5 mobile marketing tips

Cindy Krum, CEO of Mobile Moxie and author of "Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are," has spoken at numerous SES conferences around the world. And mobile was once again a hot topic at SES San Francisco this year – mobile marketing was named by many speakers as a key component of the future of search.

"The cell phone is where people go to fill their down time and find information to guide their daily lives. Get hip to the mobile aesthetic or suffer the consequences!" Krum said.

She said the main thing with mobile is you need to build your site with a flexible template that can accommodate to fit a variety of screen sizes, and orientations gracefully. Like in the early days of the web, many companies are phoning it in and creating mobile "brochure-ware" rather than really trying to create utility or build a great user experience, Krum said, adding that an app-like look and feel will be well-received on your mobile site.

Additionally, you want to code to the highest standard possible. XHTML is generally ideal, she noted, "but be ready to start learning bits of HTML5 and Mobile AJAX to snazz things up. The design aesthetic is also a bit different. You should be drawing ideas and inspiration from apps, rather than your existing site."

Here are Krum's top five tips for marketers getting involved in the mobile space.

1. Outline and Prioritize Development & Resources

Your priority should be the most likely reason customers have for accessing the site – not the ideal reason. For example, even though a bank may want to help customers create long-term investment accounts from their mobile phone, because that is the most profitable transaction, doesn't mean your bank site should focus on long-term investment accounts. Your mobile site should still focus on everyday tasks like checking account balances and finding ATMs.

A mobile site really has the opportunity to shine and make a difference for your customers with the monotonous, everyday tasks. Special activities such as researching investment accounts will still most likely happen at a full-sized computer.

2. Check the Competition

Look at applications in your vertical to see what they look like and what kinds of functions they include. This is the new bar and your site should meet or beat the expectations set by those applications.

Take this information and compare it to the sitemap of the desktop site and the goals you have set for the mobile site. Determine which of the app functions you will be able to replicate or emulate on the web and which will have to be adapted to work in the browser.

3. Educate Yourself on User-Agent Detection and Re-direction

There are ways to do it properly and ways to get all of your mobile pages removed from the mobile search results very quickly. (Synopsis of the concept and its impact on SEO here).

Create a site plan where mobile page urls are formatted as mirrors of the desktop URLs, with only a slight difference, like the addition of a "." or "/". This will make the user agent detection and redirection script eminently easier to generate, and will keep your development team a bit more sane.

4. Read up on Cache Controls and Header Controls

Most SEOs ignore these things, but they can affect the load time and indexing of the site (great article on this here).

5. Create a Promotion and Integration Plan

This is very important to create a quick awareness & adoption for the new content. This is where your initial ROI will come from, so it can't be ignored.

Use every opportunity you have to make your existing customers aware of your mobile site. They are going to be the easiest people to get to the mobile site.

This means including a list of features with screen shots in newsletters, social profiles and on your desktop site. It also means setting up a mobile PPC campaign, at least for your brand-terms, and maybe even adding a line about it in your standard email signature line for a couple weeks.

Like any launch, you should create and push a press release about the new mobile content, and if you are running traditional media ads like print, direct mail, TV or radio, you should also mention the mobile site there.


/Search Engine Watch/