With 87% of Millennials admitting their phone never leaves their side day or night and 68% of smartphone users checking their phone within 15 minutes of waking up, ensuring your content can be engaged with from a small screen has become an essential component of digital marketing.
Whether you’re just about to get serious about mobile marketing, or want to check if you’re on the right track, focusing on these 3 areas will help you create a great mobile experience for your guests.
1. Create a Mobile Friendly Website
The first step to any mobile strategy is to technically develop your website so that is performs optimally on a small screen. You have two options here: you can either create a new version of your website for mobile users, or you can create a responsive site that works optimally across devices.
If you create a new, mobile-friendly website, it’s a good idea to apply AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to boost page load speed. Google has placed an increased emphasis on page speeds in a bid to provide the best possible user experience for mobile users.
When it comes to keyword research for your mobile audience, searcher intent holds more weight than the search volume for any particular keyword. Because of the popularity of voice search, keywords on mobile can hold multiple meanings when compared to desktop users.
2. Use Analytics Data to Inform and Improve Your Mobile Marketing
Just like any decision you make concerning your hotel’s digital marketing campaign, your mobile strategy should be backed up by solid data. As always, Google Analytics is your first port of call.
The most important engagement metrics to examine to judge the success of your mobile strategy are:
- Bounce rate
- Pages per session
- Mobile site speed
- Page path
- Landing pages
You can then compare and contrast these stats to your desktop metrics to see how large the discrepancies are, and use this information to make informed decisions on the changes you need to make to boost mobile performance.
3. Focus on User Experience
If you want to create the best possible user experience for your mobile guests, it’s important to run tests on actual devices to identify any potential performance or usability issues when it comes to mobile rendering. Just because your website is mobile friendly, doesn’t mean it offers a great mobile experience across all devices.
Common mistakes include placing buttons/links too close to each other so that they’re difficult to finger-tap accurately on a smartphone, as well as using a font size that is too small and forces users to “pinch to zoom.” A great mobile experience - the kind that drives bookings- is one where every action on your website is easy to perform.
Be sure to run A/B testing to make informed decisions about the function and aesthetics of your website, and use Google’s easy to follow mobile best practices as a guideline.
Mobile technology is only going to keep evolving, and as marketers our job is to change with it, or risk getting left behind.
Does your website provide the best possible experience for mobile users? What do you need to change to improve it? Let us know in the comments below!
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