How Should Your Business Adapt to the Mobile World?
It is difficult to ignore smartphones and the impact that they've had on the business landscape. If you're behind the wheel of a business, this could even be seen as an opportunity. The ship has long sailed on mobile considerations being a novelty or outside of the norm, so what you need to do now is to figure out how you can use the mobile world to show your business in the best light possible.
After all, as smartphones become more widespread and advanced, you might even find that they represent people's main interaction with your brand.
Be Aware of Its Differences
It's easy to view the world of mobile engagement as simply being the same as it was but smaller, but the truth is that the ability to carry around such devices wherever people go has an enormous impact on the mode of interaction – regardless of how small an adjustment it might seem at first. The way that people interact with different aspects of your business might change, for example. You might find that something that was popular or saw a lot of traffic on laptops or desktops, such as specific APIs, might not be when it comes to mobile devices. At first, this might seem like something of a curiosity, but given enough time and enough people using mobile devices instead, this could seriously impact your business. Therefore, taking actions such as installing API management software can give you a clearer idea of what is successful, what isn't, and what you can do about it. Having a more thorough and statistically driven way of viewing your business can be incredibly helpful for understanding the bulk of information that comes your way.
Your Business App
The whole question of a website even changes slightly when it comes to mobile usage. Most people in business will understand the website as an important or even essential hub of information that is the ultimate destination for your online traffic. For many brands, this will even be where your product or service is offered, meaning that getting customers there in the first place is the only way that you can reach that transactional phase and make the conversion. It also means that you have an ultimate objective in making your name appear more in search queries – allowing you to carve out your niche that makes you crop up again and again.
Websites are still important when it comes to mobile use – browsers function in much the same way, after all. Many people might not find this as elegant a way of interacting with your brand as it would be if you had your own app. Having your own dedicated app can allow you to completely customize the format and layout of the presentation, exercising a much higher degree of control over the customer experience than you would be able to over a website viewed on mobile. Again, this is especially important if your website is ultimately a part of your service, and it could even make the difference between customers deciding to engage with your brand or not.
The topic of why having your own business app is important is something that has been covered by several different business-focused outlets, but that also means that there is a wealth of history for you to draw on. If you can understand the potential benefits on display here, and look at some of the best examples, you might better visualize how your brand could make this leap. Of course, nothing is stagnant in business. As technologies change and aesthetic trends come and go, what constitutes a 'good app' will also shift. This means that you can't be content with just making a good app and leaving it at that – you need to consistently try to improve and maintain it to keep it in fierce competition with what else is on the market.
Social Media and Alerts
The presence of your brand on social media has likely always been something that you viewed as being important to maintaining a consistent online presence, but even this landscape, modern as it might seem, isn't stagnant. This might be best seen through social media platforms that were once incredibly popular, such as Facebook, but are now mainly used by a certain older audience. That's a generalization, but it can give you a sense of how different social media platforms have different audiences – how having a presence across a wide variety of platforms can be important for maintaining your own varied audience, and which of these are considered the target demographic for your brand.
Back on the topic of your website, your social media platforms are also an opportunity to again improve that experience. Linking your social media pages into your website means that you can create a system where traffic flows between them – adding to the sense that your presence online is a consistent one. All roads should lead to Rome, after all, and if audiences stumble on your social media pages and are curious to learn more, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
The mobile audience is also open to an opportunity on your behalf that prior digital audiences might not have been – becoming aware of your content through alerts. Not everyone will subscribe to your various online channels, of course, but it's a suggestion that you can make to them, encouraging them to do so due to the benefits it might have. Once this bridge is crossed, your customers don't need to be actively on their phones to see your marketing content – they can be informed of it through a notification that can take them right to it if they're curious enough.
Marketing Content
Part of that evolving social media landscape is the rising prominence of video content. Video content has always been popular online, and it is arguably why platforms such as YouTube or Twitch have continued to flourish. However, the increasing popularity of video as an extension of social media has led to an increased amount of integration on services like Instagram or Twitter/X. TikTok is another video platform that sees an incredible amount of popular use, and the style of short-form video content that comprises this platform has led to the same 'shorts' style being adopted by Facebook and YouTube.
All of this is to say, that the way you go about creating your video marketing content might have to change in order to accommodate this shift. As always with trends, you don't want to seem as though you're trying too hard to match the trends – it's something that could come across as off-putting and desperate quite easily. Besides, you might also find that you're not able to adequately fit in all of the information about your brand or service within this time, meaning that slightly longer videos that can be used amidst YouTube videos or even on TV still hold a great deal of utility.
However, with the faster pace of content becoming the norm, you might find that even your slightly longer videos are still produced with a relatively brisk pace so that you can engage with the audiences quickly, make your point and get out of there. This allows you to trim this content down further to fit these short platforms if you want to – even to the point where it's just a brief clip featuring the product with relevant information. The scrolling nature of social media videos means that this can come up and be gone again in a moment, but that might be all it takes to make an impression.
The Question of Attention Spans
A common discussion that crops up again and again when talking about how smartphone usage has changed the world is in the attention spans of audiences. It's for this reason that you might find marketing, video content and even TV shows that move at a much faster pace. This is already something that's been covered by the discussion into the rise of short-form video content and what that can mean for your brand, but it's also something to consider when designing your website or even creating your social media content.
Being concise and succinct is more important now than it's ever been. The art of saying as much as possible with as few words as you can manage becomes paramount. After all, even if your customers go to your website in order to find a specific piece of information, they might be turned away by walls of text that require too much effort to get to the bottom of – meaning that you have to also work on how you display it. At first, all of these issues might sound like roadblocks that prevent you from depicting your business in the way that you want – but it doesn't have to be that way, and it can be a road to creating a more streamlined presentation for your brand.