In order to understand how important the mobile life-style is for online marketing, let’s look at some data.

According to broadband în 2018 about 52.2% of the world’s internet traffic came from mobile. In 2019 around 63% of the traffic came from mobile so having a responsive website is CRUCIAL.

Let’s look at other data, this time from Google itself. In May 2019 the biggest search engine announced that starting with July 2019, it will use predominantly the mobile version for indexing (https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing). What does that mean? That your main site is no longer the desktop version, but the mobile one.

If you own a website and it is not yet optimized for mobile, you should start as soon as today to make it fast, easy to read and responsive. This is crucial, especially because mobile phones don’t have the same speed as computers do with cable connection (even though with the help of 5G, things will change). Having a fast and well-optimized site for mobile is mandatory!

Mobile is not important only because it is the most used medium for searching the internet, it is also different from how we are used to interact with desktop devices. The screens are different, the interaction is completely different (click vs touch) which means that you need to understand how to develop a proper UX and UI structure that is very different from the desktop one.

Before getting into the differences between the desktop and mobile interface (so you can understand how to properly optimize your website) you need to know about a tool that is a lot of times overlooked by a lot of people. That is Google Market Finder! Create an account there, enter your website, choose the categories from your industry and check the behaviour of people online for your whole country.

Based on that you can make an educated decision about what you should do when it comes to mobile optimization. If people watch more videos on their phones, it might be good to create video ads targeted for mobile (which might be cheaper), or you can implement videos on your site. If people use credit cards for online purchases, make the buyer’s experience very easy on mobile etc. It is a process that you have to go through, to adjust what we are recommending to do with mobile UX and UI. 

How is the mobile UX/UI different from the desktop UI/UX?

In order to understand the differences, we need to understand how desktop UI and UX work. When it comes to the User Experience of a desktop owner, the interaction with the computer is with a mouse (or touchpad) most of the time. This gives people more agility but it also changes the way people use websites (right or left click, single or double click, scrolling etc.).

The size of the screen also influences the UX. Because screens are bigger you have more room to see and interact with. Usually, desktops are used to watch more video content in platforms like youtube, and less for social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Tweeter).

The way computers are made, they offer users the possibility to interact with the search bar at the top of the page first (this is due to visual hierarchy and the way we learnt to read in school). A header underneath the search bar of the browser it is importat because it is one of the first things people see. There you should put your logo or something very important.

After the reader sees the logo, it goes directly to your headline and depending on the quality of the headline he either scrolls down or looks at the menu bar (If they look at the menu bar and they don’t scroll, your headline is probably not good enough).

User Experience (UX) influences user interface (UI) in many ways because it is a structural base for UI. Without a solid UX architecture, the UI won’t work well (even though it might look awesome).

Here is a screenshot of a basic website, in which you can see the basic UI elements that were influenced by UX.

So we start with the search bar of the browser that you are using (in this case Google Chrome). Almost all the browsers out there have the go back or forward buttons in the top left of its UI. Why? Because it is where people from western countries see first. Then you have the search bar, where you write the web address or a query.

Websites followed the same principle. People from western countries, because they read from left to right, top to bottom, have a pattern similar to the one shown below when it comes to the visual interaction with a website:

The mobile UX and UI are a lot different because the mouse is ruled out and you interact by touching a screen. This has changed a lot the way websites should look. The touch interaction means tapping, swiping, using gestures and lately skipping all that and using voice commands. In the same time people got so used to phones, that they don’t interact with their phones with both of their hands (like they used to do in the early days of smartphones).

Most people navigate their phones using only one hand, which means that the UI has to adapt to the UX. Most people are right-handed, which means that the average reach of a person who holds his/her phone in on hand is like in the picture below:

This has a lot of implications when it comes to UI. Knowing this, the header of your website shouldn’t stay at the top of the page in the mobile version. Even though you can still have a header (for visual consistency), you should not place the dropdown menu or the search bar on the top of the page. A better alternative is to place the header at the bottom of the page like in the image below.

Even though this a very accessible option for users a UX problem appears. If the header is fixed (Sticky) a few mishaps might appear when the user scrolls down or up and this can be really annoying. In order to solve this issue, you need to create a CSS animation to your header that will slide the header down when you scroll down, and that will bring it up when you scroll up. You can see an example in the animation below or on the website www.obtineclienti.ro
                         

Mobile is also different because you have gestures nowadays. We will not talk about all the gestures possible out there, we will only talk about two types of gestures: that is swiping left or right. These two gestures are not common in desktop but very used on mobile. Ideally, if you swipe left you should go back one page and if you swipe right you should go forward. This last feature won’t be used as much as the first one, but it will be extremely handy to have.

When it comes to UX you also need to know that in order to give your users a good experience they should find what they want in maximum three taps. This might include a better site architecture, introducing a search bar or using a tool like Hotjar to see what are the most common features people look for and bring them at the top of the page.

The mobile lifestyle means also that you need to split columns properly; that you have to make sure your content is visible (and your text big enough – but not too big) or that your buttons are big enough so they can be tapped without a struggle. Usually the minimum recommended size for buttons is 48 pixels in height.

Install AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Accelerated Mobile Pages is an online publishing format that uses special HTML code to make websites load extremely fast. It was developed by Google as a response to Facebook’s Instant Article feature, which allows Facebook users to access articles from websites almost instantaneously.

If you want to increase Search Results and get a better experience to your users, use AMP. From our experience, it not only increased the average loading speed of the website but it increased our search rankings significantly when we installed AMP. If you have a website, you should have an AMP version of it for mobile.

You can find more about AMP here.

Conclusions

Optimizing websites for mobile is mandatory in 2020. Not doing it, is not only costing you a lot of visitors but also more sales!
PS. Don’t forget about the speed of your website on mobile! It is more important than in the desktop sites!

If you find this article helpful consider appreciating us! Wish you our best!

In case you need an agency to handle SEO, Mobile Architecture and optimization, consider messaging us on Facebook for fast reply!

If you like Marketing and want to get better at it-or if you don’t like marketing but you know you have to use it to grow your business and bring in more sales, you need to know about the Marketing Mix.

It is one of the most used concepts in the industry and it presents four essential and fully controlable elements from a business: product, price, promotion and placement (or the four P’s). The mix is a tool that you can use to improve the way you offer your products or services to your customers.

A combination of these elements could bring your business a competitive advantage.

The business market is build from two factors: uncontrollable (like political, economical, social, technological, legal, environmental factors or demand) and controllable factors (like the Marketing Mix).

You can use the mix to create an efficient product or service “offering” to the market. To make a product sell better you can change one of the following: 

Product

In order to increase the success of your product (or service-this model applies to both) you have the control over the features of your packaging. In order to increase demand for your product (or service-we will refer to the product also as a service from now on) you have to either increase or decrease the quality of it. (We will explain in a second why sometimes it might be a good decision to decrease the quality). 

This element alone could be a source of competitive advantage. Multiple multi-dollar businesses are built only by offering a different quality service. Apple is a good example here: they are different from any other phone company by focusing on the way their phone works and is designed.

Most businesses today focus on improving the quality of their products, by adding more features  or using different (new) technologies or changing its design (some t-shirt printing companies make millions of dollars only by changing the design of the print).

Now, the idea of improving the quality of your product might not always be good. Why? Because sometimes the market might not be ready for it. Think about the Concorde: the fastest commercial plane in history. It offered the fastest flight from America to Europe but still failed (due to multiple reasons: to make the product offering very good they had to increase the Price, the other element that will be presented soon).

As we said above you can decrease the quality of a service to sell more! Why would you do that and why would that work? Because it could affect the other elements as well. In the Concorde example, the flight tickets were almost double than the tickets for a normal plane, so instead of arriving two hours earlier people would prefer to have more money on their pocket. Sometimes a lower quality product may bring your manufacturing cost down or maybe the premium feature you offer is not valued a lot by your customers. Take that into account when developing new products.

Price

If you want to affect the demand (and sales) for your product you can change its price. This is a very used practice by most business owners. Most of them, because they don’t know how to increase the value of the product they sell; they just lower the price. This is why industries which have a lot of competition usually tend to have extremely low margins. In order to sell just a little bit more, most business people reduce their price; competitors want to stay in business too so they lower the price even more… this goes until most of the profit margin is eaten and the clients are already used with the price: good luck trying to increase your profitability then.

Lowering price isn’t always a bad thing for business as people are very motivated by “good deals”. This is the reason why most of the retail sales happen during Black Friday. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the people get the better deal, but there are more discounts overall in the market. You can find that the best deal you can get is not actually on black friday.

There are two books that we recommend you to read to understand the psychology of pricing: The Blue Ocean Strategy and The Lean Start-Up.

How to offer discounts?

When offering discounts you need to know that this approach might affect the perceived value of the service (usually depending on how big the discount is and how often it happens) so you have to do it strategically.

Products with low price usually have a low perceived value so when you lower your price too much or too often it happens that people won’t believe in it as much afterwards. It happened to us and our clients and it will happen to you if you offer it too often.

You can follow a couple strategies when it comes to offering discounts:

1. Seasonal price cuts

Offer discounts in a predictable manner so buyer ‘tension’ and excitement would build. Don’t do it too often, once or twice a year would be just right (depending on your business model you can have up to four as clothing brands have so you can sell more seasoned outfits) but don’t make discounts every month because it is easy for customers  to wait… especially if what your are selling is not a necessity.

2. One day sale

This strategy is inspired by the Black Friday but goes a step further. The one day sale strategy is based around an event you participate in once a year (it could be organised by you or somebody else- you don’t necessarily have to be the host). You can offer this discount only in the event date (and maybe at the event location). This strategy works very well with local communities and events. Eventhough they may not offer the best sale day of the year (eventhough it could happen) they would bring you cheaper leads and higher conversion rates.

3. Contests

Instead of offering a price cut you could offer a free product. This is a very good way to boost the engagement your business had and get some spillover effects into real sales. A lot of people are afraid of doing contests because they think they will lose money, but in 90% of the cases we worked with, the benefits out-weighted the costs in big ways.

Promotion

There are multiple approaches when it comes to promotions. Here you can be creative as possible. Depending on your budget you can create some highly convertible ads that will benefit your business a bunch. of course you don’t always have to spend money to get publicity. We are working on an article about Guerrilla Marketing strategies so if you want to get notified when we post it, sign up to our newsletter.

This element is very straight forward but complicated at the same time. We won’t be able to get into all the details about promotion and sales. We have two recommendations when it comes to it: remember that to stop marketing just to save money is the same thing as stopping your watch just to save time and read the book “The psychology of selling” by Brian Tracy.

Placement

Placement in a few words is what in the real estate market is called “location is everything”. Here there are two things that come into play: where your product (and promotion) is placed and how it is placed. If we are talking about the digital world (here we come into play-haha) we mean the rank your website has in the search engines, do you have Facebook, Instagram Ads?

If we are talking about the offline words we mean: Where is your store location? How visible are your products in the shops you sell in? How easy your clients can find you (if you offer a service)? How are you products arranged in the shelves? and many, many more.

In the online world getting a proper placement is easier and cheaper with PPC (pay-per-click ads), display ads and so on. 

In the offline world it is a bit harder. If you don’t own your own store and sell through retail you need to negotiate your placement, which is harder to do and it might cost you more. 

One company who focuses a lot on Placement is Coca-Cola. Almost always they negotiate the placement of their sodas in the stores… They even have product shelving specialists that focus on the psychology of how people behave in a store to increase their conversion rates… Pretty advanced stuff.

Placement is the reason Super Bowl ads cost so much. It goes by the saying: the more people know about you, the more likely someone will happen to want your product.

With this we come to an end to the Marketing Mix. You can use this model to increase  your sales or to understand what you want from your advertising company.

So let’s recap:

The Marketing Mix has four elements:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Placement

You can use them to increase your competitive advantages. Follow the strategies written in this article to increase your business.

We would be extremely happy to hear your feedback.

Remember, we are preparing a post about Guerilla Marketing strategies that will help you promote your business with little to no money. Sign up to our newsletter to receive a notification when it will come up.

Best regards!

If you want us to help you grow your business you can schedule a free business strategy session. Click the message button and contact us on your favorite platforms.