You don’t need me to tell you that your buyer today is savvy and smart. I would be amazed if you haven’t noticed a change in how your potential leads are interacting with you. Statistically, by the time they contact you, they’ve made 60% of their decision to purchase your service or product simply as a result of their online research. The question is how much urgency do you have as a business owner of VP of Marketing to proactively manage this new customer?
Buyer Comfort Zone
Before the internet, as marketers and sales reps our advantage was that buyers were relatively uninformed and therefore advertising, cold calling, and other traditional push forms of marketing were effective in converting prospects into customers.
Today, buyers regardless of whether they are looking for a senior living community, an accountant, or physician, babysitter or even a manufacturer for their product are incredibly well-informed and can find just about all the information they need about a product or service on Google.
In fact, according to dotmailer, by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship without talking to a human. I can see where this is going relative to how a company needs to evolve their marketing and sales people and processes. Can you?
Basically old school push marketing isn’t as effective and instead, innovative marketers are turning to inbound digital marketing to help them elevate their brand management and high quality lead attraction and conversion. No matter what industry you are in, buyer behavior has transformed over the past ten years, and the roles of sales and marketing have evolved in response.
Urgency Means Mobile Matters NOW
Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, this means changing your marketing strategies around a new buying process. Your core focus for 2016 should be on delivering an exceptional mobile experience. Consider the following strategies:
SEO- Ensuring your website is found when people are searching is imperative to generating leads and sales. A few of the technical elements you will want to check to receive the highest possible organic search ranking include page speed, flash, pop ups, titles, meta descriptions and the use of use Schema.org structured data.
- More than 50% of searches on mobile devices lead to a purchase. (Rocket Post)
- 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase. (Search Engine Watch)
Website- First and foremost make sure your website is mobile responsive. Not only will this ensure that your leads have a positive user experience on their phones, it will also give you higher search engine optimization rankings.
- According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had problems accessing – and 40% will visit a competitor’s site instead. (McKinsey & Company)
- 27% of consumers will leave a site if it is not mobile-optimized. (ExactTarget, 2014 Mobile Behavior Report)
- 54% of consumers believe that it is easier to find information on mobile-optimized sites. (ExactTarget, 2014 Mobile Behavior Report)
Blog- Mobile users are seeking a quick and easy user experience when reading. Use Google’s mobile friendly testing tool to quickly check if your blog is mobile ready. Mobile-friendly means focusing on showing text content in its most readable form, especially when your content is primarily text.
Good blog posts are short and easy to skim for meaning independent of pictures or illustrations. Images should enhance and compliment your text with memorable visuals. But your text must function without them.
How important is blogging? According to Hubspot 79% of companies that have a blog report a positive ROI.
Email- Email is not only one of the oldest forms of communication on the Internet, when used strategically, it is also one of the most effective tools of inbound digital marketing. A few strategies to consider include using a mobile responsive email template, use high resolution images, keep your content concise and brief, user pre-headers correctly and make your call to action buttons finger friendly.
- 44% of consumers say that they would like brands to deliver deals and coupons to their mobile devices. (Millward Brown)
- Mobile readership continues to surpass desktop readership – 44.7% of email opens occur on a mobile device. (Informz)
Social- Social media is very relevant to both engage visitors to your brand, yet also drive organic SEO. Social optimization means thinking about how your users interact on your social channels and what you can do to capture their attention as they scroll through their newsfeed. Basic strategies include the type and size of images and photos, hashtags, targeting, use of call to actions, as well as the use of videos.
- Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. (State of Inbound Marketing, 2012)
Micro Strategy
Mobile usage growth is phenomenal to say the least. As a CMO or VP of Marketing, it provides you with the opportunity to engage with leads and customers like never before. Mobile users are quick to check their phones and they have come to expect texts and emails that are deliver a positive user experience. In fact a study from BlueHornet found that when email isn’t mobile-friendly, 80% will delete the email and 30% will unsubscribe. Could that be happening to your business now? Maybe it’s time to take a quick check on how mobile friendly and ready your marketing strategy is. After all can you really afford to lose even just one lead or sale?
