5 Can’t-Miss Mobile Marketing Articles

February 26, 2016, 11:40 am

Every week we select and summarize five content marketing articles for easy skimming. This week we bring you five articles on mobile marketing!

Make sure your strategy includes geo-targeted offerings to consumers who use localization apps. You can interact directly with the consumer via push notifications, check-ins, and local stock availability.
Offer mobile payment options. The faster a consumer can complete a purchase, the more likely they are to become a regular buyer. You can also incorporate “Buy” buttons directly into your social posts to facilitate transactions.
Integrate in-store mobile offerings into your marketing plans. Let customers scan in-store codes (offering loyalty points or better warranties) to improve the shopping experience.
Upload videos of your product in action to your social channels. Unboxing videos are becoming an important component of consumer research.
Optimizing for mobile is about more than just setting up a responsive design. You need to create an entirely new strategy (i.e. shorter text, incorporating images and video, etc) to accommodate new browsing patterns.

For consumers, smartphones are becoming the new “front door to the store.”
Shoppers want local information and Google searches with “near me” have grown 2.4X year-over-year.
One in four people report avoiding stores because they’re unsure if the product will be in stock. Display store inventory to drive shoppers to the store.
People use smartphones to do in-store research like reading reviews or consulting friends and family about a purchase they are considering.
Research shows that omnichannel shoppers spend more than those who shop solely online or solely in-store.

Marketers are putting too much emphasis on mobile usability and failing to recognize that content teams also need to shift to mobile copywriting.
Forget everything you used to know about reading online. The “golden triangle” or “F-shaped pattern” are no longer applicable in the mobile world. Readers now look primarily at the center of the screen giving 68% of their attention to the center and 86% to the upper two-thirds.
The screen size is smaller and the user’s attention span is shorter, meaning concise writing is key. This doesn’t mean shorten your writing, but tighten your writing.
Create short, strong headlines that can be read in a quick scan and won’t take up the whole screen.
Front load your most powerful content. Your user won’t be able to see the first few paragraphs on a mobile device so make sure that the first few lines are powerful and attention grabbing.

Any content that forces mobile readers to pinch, zoom, or pan is going to turn people off. Ideally, we’d create content that works for both desktop and mobile screens but the content inside an image isn’t responsive so this is not an option.
If your infographic is a series of 5 major points you can break the infographic down into five supporting graphics or shorter infographics. This will make it more digestible on the small screen.
For the best results on a mobile phone keep the pixel widths below 640px when designing an infographic. Since there are so many varying screen sizes and pixel densities, there will never be an image that is optimized for everything, so just give up on that.
Design for mobile show focus on one item at a time, reading top to bottom (rather than a few items at a time, reading left to right).
Use a call to action to sidestep the mobile issue. Link your user back to the main infographic on your desktop site. It might not be suited for mobile, but mobile users are used to saving content for later by bookmarking with Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket, or other services.

“The perfect mobile campaign isn’t a campaign,” says Carl Norberg. “It’s a brand extension where marketing comes baked into the product.” While great TV is storytelling, great mobile is storydoing explains Norberg.
Will Turnage says mobile marketing should do one of four things: entertain, inform, assist, or leave people alone.
Commanding attention in the mobile space doesn’t necessarily adhere to the formulas of bigger screens. Google conducted an experiment and found that videos have to be more creative and less ad-like to pay off.
In the mobile world, well-crafted copy will become more essential. As screens get smaller and messaging gets more robust, good copywriting will help grab attention.
We should be thinking about the post-mobile world, where mobile is present but more about a completely connected life. Brands will have to synthesize their experience across a number of screens and devices which may include everything from your watch to your home’s appliances.