In this day and age mobiles are everywhere, most big websites have an associated app and what you can do on a laptop can also be done on a mobile. This goes to show the importance of mobiles and the importance of ensuring your business’ online assets are up to date and optimised for mobile marketing.
As of March 2022, 54% of all website traffic came from mobile devices, this is compared to 31% at the beginning of 2015. This shows that mobile device traffic has increased by about 75% in 7 years. Internationally, Africa has the highest proportion of internet traffic from mobile devices at 69% and within Africa, Nigeria has the highest proportion of mobile internet traffic of 81%. Comparatively Russia has the lowest proportion of internet traffic with 30%. While nothing can be said for certain as for the differences in device usage, there will always be theories.
In total, 92.1% of internet users access the internet using a mobile phone, which shows the importance of mobile marketing, whether this is via SMS campaigns, email campaigns, social media, mobile optimised websites or apps. With mobiles clearly being used for the majority of the population, it would be an oversight on a business if they didn’t factor in mobile marketing when considering future campaigns to boost their business.
In light of this, Google introduced mobile first indexing in July 2019. Since then, all new websites that have been launched have automatically gone to mobile first indexing, this means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking your pages. This means that if you don’t have a specified mobile version of your website, you may not rank as highly, because the desktop version of your website will not be optimised to be used on a mobile phone as well.
A study from 2019 revealed that only 13% of websites retain the same position across all devices, which shows that you can’t focus on one device, but rather focus on each targeted device individually in order for you to see the desired results across desktop, mobile and tablets. In the same vein, you need to ensure the data across all platform versions is the same. Google has said themselves ‘If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent with your desktop site. Only the content shown on the mobile site is used for indexing.’ So if you include more data on the desktop version but don’t include it on your mobile version, the data won’t be ranked as highly.
So how do you optimise the mobile version of your website? First you need to ensure that at the top of your homepage, you can see the company logo, telephone number H1 text, subheading and a Call To Action all without scrolling down. This gives the user initial information without having to search for it. You want to give your audience a good experience, so that they return in the future and become a loyal customer. This is can be done by rearranging the elements on the page, because unlike a desktop, a mobile is portrait and a smaller screen, so if you have elements next to each other on the desktop version of your website, this time they need to be in a column so that users don’t need to scroll across the page.
In addition, advertising on mobile is more efficient now than ever before as well, because ad services such as Google and Facebook can build up a profile of every user and only show your ads to users that are more likely to benefit from it.
In conclusion, mobile marketing is imperative now in order for your business to succeed, because you have 24/7 access to your customer base and you don’t have to pay for postage, air time or print material. People are online when commuting or just out and about and if you play your cards right, you can benefit greatly from it!
