Succeeding Where Others Fail: 3 Classic Mobile Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Take some valuable marketing tips from these common mobile mistakes.

Remember when you were told as a child to learn from your mistakes? While some of you goody-two-shoes may have actually listened to this, the rest of us scoffed at the idea that we could possibly be less than perfect and continued to screw up our long division problems or paint-mixing with the assumption that our mistakes would magically fix themselves.

Well, what about when it comes to mobile marketing? While the complexity of mobile marketing may be a tiny step up from mixing paint, you’re pretty sure that your mobile marketing strategy is working just fine as is, right? After all, according to a 2013 Our Mobile Planet report released by Google,

77 percent of Canadian smartphone users research services or products on their mobile phone.

You’ve already slapped up a mobile-ready site, so you’re probably good to go… right?

To avoid sounding like your elementary school teachers, the simple advice we’ll give you is this: Don’t learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of your competitors.

Doesn’t that sound oh-so-much more appealing? Now let’s all collectively point and laugh at these mobile marketing failures (while hiding the fact that we’ve done them ourselves). Ladies and gents, in no particular order, here are some classic mobile marketing fails:

1. Sliders, Sliders and More Sliders

For a while there, everybody associated with web design was so obsessed with sliders you’d think they were the answer to all marketing-related woes. Alas, those days are now over.

But before you start mourning the death of the slider, consider this:

According to research conducted by SearchEngineLand, only 0.22 percent of users actually click on sliders. That conversion rate is so shockingly low, I dare you to come up with a worse way of getting clicks.

Furthermore, sliders on your homepage can be confusing. Does Image 1 best represent what your company is about, or should we focus on Image 2? What about Image 3? And why does the image change just when we’re actually starting to maybe feel a slight modicum of interest in it? It’s like a nightmare where someone keeps changing the channel the second you start to get a sense of what’s going on.

Accept the fact that sliders are going down in the history books right there next to denim jackets and bell bottoms. Instead, consider upcoming mobile design trends, like parallax scrolling and flat design.

2. Sending Away Customers

Here’s another brilliant marketing tactic: sending potential consumers away from your site and into the open arms of your competitors. When businesses don’t yet have a mobile-ready site in place, they sometimes block mobile traffic, resulting in an influx of all your potential leads straight into the ready sites of your competition.

While ideally, your site should already be optimized for mobile — the mobile shift isn’t going away anytime soon — don’t block mobile traffic just because you’re late to the party. More often than not, users would prefer access to a less-than-optimal site on their mobile over no access at all.

Another way to ‘send away’ your user is by requiring an opt-in just to view basic content. This strategy is like charging a cover fee at a new venue when people don’t even know if they’re going to like it or not and there are free drinks at Bob’s place around the corner. Keep your basic content free, and include an opt-in for more high-value content.

3. Not Helping Out Your User

Remember how much users love it when you make it as difficult as possible for them to locate your business, contact you and search for keywords on your site? While everyone loves a good challenge on occasion, mobile marketing is not the place or time to make your user jump through hoops. Do us all a favor by helping out your user in the following ways:

• List your business’s address somewhere on your main page so that users can search by location.
• Make your phone number a clickable link.
• Speaking of which, make your links big enough for even the pudgiest of fingers to hit them on first try.
• Autosuggest the most common search and navigation options. While Google’s autocomplete can be a great source of knee-slapping entertainment, it has also proven to be extremely convenient. Factor in the fact that typing on a mobile is far less comfortable than on a PC.

Optimizing your site for mobile is a great way to boost traffic, get more conversions and gain more opportunities to connect with your target audience. Outdated designs, gated content and increasing user difficulty, on the other hand, are epic face palms when it comes to mobile marketing.

Until Next Time and Thanks for All the Info!