To offer truly effective mobile marketing content, you have to have an accurate idea of what’s going through the minds of your target consumers, so you need to understand consumer behaviour. This doesn’t just mean the latest trends, buying factors, and seasonal impacts. It also means being able to account for consumers’ predictable behavior patterns. When it comes to mobile marketing, that means two key areas: making the buyer’s journey convenient and accounting for consumers with multiple devices.

Consumer Behaviour – Can consumers go through the buyer’s journey from start to finish on a mobile device?

The buyer’s journey is a useful organizational tool for thinking about how prospective customers go from consumers with a specific problem to buyers finalizing their purchases. The framework isn’t just for mobile marketing. It should affect all of your marketing decisions from inbound marketing to how you interact with recurring customers. The three main steps in the buyer’s journey are:

1. The awareness stage: Consumers know they have a problem. But they might not know what the precise problem is or how to start solving it.

2. The consideration stage: Consumers now know more about their problem and potential solutions. At this point, they’re researching specific vendors, comparing products, and looking for the best solution.

3. The decision stage: Consumers have a final list of options to select the right product or service. They make the purchase.

If your company is a trustworthy content provider during each of these stages, you are more likely to have a prominent place in the consumer’s list when they reach the decision stage. If you can help consumers spend as little time as possible in the buyer’s journey, your company is even more valuable.

The best way to help consumers from start to finish is to make sure they can go through all three stages on your mobile site. More and more people are turning to search engines to solve immediate problems. Whether they have a flat tire, a cracked water heater, or a virus on their computer, they are going to look for the answer on their phones. Provide awareness content, as well as articles and videos that offer objective comparisons. Then make sure shoppers can easily buy your product with as few clicks or taps as possible.

Offer the right content to the right markets in bite-sized pieces.

Smartphones have small screen sizes, and even the recent growth in Apple phone dimensions won’t change that. That means your responsive design needs to allow for easy readability and navigation on screens that are just a few inches wide. If your website is handled by third-party experts, they’re already taking care of this design for you. Design your content for mobile users, too. Whether you’re writing new content for your About Us page or you have a business blog for strong inbound marketing, you need to:

* Have concise points, with short sentences and brief paragraphs. The wall of text phenomenon is even more exaggerated by a small screen size and large font size. Mobile readers are also much more likely to be glancing through content for entertainment or scanning it for a specific solution to an immediate problem. So make sure everything is scannable.

* Have a mix of short and long articles. Long articles with a lot of expert information boost your company’s credibility. The people looking for long, complete answers will consume the content both on a phone and off of it. Short articles are also useful because you can address infinitely specific questions and provide quick reads.

* Hook them into your email marketing. Just as more and more Internet activity takes place on mobile devices, more and more consumers use these devices to casually check their email during downtime. Use this content for regular newsletters and informative emails. Exposure to good content helps consumers feel more confident in the marketplace and confident consumers are more likely to make purchases. If you’re providing informative entertainment, you’re also increasing positive exposure to your brand.

Make sure your mobile shopping cart doesn’t put mobile marketing to waste.

Mobile shopping carts have had to overcome a lot of resistance. People don’t like giving companies their credit card numbers, and they certainly don’t like typing a precise string of numbers on a small touchscreen. That means your mobile site has to offer convenience, security, and memory.

More than that, your content and mobile marketing have to establish ease of shopping from the beginning. People are reluctant to even consider shopping online with small vendors and companies. Once consumers start to suspect that your checkout is hard to use, they might just use your site for research before going to Amazon or back to Google. So write about how easy shopping experiences and online access matters for your specific niche. Even that content is part of mobile marketing because easy purchasing is a feature you offer that not everyone does. This is where landing pages with good reviews, prominent customer feedback, and easy navigability step in.

Mobile marketing isn’t just mobile: account for cross-channel interactions.

However, just because an interaction starts on a consumer’s phone doesn’t mean it will end there. As devices get more and more synced to tablets, laptops, and browser accounts, people shift from screen to screen without clear transitions in their behaviors. Design your marketing content to allow for easy changes, and don’t let it corrupt your interpretation of marketing data.

Phones are used more for browsing and easy access than for multi-window work. If someone’s working on their laptop, they probably have a split screen. Allowing users to see two tabs at once with less fuss and manual adjusting was one of the best feature enhancements in recent years for standard computers. But smartphones and smaller tablets can’t provide the same functionality. They can switch between tabs, but they can’t show both with a great deal of effectiveness.

This means many consumers are going to put their interaction with your content on hold if it needs two windows.

As a general rule, interruptions have always been fatal to marketing efforts. If a prospective customer leaves an article half-way through, they won’t be back. But automated marketing and email tools have provided a bit of protection against this. If a subscriber clicks a link on your newsletter to read an article but doesn’t spend that much time on the page, software can guess whether the reader left because they didn’t like it or if they were interrupted. Interrupted readers can get a follow-up message or related content in the next (and more refined) email.

Sometimes consumers consciously put tasks on hold for when they have access to a different device. To-do lists that sync across devices and browsers that let you put down your phone and turn to the same tabs on a laptop are common. So make sure most of your mobile marketing content can be fully enjoyed on just a phone. But don’t be afraid to branch out to more complex content and interactions consumers will save for later.

Use analytics to see which communications are dropped and which are continued on different devices.

Even if you’re prepared for consumers to switch screens and continue interactions on a larger device, it can be devastating to see the drop-off rates when you look through your analytics. For example, your page might show that 79% of subscribers opened your latest email. 90% did so on their phone. 50% of them clicked on a link to read the rest of an article. All in all, these are fantastic numbers.

But then only 0.5% had a duration time that matched the length of the article. Only 10% of the remaining viewers clicked to another page. That’s a drastic downturn, and you might spend weeks and months trying to refine your content to get better results with negligible changes.

While having streamlined content will boost those numbers, make sure you’re accounting for cross-channel variables, too. A lot of consumers will skim an article and bookmark it for later. They might check the email as unread so they can go back to it when they get home. If your links lead to content that’s protected with a login, then your subscriber’s credential may not have transferred from their bigger device to their phone. They almost certainly don’t remember their password, and they’ll leave the page frustrated.

Don’t rely on device-type statistics

So never look at device-type statistics alone. Instead, use marketing software that creates unique URLs. You can use these to analyze aggregate cross-channel behavior accurately. It also allows the option to cycle through one-time and one-user links to see what percentage of customers are coming back later. It can further be used to track the duration and behavior stats to interpret why readers are clicking away: logins, offscreen interruptions, or, yes, even bad content.

Mobile marketing is complicated. You have to be able to garner attention and drive action in a world full of distractions. Your content and marketing interactions can be distractions and entertainment themselves. Make sure your strategies are designed to reach as many people as possible and give them precisely the content and access they need.

Go to Digital Training Institute for specific, step-by-step guides on how to capture consumer interest on phones, social media platforms, and search engines.