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The Future of Mobile Marketing: Interview with Simon Salt

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Last week, I had the opportunity to interview Simon Salt, author of “The Shorty Guide to Mobile Marketing” and “Social Location Marketing”.
[frame type=”left” width=”237″ height=”160″
src=”https://contenttrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/simonsalt.jpg”]Simon was a speaker at Blog World, New York, last week and gave a presentation titled “Smartphones, Smarter Users – The Who, What, Where and When of the Mobile Customer”. He has been recognized for his ability to provide strategic marketing guidance that covers Digital, Mobile and Social Marketing. He is an in demand Keynote speaker on the topics of Digital, Mobile and Social Marketing. He teaches an online course in Advanced Mobile Marketing through the LERN network that is distributed to over 300 universities throughout the US and Canada.

He writes online at IncSlingers.

Here are the excerpts:
What does the future of mobile marketing look like, including areas of growth?

  • Mobile is playing an increasing important role in the lives of consumers. Just as a decade ago businesses had to understand the concept of moving their business online now they must grasp that it is an essential element of doing business to be present in the world of mobile.
  • We will see more organizations finding the best fit for their individual audiences. That might be SMS campaigns, mobile optimized websites, apps or partnering with existing apps. There is no one size fits all solution when it comes to mobile.
  • In addition President Obama has recently ordered that government departments embrace the mobile user.

    • Which are examples of best websites that are mobile optimized, that we can look at for inspiration and what makes them so good?
    Domino’s pizza has done a phenomenal job of translating their traditional website into a mobile experience. They have recognized the touchscreen environment of many mobile devices and made use of that as part of the experience.

    Another great example would be Harley Davidson, their site functions exactly as their traditional site does, including being able to navigate around the site and even use the customization features.

    What are some tips and advice on making your content mobile ready?

    • Firstly, optimize what you have. Review the content on your site and ask yourself is this really important, or have we just included it? Will it transfer to a mobile environment and if not do we need to keep it on our traditional site?
    • Also, the way that documents in particular, as well as web pages, are rendered is completely different to the traditional environment. So if you are preparing something like an e-book or a longer document for mobile you have to be much more conscious of page breaks, font size and paragraph breaks.
    • Writers have to be aware of all these differences as well as educating themselves about new technologies like Responsive Design which heavily impact how mobile sites act.

    What according to you are the biggest challenges in creating content for mobiles and best solutions?
    Organizations often have content on their traditional sites in formats that don’t work well with mobile devices, for example product catalogs in .pdf format. These not only use large amounts of a mobile users data plan, they don’t render well on small screens.
    Thinking through how the content will be displayed and ensuring adequate testing is essential to provide a good mobile experience.

    What are some of the biggest mistakes you see businesses make in mobile marketing?
    Investing in Mobile ads to drive users to a website only to find that the site is not mobile optimized (79% of organizations buying mobile ads do this).

    If you had to give one piece of advice to businesses on mobile marketing what would it be?
    View your site from the users perspective not yours. Don’t focus on what you want them to know – focus on what they need to know to take the relationship further.

    So there you have it – top notch advice from Simon Salt that all marketers, content creators and businesses alike need to pay careful attention to. Statistics reveal that that one half of all local searches are currently performed on mobiles and that by 2014, mobile internet will take over desktop internet usage.

    What about you? Which are some of the challenges you face in mobile marketing?
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Comments

  1. Great advice from Simon, indeed. I specially like it when he closes with this observation: “View your site from the users perspective not yours”. This is sound advice not just for mobile design but marketing in general: brochures, web sites, etc. Too often, we tend to project as we think and forget that it’s all about the client. If none of your clients are on Twitter, why bother being there? And on the contrary, if you cater to 14-25 year olds, how connected if your organization to ensure you reach them through every possible touch points?

    Cheers from Quebec City,
    Frederic

    • Thanks, Frederic. I agree that Simon makes a great last point that focusing on the customer’s perspective is of primary importance and is especially relevant in any type of design (web, responsive, mobile, tablets, print etc….), content creation or marketing.

  2. “Investing in Mobile ads to drive users to a website only to find that the site is not mobile optimized (79% of organizations buying mobile ads do this).”

    I see this far too often and not just from small brands. It seems as if bigger companies with big budgets just like to throw a bunch of things out and see what sticks without having a coherent marketing plan.
    Howie Nguyen recently posted..Why I Wanted 1,000 Facebook Fans and How I Got Them In 3 DaysMy Profile

    • I was actually surprised by this statistic. I thought that having your content mobile optimized before advertising was a no brainer. Thanks for your feedback.

    • Thanks, Peter. Yes, looks like, mobile optimization is just as essential as having a web presence was 10 years ago – if you snooze, you lose!