Cross Channel Marketing
I’m going to show you what you need to know to be able to go out and start creating Cross Channel Marketing for local businesses that are optimized for mobile phones.
Essentially what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about creating a separate website and we’re not looking to change anything about their existing website. We’re creating a second one that is specifically for mobile phones. It’s not that difficult. Did I ever tell that when I went out to do it myself there were a couple of hurdles that I skipped pass and things that I forget? So I thought it would be great for me to create a series showing how to do it, so you can go ahead and get started a lot quicker and I was able to. So it really is not that difficult.
Cross Channel Marketing
Let’s go ahead and started by talking about why businesses need a mobile website. I want you to understand that more and more people are using their phones to find things each and every day. This is an article I found that was written back in April 2009.
Quite a bit ago but it’s very relevant because the US, these people here predict an increase from advertising revenues.
Many people are advertising in mobile search to increase from 39 million in 2008 to 2.3 billion in 2013, a compound annual growth rate of 125.6 percent. That is incredible!
Let me show you two scenarios. Let’s say that you live in Chicago and you’re looking for a restaurant. So you type in Chicago, Italian, restaurant and of course here all the results popup Cross Channel Marketing and you can click on each place to find more about the website. Let’s take a look at the top one here, italianvillage-chicago.
Cross Channel Marketing
Okay, so I would say this is a very nice looking wbsite. It conveys multiple things to me in my internet browser. Now let’s say that I’m doing the same search using my phone. This is a site that I share with you later more about Cross Channel Marketing.
It’s called Iphonetester.com. It’s very helpful because it allows us to look at websites as you would through a phone. The most popular of phones right now being the iPhone. Other phones such as Google Droid, the Google operating system for phones, it’s going to look pretty similar, this type of look.
So let’s go ahead and go that address, that address being italianvillage-chicago and I want to show you what the website looks like in this phone. Look at that. So let’s say I’m in downtown Chicago.
I’m trying to find an Italian restaurant and I type this on my phone. This is not going to help me. Let’s say that I pull off the side road of my car which I hopefully could learn doing this while driving and this is very frustrating because now in order to see more of the website I’ve got to scroll this way and look there’s no address that’s safe.
Cross Channel Marketing
For example that I was going to visit this restaurant and I have to scroll and okay there’s the phone but it’s still not easy to find. It’s just that it’s annoying. If we look at the website here, you know the people who designed this site you know they said, “We want to convey multiple things when people come to this site.
We want to show them:
- “Hey we have guest certificates”
- “We have a newsletter”
- “You can subscribe to the newsletter”
- “We have these nice rotating pictures.”
… All these cool things.
It really does look like a pretty amazing restaurant, doesn’t it? But when we look on the phone all these gets lost so what we want to do is we want to build a site specifically for the mobile phone.
Cross Channel Marketing
We want to back it off a bit not to have so many images in it. We want to emphasize the location and the phone number and the advantages of the restaurant.
Write in a very simple graphics not something complicated and crazy like this. So what we’re going to is we’re going to explore to local businesses and offer them the opportunity to have a separate mobile site which is what a lot of people are doing now, a lot of the bigger businesses.
So let’s go ahead, let me show you an example of a mobile ready site. Okay so here we are. I went to a mobile site for a Mexican restaurant.
Switching here a bit, you can see here that when we go that restaurant there’s a nice picture there of some tasty food and it’s being followed by information that’s all easy to read.
Cross Channel Marketing
You can see here where we can contact them, we can learn more about them, we can even access the menu and when I go to click on the menu it is all very easy to read in my phone.
You can see it’s quite different than what we were looking at before and here’s all the information their address, their phone also the email right all there easy to access.
So what we’re going to show you is of course, how to be doing this. So now you have a better understanding of what a mobile website is and how it works let’s go back to what we did initially started talking about and that is the advantages of why businesses need a mobile website. Many people are accessing websites via their phones every day.
It is especially valuable in tourists areas or when targeting travellers. So we can just keep in mind let’s say for example, someone’s driving down in a main street of Chicago and they’re looking for an Italian restaurant. They’re going to go ahead and type in Italian restaurant in Chicago, whatever they’re going to type in and if they go websites that are big and hard to navigate it’s going to be more difficult and challenging.
One of the things was I work with some local businesses in my area and I took a look and just to give you an example, one of the restaurants that I worked with. He’s getting mobile visitors. It’s about 5 percent of his traffic. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot and it isn’t but it’s going to increase over time and I can tell you that those 5 percent of people that are checking his restaurant out, those are probably at least in some cases people that are already near his restaurant and looking for a place to eat and when they’re coming to a site they stay on an average of 1 second.
That is pretty bad news for him because that means people are going to visit his site and are leaving because they don’t like what they see. This is a red flag to me that I need to take things and create a separate mobile site for him. It will then take the most advantage of the traffic he’s getting through their phones.
So just keep that in mind we will make things as simple as possible and we do our thing where we optimize a website for people but if you’re not doing a separate one for the phone, you’re really missing out on really targeted traffic that might literally be just down the street looking for your local business.
Having a mobile website of course allows you to offer two separate ways to show information, catering to each. Of course, one thing you could do is you could go back and redesign your site and make it more mobile friendly but the problem is they’re going to conflict.
You don’t want your main big website to be super simple and then have small images and all that kind of stuff because then you’re not going to take advantage of browser based traffic which is going to be where most people come to.
The best solution is to have two separate websites and we’re going to talk about how when people come to your domain you’re going to be able to separate them and you’ll send the people coming in to your site from the computer, you send them the one site and then people that are coming to look at from the phone, you send them to the mobile site. It’s not that hard to do.
Having a mobile website also opens up to some unique mobile opportunities. Meaning that when have a mobile website you can go ahead and then submit that mobile website to directories and when people do some certain searches if they’re using a mobile search engine it’s going to make your website come up, ideally have the rankings.
So let’s take for example if you’re looking for a restaurant in an area where there are 15 other competitors and you’re the only one with the mobile website, it’s going to give your client a humongous advantage. Especially 5 years from now let’s say they all have a websites, well you know what, your client’s is the first so that’s really going to certainly help.
Another advantage of having an optimized mobile website is that it’ll load much faster. If you start to think about how sites are being designed these days, of course back in the old days sites were simple and now sites are very elaborate.
They have lots of pictures and even video and what not and when someone tries to access them from a mobile phone oftentimes it is much more like someone accessing the site through dial-up which means you’re going to wait awhile for the site to load.
Or if you have a mobile website it’s going to be scaled back and more simple which means your site will load faster and those of you who have experience in this industry know that having a fast loading site is really important. It is even more important when someone’s searching by the phone because you’re going to find out that their attention span and the time that they’re going to be looking at the site is going to be significantly small.
Having a mobile website allows you to focus on the most important issues for mobile users. Meaning things like if someone is looking at your site from a regular computer there are different things that you want to explain about your restaurant.
When someone’s using their phone that becomes more important to really right away have your phone number and location and also spelled out the benefits of your business to that person.
Say for example, someone’s looking for the restaurant you want to give the opportunity for someone to just push a button and then be able to get directions to the restaurant.
That’s one important thing for a site to have. It allows you to really break out and say to yourself, “If I have someone checking out my website from their phone, what do I really need to emphasize especially given that I only have a small amount of space to do so.”
And that allows you to accomplish specifically that. So thing is there’s a lot of reasons why a business needs a mobile website. We’ll talk a little bit later specifically about how to approach businesses and explain that they should have a mobile website. But I first want you to understand why Cross Channel Marketing is important and why these theories do exist and of course why you need to learn more about it.
Related posts: