When was the last time you left your house without a phone? I’m willing to bet it’s been a while. Most of us keep our mobile devices within reach at all times, even when we’re sleeping. From a marketing standpoint, that’s good news – or it would be if you were making the most of mobile marketing.
The truth is that only 70% of small businesses are using mobile marketing to promote their products and services. Only some of those are doing it effectively. Here’s what you need to know about how mobile marketing can help your small business in 2021.
Grab Your Share of Voice Search
When you search for something using a mobile device, do you stop and type out your query, or do you start with “Okay, Google” or “Siri” and then ask a question out loud? Increasingly, people are doing the latter. In fact, 50% of all searches were voice searches in 2020 and estimates are that 55 million American households will have at least one voice assistant by 2022.
You can get your share of voice searches by optimizing your website for long-tail keywords and answering common questions on your website. Using questions in your titles and headings will increase the chances that your content will earn a high rank on Google.
Embrace Mobile Responsiveness
While we’re on the topic of mobile friendliness, is your website mobile responsive? Mobile responsive designs adjust automatically to fit the device being used. In other words, a user who accesses your website on their laptop should get the same information if they visit using a smartphone or tablet.
Web design matters to mobile users. Research shows that 94% of users’ first impressions of a website are based on design. If a mobile user accesses your site and sees tiny text and buttons that aren’t readable or usable, they’re going to navigate away.
A lot of small business are lagging on mobile responsiveness. You can take a big leap ahead of your competitors by choosing a design template that’s both mobile-friendly and responsive. Anything you can do to improve the experience of mobile users is going to help you reduce your bounce rate and get more visitors to your website.
Increase Your Social Media Following with Captioned
Social media marketing is necessary for every small business. It’s important to remember that most people access social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram on their mobile devices. That means that it’s a worthwhile use of your time to ensure that your content is created with mobile users in mind.
Videos are a great example. 75% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a new product or service by watching a video. A whopping 85% of people on Facebook watch videos without the sound on. That means they rely on captions to understand what they’re watching.
You can increase engagement by adding captions to the videos on your website and social media. The biggest benefit of captioning your videos is that a mobile user can watch them in a public place without disturbing others. Captions are a great tool that make it easy for people to watch and understand your videos – wherever they are.
Increase Engagement with Your Brand with Text Messaging
If you’re not using SMS messaging, more popularly known as text messaging, to engage with your customers, then you’re missing out. It’s that simple. While marketing emails have an open rate of about 20%, the open rate for text messages is consistently at 98% or higher. That means that if you allow people to opt in for text messages from you, it’s a virtual certainty that they will read what you send them.
Text messaging is an ideal way to keep customers aware of your brand and what’s happening with you. You can let them know about new products, text coupon codes or sale information, and even solicit their feedback in the form of online reviews or polls. Best of all, text messaging is very affordable and even businesses with a small marketing budget can use it.
Increase Sales and Conversions with Mobile Facebook Advertising
You already know that a lot of people access social media on their mobile devices. You can use that to your advantage by creating social media ads that cater to mobile users, making it easy for them to click through to your site or call your business.
One of the best methods you can use to engage with local customers is to choose the “Call Now” call to action button on Facebook. With this button, mobile users can call you with a single tap. It’s an ideal conversion booster for service companies because it allows people to contact you to ask questions or make an appointment without having to navigate away from your content.
Simplify Purchases with Mobile Payments
You want it to be easy for people to buy from you, right? Research shows that approximately 110 million Americans have used a digital or mobile wallet to buy something and that’s a number that’s likely to increase as people become more aware of the security benefits of encrypted payments.
Accepting mobile payments can give your sales a boost because it empowers mobile users to make secure purchases from anywhere. Mobile wallets may be used for online purchases and in brick and mortar stores. They can also be used for in-app purchases if your business has a branded app.
While a lot of the talk around mobile payments focuses on security benefits for consumers, accepting them benefits you, too. The reason? A security breach, if it happens, won’t compromise your customers’ information because a hacker would get only a useless, one-time code instead of a customer’s credit card number and other information. That means that your reputation won’t take the same hit that it would if someone stole data they could use.
What you should take away from this is that embracing mobile technology and finding ways to connect with mobile users can do a lot for your business in 2021. It’s a great way to increase your following on social media, teach people about your brand, and boost your profits.