Making the Most of Mobile – Test and Design

In this webinar, Ian Everdell of Mediative talks about how we can make the most out of our mobile device marketing. He talked about mobile advertising and how it affects online marketing. He also talked about how we can work with the 4 mobile friendly digital experiences. That includes mobile search campaigns, email campaigns, landing pages, website, and forms & conversion paths. But how do we know that we are really making the most out of our mobile marketing?

Research and Development

There are a lot of new advertising techniques that you can take advantage of and test. You need to understand the context people are using their mobile experiences in. That can come from analytics, from web blogs, and reviews. Mediative research highly encourages us to do actual qualitative research with our customers. Ask them what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what they are looking for.

You can test on mobile devices as you can on desktop devices. Set up something in Google content experiments. There are a lot of tools used for conversion optimization that is starting to build mobile components and you can take advantage of those. See how you can make most out of your mobile experiences through simple research.

Audience Preference

In one actual market research made by Mediative, they did an analysis on the different preferences between men and women. Men and women look for information in very different ways. Men look around the page in weird ways, it sort of goes back to our caveman days where men are hunter-gatherers, so they are very erratic. Whereas women tend to be much more methodical, and they are more likely to read through the content in an elderly fashion. We look at the same places on the page but the order we look at them is very different. At some point, websites are going to have a pretty good idea, based on actual phone that is visiting them, who that person is. If you take this into consideration, you might be able to serve up different experience depending on whether the person who owns that phone is male or female.

Developing your Website

If you are just starting to develop your website and you still can’t test everything, you may want to have a responsive design. Ian states that responsive design is going to take off in the next few years.

According to Ethan Marcotte:

Responsive design is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors).

Another great quality about responsive design is that you are not managing multiple sets of content as you potentially would have to if you have a separate desktop and mobile set. You don’t have SEO issues in terms of duplicate contents. You don’t have to worry about people being detected for the right device, all just based on screen width. If you are just getting started and you are concerned if you should be having an appropriate mobile, tablet and desktop experiences, responsive web design is a great place to start to look.

[Tweet “If you are concerned on how to develop your website, know that there is no prior conception among your users about what the experience should be”]

This means that you can pretty much dictate the experience they are going to get. If you have experiences that your users are very used to, you need to be more careful about how you start changing things. It comes back to understanding who your customers are and what they want. If they are really tied to your existing interface then you are going to have to ease them slowly into a new one. If you want to find out more, you can check out the entire webinar here.