What does mobile-first thinking mean for your marketing strategy?

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Dec 3, 2021 / by
What does mobile-first thinking mean for your marketing strategy?

From the offset, all web development and digital marketing campaigns were focused on targeting stationary desktops because, at first, that was where 100% of users would be viewing the content. Fast-forward twenty or so years, however, and the paradigm has shifted.

Mobile-first isn’t an option anymore, it’s a mindset that’s going to sort out the future leaders from the fossils of the past. But does adopting your digital marketing strategies to a mobile-first perspective necessarily mean you need to sacrifice the experience for desktop users?

What does mobile-first marketing actually mean?

Mobile-first is about optimising not only the presentation of your marketing content for mobile devices but how it functions too. While the content of the past was designed around fitting on a widescreen in landscape mode on a desktop monitor or laptop screen, mobile-first content is all about portrait content on surfaces 5 or 6 times smaller.

Customer experience

The key to facilitating the perfect customer experience is to settle on a design and function that works just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop device. The only difference now is that it’s expected that the content should be optimised for mobile and then ported over to desktop if necessary. The ideal situation would be content that worked just as well on both platforms but that holy grail has yet to be truly claimed.

Benefits of mobile-first

The innate benefit of mobile is that there’s much less space for distraction. Mobile allows you to focus on the essentials and create a more immediate and user-friendly experience. When people use the internet on their phones they are generally using it for brief moments and they are looking for answers quickly and without fuss. Use Google Analytics to reveal what it is your customers want to know and give that answer in the most immediate way possible. That’s what mobile-first marketing strategies are all about.

Getting started with mobile-first marketing

The first step is a very simple one – access your marketing content from a mobile device and see what it looks like for yourself. Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer seeing this content for the first time and ask yourself if it’s as efficient as it possibly can be.

Of course, your specific sector and the size of your business will have a major impact on what’s possible through mobile marketing and how effective it can be. For example, if you rely on lengthy blogs, what’s the best way to condense that information for your mobile users and let them know that a more in-depth version is available if they so desire?

Generally speaking, however, mobile-first marketing should try to do the following:

Focus on images – Less is certainly more when it comes to mobile-first so think less about text and more about images and videos. Of course, if you do need to use text then keep it large, clean and readable.

Integrate social media – One of the key tools utilised by all mobile users is social media so this is the ideal place to start with your mobile-first strategy.

Don’t forget about your emails – Finally, ensure that all emails are optimised to offer the best possible experience on a mobile screen.