There are a few good reasons why marketers should consider mobile as a platform to reach their target audience.

Mobile is no longer just used by millennials. Instead, the platform offers an opportunity to reach a huge demographic purchasing products, services or simply using their mobile to access entertainment.

Speaking at the 2016 Interactive Minds Digital Summit, Melissa Verner Green of Facebook said marketers should consider mobile as a channel, and that mobile should be part of a brand’s advertising and marketing mix.

In the last year alone, mobile use has grown so that on average, “people are spending three hours per day on their mobile,” said Verner Green.

According to this CMO article, mobile now offers a unique advantage to marketers who wish to target particular audiences based on consumer industry segments.

Marketers can select their target audience down to their location, with further opportunities to drill down to the nuts and bolts of usage patterns and behavior, meaning savvy marketing hits its target.

Where the last few years saw the shift from reading news articles on mobile devices to purchasing products and services and taking advantage of the increased camera functions on mobiles, the latest shift has most definitely gone towards video.

Verner Green adds that the key focus for mobile marketing should be video.

“Mobile is changing the way people consume and the way people express themselves,” she said.

“The future of expression on mobile is video – 75 per cent of all mobile data traffic will be video by 2020,” she said.

From Instagram to Uber to online shopping, it’s clear our mobile usage can offer unique insights into key demographics. Mobile represents a huge opportunity for savvy marketers to use data measurements to reach these markets.

 

According to InMobi’s principal research scientist, Ian Anderson, mobile data is one of the best assets a marketer can tap into.

“You can’t lie to your phone – it knows where you’ve been,” he said.

Instagram reported a 40 per cent increase in the time people spent watching videos on the platform in the past six months. And it’s not just millennials keeping up with the Kardashians – 72 per cent of dads and 68 per cent of mums (according to this data) log in daily, representing a huge chunk of the marketplace ready to view content on the platform.

There’s no doubt about it – mobile marketing is the quickest way to reach your consumer. Their phones are in their pocket, in their ears, on the kitchen bench, next to the desk at work.

From purchases to monitoring heart rates, maps and mood boards, mobile represents an enormous opportunity to get to know your consumer and reach them with the right messages.

Smartphones combined with intelligent search engines has revolutionised the way marketers touch base with their customers on the digital front. What was once a very static consumer buying process has now become a serviceable journey with hundreds of touch points dubbed ‘micro moments’.

How has mobile changed us?

Smart phones have made the entirety of the world’s information available right at our fingertips and have changed the way we shop. As a result, our needs revolving around information have gone into overdrive. We now demand immediacy in the answers to our questions, relevancy in the information we’re presented with; and we reward brands that satisfy these needs with loyalty.

‘82% of consumers turn to their phone to influence purchase decision in-store’ (Google, 2015)

This has made the idea of servicing your customers at every possible touch point along the buying process more important than ever. It provides you with more opportunities to shape prospects’ behaviours and preferences, allowing you to turn them into loyal customers.

What are micro moments?

‘Life isn’t lived in years or days, or even hours. It’s lived in moments’. This quote by Google illustrates the point that brands need to be there for their customers (and prospects) at every possible touch point. At various stages of their lives, customers will have micro moments where a need for information will surface, and they will turn to their mobile phones and search engines for answers.

A moment can be anything from a family friend providing financial advice, leading your prospect to search for a top-of-the-funnel question such as: ‘what is a self-managed superfund?’ to a prospect further along the buying process deciding to eat out for dinner and searching for: ‘local pizza restaurants near me’.

How can I be there for my customers in these moments?

The first thing marketers need to do is analyse their touch points. This involves mapping out the customer buying process into its various stages: awareness, consideration, preference, purchase and retention (for example) and identifying every single possible touch point within each stage. Look at what kind of questions customers may have for each stage, what information they need, and what pain points they might have.

Next, consider how well you answer those questions and how well you manage their needs at every touch point you identified. This is where the strategic side of digital marketing comes into play. Think about asking yourself the following questions:

• Have you created content that targets customers at various stages of the buying process? This is important as it’s a common mistake to only publish content that focuses on the purchase stage but omits the stages earlier on in the funnel.
• Have you written a blog post for every possible (and appropriate) question a customer might ask? This is usually an easy win because the competitiveness of ranking number one in search results is typically low due to the long-tail nature of the question or search query. Additionally, these queries generally have more behavioural intent driving them.
• Have you created a Google Places listing so your brand can appear as a knowledge graph for local search engine optimisation purposes?
• Have you optimised your website pages for local search terms allowing you to come up for local and geographic based search queries?
• Have you implemented content remarketing measures to recapture lost leads? Serving content to those who have interacted with your brand before will help build your brand’s authority, educate your customers, move them further along the buying process and subconsciously set your brand in their consideration set.

Predicting, acknowledging and servicing every possible micro moment your customer will have should be a crucial task every marketer should undertake. Failing to nurture your customers through their moments provides competitors with opportunities to steal your customers.

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Find out how you can target customers at each step of their buying process with marketing from Assemblo. Contact us to find out more about a strategy suited to your brand.

Did you know that 80% of internet users now use their smart phones to search for information online?

Google knows this (let’s be honest, Google knows everything) that’s why they released their algorithm update “Mobilegeddon” on April 21^st 2015.

So, what is Mobilegeddon?

As a search engine, Google’s primary goal is to provide their users a great experience. One of the ways they do this is by displaying the “best” possible search result on the Internet based on answering a users search query.

Google use a whole heap of different factors to weigh and compare results looking for the best ones, and a big part of this revolves around the idea of site usability – both on desktop and mobile devices. It’s frustrating when you search for something on your phone or tablet, and click on one of the top results, only to be taken to a site that’s too awkward to navigate because it isn’t mobile responsive.

That’s where Google new update came in.

Mobilegeddon, as the algorithm’s creative title implies, focuses on the usability of a website for mobile devices, making this a critical ranking factor for websites on Google’s results pages. The roll out took about a week to take full effect, and now, two months later in this post-apocalyptic wasteland, we find out just how much it affected search results.

The impact of Mobilegeddon

Earlier this month at SMX Advanced, Google’s Gary Illyes stated that the update had a bigger impact on search results than Panda and Penguin combined.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) undertook a study of the top 10 search results for over 15,000 search queries a week before the update hit, and then again a month later. The results showed that 47% of non-mobile friendly sites dropped in ranking, and that 30% of mobile responsive sites increased in ranking.

As a result, STC recorded that prior to the update; there were 56,164 non-mobile friendly URL’s. A month later, they saw this number decrease to 54,162, indicating that over 2,000 URL’s had been affected, with the search favouring the mobile responsive results.

In a similar study, BrightEdge tracked 20,000 URL’s after the update. They found a 21% decrease in the amount of non-mobile friendly URL’s on the first three pages of Google’s search results. However, only 17% of URL’s decreased in ranking from page one.

This smaller decrease could be due to second and third page results having weaker ranking factors, making mobile responsiveness more influential on search results.

How to recover if you were affected by Mobilegeddon

If your site was affected by Mobilegeddon, you can recover in time by making your website work better for mobile users.

Here are some quick tips to keep in mind:

• Avoid using plugins like flash as it’s not supported by Apple phones.
• Ensure that text and imagery is properly sized for mobile devices.
• Make sure everything is viewable and properly fits on the screen.
• Ensure you space out your links and make them big enough for people’s thumbs to press.
• Check your site with Google’s mobile responsive testing tool to see what else you can improve.

Check out other ways to make your site mobile responsive.

Having a mobile responsive website provides a better user experience for site visitors, which will lead to more time spent on site and an increased chance of generating new business and word of mouth.

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Need help optimising your website? Contact Assemblo today.

Phone (03) 9079 2555, email [email protected] or get in touch by filling out the form below:

Today saw the announcement of 3 new Apple Products, the iPhone6 and iPhone6 Plus, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch.

In this post, we take a look at the new iPhone devices and see what they might mean for the future of marketing and consumer behaviour.

iPhone6 and iPhone6 Plus

Apple are moving towards bigger devices with a lot more processing power. The device features some big upgrades including:

• Improved Display: Retina HD Display and a curved screen.
• A Thinner Device: this is the thinnest device Apple has ever created at 6.9mm thickness for the iPhone 6 and 7.1mm for the iPhone 6 Plus
• Larger Screen Size: The iPhone 6 features a bigger 4.7 inch display area, and the iPhone 6 Plus offers a massive 5.5 inch. The iPhone 5s was 4 inches.
• More beefy processor: The new A8 processor is 25% faster than the A7.
• Enhanced Camera: The new camera includes autofocus and optical stabilization.
• Improved Battery Life: 14 hours of talk time, 50 hours of audio playback and 11 hours of video playback means more time spent on mobile.

What we’re seeing is a continued trend towards users treating their mobiles as a substitute and even a replacement for computers, and with these larger and more powerful devices this trend will just become stronger. With the bigger screens we can expect to see an increase in video consumption, which could guide your next marketing activation.

This consumer shift to mobile computing continues to put more importance on device-optimised online experiences. Opportunities for rich responsive websites, tailored content and mobile display advertising open up even more with these new devices.

Apple Watch

On top of this there is also the announcement of the new Apple Watch. In conjunction with a new small interface, the ‘taptic’ engine (basically sends notifications that feel like a tap on your wrist) could hold some exciting possibilities for interaction and campaigns in the future, like we’ve already seen with Durex’s Fundawear campaign. Weighing in at a hefty $350USD, the price tag will probably keep this device off most consumers wrists for now, but it will be interesting to see how the product is taken up and if it sticks around.

Bigger, Faster

The new iPhone 6 devices will be launching on September 19th, so we don’t have to wait long to see what impacts it will have in the market. Overall, the next generation new apple products will mean:

• More time spent on devices
• Increased demand for tailored mobile experiences
• More mobile video consumption
• A more personal approach to devices