Whether they’re researching potential buys, trying to locate nearby stores, or even directly placing orders, today’s shoppers habitually use their mobile devices for eCommerce-related purposes.
Indeed, mobile retail revenue in the US is expected to hit 338 billion dollars in 2020, and all rational sellers are clamoring to take advantage of this rich market.
Carving out a respectable slice of the mobile e-commerce pie is far easier said than done, though, for two main reasons it’s hard to stand out in search results due to limited screen real estate and Google’s incremental bloating of the mobile SERPs, and there’s less time to make your case because mobile device users don’t have the patience of laptop or desktop users.
Mobile Marketing Key Trends in 2020 :
To have any hope of competing, you need to understand how to market your brand and products most effectively and commit to making it a priority. In this piece, we’re going to set out some of the key mobile marketing trends that will prove influential (and valuable) in 2020:
Branded app notifications
The significance of offering a branded app has been clearly established by now. If you can provide an app that offers real value (and ideally has cross-platform functionality), then the expanded online presence can make a huge difference.
It also matters a great deal for marketing, because marketing to existing customers is always more cost-effective. When you’re promoting to people with sufficient interest in your brand to install your app, then you don’t need to waste time on introductions, and you can easily work in elements of personalization.
This is where app notifications become hugely valuable.Roll out a discount offer notification through your app, and it can immediately get the attention of your app’s user base — even as similar marketing emails go unnoticed in spam-riddled inboxes.
Shoppable social media posts
Social media has long been powerful for promotion, but they need to push users to eCommerce sites that have often presented a stumbling block.
Any elongation of the conversion process can cause interest to fizzle out, as you’ll know if you’ve ever come close to placing an impulse order through your phone in the middle of the night before deciding against it. In ideal circumstances, interest will lead to purchase as directly as possible.
This is what shoppable social media posts are for. A shoppable social media post allows the person viewing it to purchase the featured item (or anyone of multiple featured items) very easily, either through an embedded store page or — more conveniently — a button that hooks into the eCommerce CMS and can place an order in seconds.
It fits neatly into social media content as it is, but particularly Instagram: posts are already built around actionable captions, so swapping the proposed action from visit this site to buy this product is simple enough.
High-quality video advertising
Early efforts at mobile video were somewhat disastrous. The bandwidth just wasn’t there, leaving the quality lacking and the experience intensely frustrating.
But things have changed immeasurably since then, with the average smartphone offering a perfectly-capable 4G experience and having a generous mobile data allowance to suit.
Due to this improvement, high-quality video is no longer exclusively found on laptops and desktops, nor even on Wi-Fi. Mobile users not only tolerate mobile video but actually welcome it, and this is excellent for marketing, most notably in social media feeds where videos (video ads, at least) can usually be set to autoplay.
Videos catch the eye where other social media posts blur together. And since a smartphone camera is more than enough to record suitable video footage, there’s little reason not to try making promotional videos for your brand.
Smart e-commerce chatbots
Shoppers often have questions: they want to know if there are other products like those you’ve suggested, or different varieties, or specific shipping options.
And while you can provide the answers through an FAQ section and/or a phone support service, you need to consider that people may not know to look for the former (or be willing to use the latter). So what’s the alternative? Well, live chat is great and can be made prominent through a floating prompt.
The main reason why some companies shy away from the live chat is that it’s very time-consuming — but it doesn’t need to be. Chatbots have advanced to the point at which they can very capably deal with live chat, fielding core queries in natural language at all times of the day (or night) and with great efficiency.
You can even link your chatbots to messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, letting them serve as virtual contacts for your customers.
Local search optimization
I noted earlier that appearing prominently in mobile search results is a real challenge, and it gets even worse when you consider the level of competition.
Huge international companies pour money into advertising, squeezing out smaller rivals with minimal budgets — but you shouldn’t try to compete on their terms.
Instead, try competing for local traffic.This is key in mobile search because it’s generally coded for location either explicitly (“hiking shoes in [location]”) or implicitly (“hiking shoes” searched for using a phone with a detected location tag).
By optimizing your website for your specific location (or locations) through the extensive use of relevant keywords — particularly in headings and title tags — you can really punch above your weight in the relevant rankings.
These mobile marketing trends aren’t cutting-edge:
instead, they’ve been gathering pace in recent years, and are certainly set to continue in 2020.
With many of the solutions that have now reached maturity, this is the perfect time to start updating your digital marketing strategy and take advantage of the mobile market.
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