5 mistakes to avoid in your mobile strategy

52%.

This is the worldwide market share represented by smartphones in terms of devices used to go online, in November 2019. A statistic which continues to increase year after year and which relegates the computer to a percentage of 45% and the tablet to 3%. With more than one in two people preferring to use phones, it is essential to consider a marketing strategy for smartphones first (and in some cases, smartphones only). This means that you must first think about your marketing approach towards mobility. However, it isn’t that straightforward and mistakes are frequent. You already have to know what they are to avoid them.

Ignoring AMP

AMP is an acronym that means “Accelerated Mobile Pages“. It is a technology developed by Google that can display a web page almost instantly. The process is free and requires optimisations within your website code. Many news sites also use AMP to boost the page load time.

The icing on the cake is that AMP pages are designed to be mobile friendly and are generally better referenced on Google. For publishers, AMP does not cost much to set up as soon as they have web developers in their company.

Ignoring AMP means running the risk of a poor customer experience as well as neglecting your SEO. The pages then load more slowly, and the final rendering can be disappointing to the point of scaring away users.

Displaying overly intrusive popups

Overly busy sites with popups and interstitials flashing everywhere are particularly frustrating on a computer (and one of the reasons for the rise of ad blockers). But on mobile, it’s an absolute nightmare!

Google with its dominant position via its search engine, its web browser and its mobile operating system has declared war on overly invasive advertisements. Anything that obstructs the user experience too much is banned. Displaying overly intrusive popups on a site is penalised and the discoverability potential of your content will be reduced. So you therefore need less ads and better ad integration into your pages (native ads, influence, affiliation, etc.).

Not testing responsive design

If your site looks good on a computer, that doesn’t necessarily mean it works on a mobile. Responsive design must be tested on all screen sizes. Even better: you can reverse your design process. Start by developing your site on mobile, then then port it to desktop and tablet.

You have to put aside some time to create a site that adapts perfectly to all use cases. In a hyper-fragmented digital ecosystem, everyone must be able to access information at any time and from any type of device. In your internal process, don’t forget to test the adaptability of your design, even if it means reducing content on some of your pages to make them more digestible on mobile.

Underestimating voice searching

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana… voice assistants are changing the human-machine interaction. Tomorrow, voice may become the preferred means of accessing information. However, users can ask their voice assistant questions on mobile too. Now that there are more and more connected speakers in people’s homes, searching for information by voice is becoming more and more common. However, voice assistants are not smart. They only go online to find the requested data. But this data still has to be well structured.

Don’t forget to design or update your website to meet voice search requirements, especially by using the aid of schema.org’s structured data which helps search engine robots understand site content. Don’t forget to design or update your website to meet the requirements of voice searches. In the United States, residents of the city of Albuquerque can thus contact municipal services via Alexa, Amazon’s assistant, from a connected speaker. This approach simplifies the reporting of graffiti and obstructions, and enables direct answering of any questions about urban life, without having to call a phone server.

Thinking that everyone is surfing in 4g/5G or Wi-Fi

We would love it if everybody had access to high-speed internet. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And outside big cities, it’s not uncommon for the internet to be slower. Do not build your mobile strategy for urban hyperspeed hubs. Try to be as inclusive as possible, even if it means adapting your pages to the speed of the network.

To achieve this, consider optimising your content, such as reducing image sizes, no video on the mobile version, lazy loading, cache optimisation, etc.

Customer journeys are more and more fragmented but almost all go through mobile at least once. Your mobile strategy requires a special focus considering its importance in terms of traffic. Last but not least, thinking in terms of mobile also means creating services and an internal culture that promotes agility, mobility and multitasking for your customers.

Don’t forget performance marketing to optimize your mobile strategy. Contact our experts!