, you can bring the entirety of your digital assets into mobile indexing compliance.
For mobile SEO, you want identical desktop content for your mobile site. Also, your programmers should set up all objects – meaning text, videos, images and so on – for mobile crawling and indexing. Now, Google mobile and app results display badges, making ALT attributes more important than ever before.
Where do we begin with Mobile Stategy?
A successful mobile launch requires a systematic approach to development. Start by identifying a problem, then develop an app to solve it.
Next, figure out what app features will help your ideal consumers solve their pain points. Your app should provide users with real benefits, such as increased productivity and revenue or improved customer experience.
When you start planning your mobile strategy, begin with the end in mind. Every phase of development should centre around your ideal consumer. What’s more, you must use data-driven decision-making throughout the development process.
Do you need a consultant that can help you analyze data to develop a highly useful app? The Growth Agency leverages information to help you achieve your objectives. Call today to speak with a friendly TGA strategist to find out if your organization qualifies for a complementary growth audit.
