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Your 60 Second Mobile Review

This article is one of a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers working in the digital marketplace and also at others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. So far we have covered knowing your objectives and fixing your customer experience. Plenty more to come, including tips, best practice and case studies.

Let me know if you’ve any ideas or experiences you’d like to share.

For many companies getting the website right is enough of a task, so something like Mobile just has to wait. Especially as it’s not yet mainstream, right?

Or is it? If you read the press / blogs, it’s very clear that this year is finally the long-promised ‘Year of Mobile’. Smart phone uptake is substantial, Facebook has 150 million active mobile users and more and more companies are making mobile revenue.

Great for them, but your market isn’t quite there yet, is it?

Or is it? I think it’s an easy assumption to make, especially for less ‘glamorous’ industries. But I’ll ask you this, how do you know?

On the clock

This series is about being a better digital marketer and making a personal impact. Well, to do so you have start looking at things differently. This is an easy one, it’ll take just 60 seconds for you to work out if you need to pull your finger out and go mobile now or whether to add it to your list of ‘check back in 6 months’ projects.

It’s simple. You could survey your customers now and ask them if they would use a mobile solution and run the risk of getting a bunch of “sure, probably would, I guess” answers. Or, you could just look to see what they are already doing with mobile.

The answer lies in your analytics.

A mobile case study: Jobsite.co.uk

Before I show you where to look, consider this example. Over at Jobsite.co.uk we have just announced some fantastic stats for our mobile usage. Over the past 19 months, traffic from mobile devices to the website has increased by over 600%. We’re not playing around with impressive sounding percentages on tiny actuals here either, the mobile traffic represents over 5% of our total site traffic – more than double what Yahoo and Bing search engines provide to us combined.

The takeaway from this example however, is that we only discovered the initial mobile traffic growth because inquisitive minds asked the question (“I wonder how much mobile traffic we get?” ). Stunned by the numbers, the data was fed into strategy and product development discussions and a year later Jobsite is now leading the way in mobile recruiting.

We could have waited until the mobile recruiting market was more established, but our customers were telling us otherwise – they wanted a mobile job hunting solution now – so we moved quickly.

What are your customers telling you? And are you listening?

Checking the numbers

So, this is what you need to do (using Google Analytics for this example):

  1. Login to Google Analytics
  2. Select your date range (top right). Recommend at least a year to see a growth pattern.
  3. Open the ‘Visitors’ menu on the left of the page
  4. Click the ‘Mobile’ link to open up the mobile options
  5. Select ‘Mobile Device’
  6. Marvel at the information

So what do your customers say? Is there a need for a mobile friendly version of your offering? If yes, you need to ask – and answer – some important questions.

  • Does your business lend itself well to mobile?
  • Can you improve the customer brand experience via mobile?
  • Should I do something in Mobile right now?
  • Which first – iPhone, Android, Mobile or other?

You can answer these questions soon, but right now you need to spend 60 seconds in your analytics package. You’ll learn something about your business and customers and have an opportunity to influence the future direction of your company’s strategy.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objective

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

Over the course of this series, we’ll be looking at a wide range of things for you to try in your marketing, including behavioural re-targeting, smarter customer service, social media monitoring, conversion rate optimisation, mobile marketing, and creating linkbait to boost search performance. Please feel free to add your comments and join the conversation.

Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

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