The holidays are almost upon us and so is the busiest shopping day of the year – the ubiquitous Black Friday – where people of all sizes and shapes, creeds and colors scramble off to the mall before the sun even has a chance to think about coming back up. If you haven’t started preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all the shopping days leading up to the big C, you need to start preparing right now. One of the smartest ways you can prepare is to have your web presence ready for mobile devices of all makes, models and screen sizes. The world has gone mobile and even though a ton of mobile devices will be given as gifts this year, the mobile device will likely be your customers’ vehicle of choice for browsing your store and making a purchase. If you haven’t started holiday mobile marketing, here is how to get mobile marketing ready just in time for the holidays.
Your Mobile Site With a Holiday Theme
Holiday mobile marketing should appear different than your marketing materials from any other time of the year. Dress your mobile site up with a Christmas Tree, or a Santa Hat. Just consider what physical brick-and-mortar stores start doing around this time. They decorate and blast Christmas music until everyone is ready to find the musac machine to destroy it. Do the same with your mobile marketing site. You can even have Christmas music on auto play to really bring the spirit home, though your customers probably would not prefer it. They’d much rather you save your holiday music for your engaging mobile-friendly videos.
The site itself should retain some colors or at least the same look and feel from your original site, as well as have the same language, font, etc. You don’t want to confuse customers into thinking that they have landed on someone else’s mobile site. Your mobile site should not merely be a shrunk down version of your regular site, but it should be recognizable as a mobile site that originates from your brand in a single glance.
The rules of mobile advertising is always to keep it simple. People are used to instant access on their smartphones and tablets, and they won’t wait around for a website to load; and they certainly won’t tolerate a wall-o-text. Make it easy to buy from your store, browse your pages and make purchases. Keep all forms as short as can be and keep images to one or two per page, and even then two is stretching it. For best results, hire a professional from a firm like Third Digital Media who are renowned for their marketing feats, they can help you design your holiday mobile marketing site and then view it on an actual mobile device to see how a potential customer might experience it on the fly.
Mobile Advertising
Having a mobile-friendly website is only one version of mobile marketing. If you’ve done your SEO due diligence, you are hopefully obtaining good search rankings so that your mobile site will automatically appear on the screens of Internet searchers who are indeed using mobile devices. You can increase the number of times your listings and brand shows up for searchers by engaging in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and by creating a mobile app, to name just two.
PPC Marketing
PPC mobile marketing platforms like Google Adwords allow mobile advertising hopefuls to have access to an immense amount of data about potential customers, and they also allow advertisers to control how their holiday mobile marketing presences show up for search users.
For example, by having a PPC mobile marketing ad campaign in place, you can track how many of your users click on your ads using Tablets or Smartphones and then tailor your holiday mobile marketing campaign accordingly. If you know that more people are using tablets, and what time of day they typically click, and from where, you can tailor your ads to match those exact demographics, thus making your ads extra clickable for your target market.
Holiday Mobile Marketing Apps
If your company doesn’t have an app, maybe now is the time to start thinking about your grand introduction to the ever-popular world of mobile advertising with apps. It doesn’t have to be a holiday themed app, per se, but it should be clear that you are releasing it for the holidays and you should entice customers to buy by giving them one or more holiday-themed incentives. An example might be a wrapped surprise gift with every order or you may display a Merry Christmas banner. You, as the mobile marketing executive, will decide what to put in the box.
If you haven’t designed a mobile site, that’s operation Right Now. Then, get started tailoring your site and your PPC marketing campaigns, and app release, around a holiday mobile marketing theme. It’s time to get in the spirit, as your mobile marketing target audience will certainly be feeling the joy when they browse, shop and buy your wide selection of whatever valuable items or services you happen to be offering.
