Top 5 things to consider with mobile marketing

Mobile marketing has become a hot topic, as most dealers are hard-pressed to find very many of their customers who don’t use smartphones. With that in mind, Brad Smith, director of product management at ARI, has supplied Powersports Business readers with a list of mobile marketing tips.

1. Prominently display your location and contact information. One of the most critical things a user on the go is looking for is contact and location information. Displaying this information prominently on your mobile site is mandatory and will help drive traffic to your brick-and-mortar store rather than your competition. To take this best practice a step further, consider adding geolocation capabilities to your site to provide users with directions to your store from their current location immediately.

2. Balance content presentation and load speed. Don’t simply make your mobile site a watered-down version of your main website. Instead, focus on how and where content is presented to optimize the experience for both clarity and rapid loading over mobile networks. Rather than cutting out content, find ways to break the information and architecture down into smaller segments that can easily be navigated, loaded and browsed.

3. Create a responsive website design, if you can. Adopting a responsive website design means that your current website will automatically be formatted to the device the consumer is using. While it requires more extensive initial coordination when developing your website, it provides significant efficiency gains and eliminates the need to maintain a dedicated mobile site. An additional benefit is that visitors will have a consistent user experience no matter what type of mobile device they are using at any given moment.

4. Help mobile users share your site. Don’t forget that in addition to actual transactions, visitors share your site and pages with others via social media and/or email. Make sure your mobile site and strategy support cross-channel (desktop and mobile) visits via the same URL. Don’t make the mistake of presenting a mobile version of your site to a desktop user just because they were shared a link by a user who happened to be on a smartphone! Responsive web design is one way to solve this challenge easily, while URL redirects are another option if you already have a separate mobile-only website.

5. Plan for mobile SEO. Mobile search is the next frontier in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines serve up unique results for mobile users that are selected in a slightly different manner than traditional desktop searches. The first step is to make sure your mobile site can be crawled and is visible to search engines. Then, you should focus on the unique SEO elements that will help your site show up on mobile search results. Location is an important variable to focus on because the search engines take into consideration geographical proximity. You should also consider using alternate, abbreviated keywords since mobile users tend to use much shorter search strings.