Mobile Websites & Mobile Marketing Orange County, California – Sean Sloan

Online Marketing - Sean Sloan - Open-Interactive.com

Online Marketing - Sean Sloan - Open-Interactive.com

The discussion today is about mobile computing. Is there anyone who hasn’t played around with an iPad? It’s a mobile device that a lot of you have experience with. Many of you have smart phones. Those two devices are the focus of mobile computing at the time. There is a third kind of mobile computing device that comes in the form of Google glass project. Which are actual glasses that are like a heads up display in which images are projected. They are dealing with something called augmented reality where as you turn and move what is displayed can change contextually it’s a very important thing for only the dorkiest. So what we’re talking about how mobile devices because they are smaller they have screens with a lower resolution they need websites that are specifically designed to cater to those forms. It’s generally done with a subset of pages not the entire site because the majority of people when they’re on their phone they are looking for things like location, phone contact, description of your products and maybe some prices. That comprises of 80% of what people are looking for currently in terms of mobile computing. This is an example of a traditional website for a company called Sky Candy. There is also a mobile version. If this was a mobile device it would have auto-detected this with a script. I’m forcing it here to go to the mobile version of the site. With that it looks something like this. You can imagine this being much easier to navigate through on a mobile device. It behaves a little bit differently. It has bigger buttons, bigger type and very simple navigation.

The research that I showed you two weeks ago shows that 60% of people complain of the difficulty in navigating traditional websites that don’t have mobile versions. That’s the compelling reason to have a digested simplified version of their website, so people can get the point of the website when accessing it form a mobile device. We are working on a mobile site for Anthony Campo which has the limited set of items but it also has this prominent call now button. One things that phones can do that regular web browsers cannot is that you can have a click to call button, which with a click of a button will prompt the phone to put the number up and all you have to do is hit the button and call. Although some other browsers can also do this it is extremely effective with mobile sites. This has his header it looks like his site it has the call now button and also has the toned down set of links to other portions of his site which will be very easy to navigate to. Once we put that content in it will go live perhaps even this week. The first page of this is a special introductory offer for creating mobile versions of the website and then in here there are a bunch of statistics about the momentum and movement towards mobile computing.

That brings us to the logical next step which is mobile marketing. There is this push and the reason that so many people are interested in the whole mobile realm is because the device manufacturers are essentially inserting themselves between the final customer you, and the material that is being produced externally. So, by doing this they’re trying to control the environment in which people are advertised to. Apple is particularly interested in this. Google is particularly interested in this and other phone manufacturer try to do their own version of this. This is an arms race now for people. They are trying to mediate your content so that they can present ads to you basically and they will come in every form. Inside of apps, inside of videos, inside of anything that you consume, inside of games even. Some of the traditional things still work. If you are doing a search on your phone and you use Google, the results are different. They are very similar however there are other mediating thing there that make it slightly different.

So mobile SEO still works. Pay per click advertisement works. Then it comes down to some more interesting things like text message marketing where you essentially give a person permission to market to you. Like when you see a message saying text this word to this number and you will get XYZ reward. It will be some exclusive deal like an option, coupon or a special offer by opting into the program. This is obviously done through mobile phones because through them is where the best marketing takes place. On this sheet, if anyone has a QR code scanner on their phone. QR code scanners are free to download. This series of black dots here is a QR code if anybody doesn’t know. You can take a phone aim it at this. It’s like a barcode you scan it, but it takes you directly to our website. Exactly to our mobile page. The same thing can be done. You can create an SMS message, you can create a text message. You can then prompt people to e-mail it to themselves or anything similar. A lot of creativity can be applied to use of QR codes.

Once you make an app does it automatically show up in the Apple store or on Droid devices?

This is a very important distinction to make. This is not and app, this is a mobile website. Mobile apps are software that lives on the phone and generally has an icon on the desktop. It’s an important distinction to make because mobile apps are very expensive and complex to develop and it is possible to turn a website into an app. There is a way to do it but then you are in amongst hundreds of thousands if not millions of other apps inside and what is really going to compel the person to choose to download your app when all it does is take you to your website. So it is possible to do that kind of thing. It’s not too expensive to take your site make it an app and transfer it to the marketplace or any app store.

Does this mobile website take over your traditional website?

No, they coexist. JavaScript actually detects what device is communicating. You’ll see some statistics I put in here, It shows that Ballard is getting 25% of their traffic now from mobile devices and I think it has to do with their clientele being a little bit higher end and being more cutting edge on their adoption of these technologies, but that is a significant portion of traffic.

Check out my website, open-interactive.com, for samples of my work or give me a call at 949.722.6119.

sean@open-interactive.com