bluetrain_Mobile Marketing Guide

5 things to consider before building your mobile website

Mobile Marketing Guide

If you’re a professional marketer or web designer looking to build a truly optimized mobile website or simply improve the site you already have, this best-practices guide is for you! Building a mobile site isn’t always as simple as taking your desktop website and shrinking it down to fit in a smartphone screen. Before diving in, there are 5 things you should consider that will help you develop and refine your mobile strategy. Read on to learn more.

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5 Things to Consider Before Building Your Mobile Website Page 2

your first consideration should be your target audience and what they need from a mobile experi-ence. Are they visiting your mobile site because they’re on the go and planning a visit to your location? Are you expecting your visitors to be accessing your site as part of a paid search or email campaign?

Perhaps you don’t have enough information on your mobile audi-ence and the full potential they may offer your business, but you know that mobile is becoming increasingly important to your customers and prospects, and you recognize that your mobile web

experience is falling short.If you’re ready to think about

how you can create a mobile site that engages your prospects and customers, creates new business, and communicates your unique brand and value proposition, but you want to be sure you are

thinking about your mobile web strategy correctly, you’re in the right place. We think these five considerations will help you grow your mobile business re-sults and delight your customers with superior mobile experiences.

Whether you’re looking to improve your existing mobile website or you’re starting from scratch, it’s important to consider several things before getting started.

Introduction

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Page 35 Things to Consider Before Building Your Mobile Website

This is cardinal rule #1. Mobile visitors should see the essence of your messaging and your most important calls-to-action as soon as they land on the page. It’s harder to be concise, but be-ing disciplined and prioritizing what you really want to say to your mobile audience will help you improve the effectiveness of your messaging and marketing initiatives, including your desktop site. Transcoded and responsive solutions to mobile site design often fall short in this area, be-cause they simply pull 100% of

1. think “mobile first” and don’t Just coPy/Paste

the desktop content to use on the mobile site–word for word, image for image, screen-for-screen–without regard to the unique needs of the mobile audience.

Mobile FirstAn alternative approach is to think about your web content from a “mobile-first” point of view. This is called “Mobile-First Web Design,” and we’re all for it. In this approach you start with the mobile audience and determine the content, functionality, and

calls-to-action that are necessary and motivating for your mobile visitors. You then expand and build out your mini-tablet, tablet, and desktop experiences with increasingly rich and relevant content that complements the browsing styles unique to these platforms as well as the informa-tion needs and use cases associ-ated with visitors to the desktop site. Of course, many marketers have a legacy desktop site they are not ready to redesign, but this does not mean you can’t think about your mobile site as the core of your messaging. We believe that the most successful marketers will be those who are adept at targeting and engaging audiences on all the devices that are in use today. In the post-PC world, the web is no longer “one size fits all.”










We recommend trimming content down to 75-110 words per page. And really, it’s not that difficult.

Look at the first paragraph on any given page – does it contain introductory language? If so, eliminate it. Mobile means get-ting to the point and top-loading your content. Think of it as writ-ing a news story or press release; put the important information at the top of the page, and if the

ContentYou almost never want to take all the content from your desktop site to mobile. What’s wrong with this method? Well, oftentimes, you’re transferring four or five paragraphs with anywhere from 250-450 words per page to a screen that typically displays 90-100 words per page. If you simply duplicate your desktop pages, think of all the scrolling it will mean for your mobile readers.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not found the time to make it shorter.”

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662),Lettres Provinciales

It’s no surprise that viewing a picture on desktop is quite differ-ent than viewing the same image on mobile. And no matter how appealing that group shot of your team looks on the desktop web-

2. a Picture is worth a thousand words – unless you can’t see it

site’s “About Us” page, you will all be roughly the size of ants when you try to fit that same image on a smartphone screen.

You may also want to swap out your homepage’s background

image or resize some of your location or product shots. Be sure to consider the 90˚ rotation in aspect ratio between a 4:3 desktop monitor or laptop screen to the ~5” vertical screen of the

reader wants to learn more, or has time to keep reading, put the nice-to-know content at the bottom. Finally, don’t say in three sentences what you could easily convey in one. It might take a red pen and some creative editing, but ultimately your mobile visitor will be the one who thanks you by following through on a call-to-action.










average smartphone. Yes, smart-phone users will occasionally flip their phone into landscape mode to watch a YouTube video or play a game, but more often than not, smartphones are upright for web browsing. Keep this in mind when choosing focus images, or else you’ll be doing a lot of cropping.

A more advanced way to en-sure your images look great on any device is to use techniques such Responsive with Server Side Components, which uses device detection to determine what size image to deliver on a webpage. If your mobile website platform offers this functionality, you’ll be

You want to rethink your navigation as carefully as you rethink your content. Many people just use the full sitemap from their desktop website for their mobile site in order to ensure that everything gets included. However, you need to remember your mobile user has different needs from your desktop user, and therefore, should have a navi-gation system tailored to their needs and behaviors. People who are on their smartphones need to quickly reference information, and your navigation structure should give them the ability to do just that. Usability studies offer basic

guidelines on how to optimize mobile website navigation, such as menu buttons with nested navigation.

When you’re determining what pages to include on your mobile site, ask yourself, “How often will a mobile user need to access this content and why do they need it?” For instance, here at Bluetrain Mobile we chose not to include our Press Kit on our mobile site, because we assume press and media audiences typically file their stories on a desktop computer. Don’t be afraid to make these kinds of decisions— ultimately they will lead to an

3. navigation: not all desktoP Pages merit mobile versions

easier navigation experience for your mobile users.

In addition to eliminating pages, you’ll notice that multiple pages on your desktop website could be combined into one mobile page. Do your “About Us” and “Brand Story” pages share similar information? If so, we recommend consolidating them. While streamlining your website for mobile, you may even realize that certain desktop pages are superfluous.

able to add one high-res image to a page and it will automati-cally resize based on the screen size of the device accessing the page, be it smartphone, tablet, or desktop. This helps optimize load time and performance across all devices.








http://www.bluetrainmobile.com/blog/the-ins-outs-of-mobile-website-navigation/



Creating and rethinking your calls-to-action for the mobile user is one of the most important steps to delivering a truly opti-mized experience. Your mobile website should be a finely-tuned lead generation tool.

For example, if downloading a brochure or company overview is the main call-to-action (or CTA) on your desktop site, chances are a smartphone user accessing the homepage of your mobile site will be less interested in read-ing a longer document, even with the option of having it emailed. Perhaps more action-oriented options such as “Sign up for Our Newsletter” or “Like Us on Face-book” are better lead generating offers for someone who’s on-the-go.

You also want to think about your overall lead generation flow or funnel. Let’s say you’re a university or local community college, and your “Admissions” page on your desktop site has a CTA button that launches visitors

directly into a form where the prospective student can request more information and also share valuable targeting information for the admissions team, their background and fields of interest. That may be an easy and friction-less process for desktop users, but unless your form was designed to work on a smartphone, you may be dropping mobile visitors into a frustrating user experience.

Instead, what if your mobile site offered a shorter form that allows the visitor to provide their name, email address, and a simple checkbox selection from a list of intended majors? You could then send your prospect an email with detailed information on their intended programs of study that they could open later, perhaps when they are working on a desktop PC. Always keep the engagement model or user flow across device platforms in mind, and decide how it might look on different screens, such as smart-phone, tablet, or PC.

4. all calls-to-action are not created equal

Finally, don’t forget to take advantage of mobile-specific CTAs. Utilize click-to-call buttons or map links to provide users with turn-by-turn directions to your location. If you’re a local business, these types of CTAs often belong right on the mobile homepage.










Mobile is offering entirely new ways to engage website visi-tors, showcase your brand, and market to potential and existing customers. More than anything, now is the time to think about all the things you can do on mobile that you can’t do (or you can’t offer as easily) on desktop – and that means thinking outside the monitor-shaped box.

For example, do you have ex-cellent user-generated videos you want prospects to see? Consider adding a video gallery, but be sure you offer this on a high per-formance platform so the experi-ence is optimized. Do you want to increase the number of people who attend specific events? Put a prominent mobile homepage link to your event page and automati-cally update the event content via your backend systems. Do you want to share special informa-tion to event attendees who will undoubtedly have their mobile phone with them? Post a QR code on signage at the event or a unique URL on your event bro-chure and provide your attendees

a special offer, a donation page, or perhaps an event survey. They will be converting before they even leave your event!

Don’t let the blank page or the newness of mobile intimidate you. As more and more people begin accessing your website via mobile devices in the months and years to come, your mobile site will soon be your first interaction with customers. So start thinking about mobile strategically, and you may very well find yourself ahead of the game.

In Conclusion Before you get started on all this good advice, we need to share a sixth best practice, which is a fundamental consideration. At the outset of this Guide we said that paramount to your mobile success is knowing your target audience and the context for their mobile experience.

To gain insight on current user experiences on your mobile site, you need to determine what pages on your website are most

viewed by your mobile visitors. Not only will this help you pri-oritize content on your mobile website, it will also help you observe trends and ultimately measure changes and visitor traf-fic. Google Analytics is the most popular analytics tool on the market, and it enables you to drill down to discover your mobile traffic fairly easily. Mobile is now included in their standard report-ing, however we encourage you to set up a custom report to see top website pages viewed on mo-bile devices (not included in their standard report).

Alternatively, if you’re look-ing for a quick and easy way to monitor your mobile traffic, track your top desktop pages viewed on mobile devices, and see the most popular device types arriv-ing on your website, check out Bluetrain’s Mobile Dashboard, our free mobile analytics tool. This is a great place to start before planning your mobile website!

5. be innovative








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bluetrain_Mobile Marketing Guide