The normal reaction after one checks his analytics dashboard and finds an inflow of traffic to his site is a gummy smile. The smile becomes broader when he finds a large percentage of the traffic is mobile.

In a previous article, I discussed mobile marketing in detail. Mobile marketing, when done correctly, brings traffic. Next, you need to think how you can utilize the traffic. For that, you need to follow several practices.

I am detailing some of them below:

More Call To Action (CTA) buttons

You need more than one set of CTA buttons for mobile visitors.

Wondering why?

Here’s the reason:

The mobile screen being small restricts visibility. The desktop screen, on average, is 15.6-inches in length. Compared to that, the typical size of mobile screen is 5.5-6-inches, making it difficult to view many design elements. The small gap between the viewport and each end of a site exacerbates it.

Research indicates that more than 70% of consumers prefer to visit sites that are mobile friendly. A site that fails to accommodate its design elements by the screen size is not mobile-friendly. There’s a lot of talk about responsive design. The advocates of RWD (responsive web design) fail to understand the codes only instruct a site about the specs of a device, that’s all. They can’t change the specs.

The wise move would be having more than one set of CTA buttons and form fields. Having more than one of them increases the odds of visitors noticing them. The screen may be small but 50% of it showcasing lead-gen forms or CTA buttons makes it hard not to notice these elements.

Adaptive web design

Despite being the talk of the town, RWD has failed to overshadow adaptive web design (AWD). As a matter of fact, some brands have discarded RWD in favor of AWD. From a completely neutral and unbiased angle, AWD has the upper hand in the design industry.

The reasons are

#AWD offers control: RWD doesn’t offer you as much control as AWD does. An adaptive web site is designed to fit typically six screen widths:

320, 480, 760, 960, 1200 and 1600.

Because responsive layouts are variable, they reshape themselves depending on the device being used to access the site. AWD, on the other hand, uses static layouts. So apparently, RWD involves less work and comes easy on the designers. Right?

Wrong.

Because RWD is media query driven, the media type in the query needs to match the device type. Or else, the result of the query will be false. From a designer’s point of view, this is quite tricky.

#M-commerce leverage: Mobile has eclipsed the e-commerce segment and a new genre of e-commerce called mobile commerce (abbreviation M-commerce) has originated. Because AWD anticipates the device specs, it streamlines ordering and payment processing for mobile shoppers. The shoppers get device specific experience of shopping and enjoys it.

#Loading time: AWD fares better when it comes to improving the loading time. The commonest reason a site gets slow is the presence of media elements. RWD has been slammed by many for making a site slow-loading.

Unlike RWD, AWD doesn’t render a scalable version of a site that is littered with images, animated GIFs or videos. It rather allows the server to determine the optimal rendering of pages, depending on the device being used.

Now that you understand the benefits of AWD, use it to optimize your site for mobile viewing experience, so that the mobile traffic gives you business.

The semantic web

What we understand about the Internet today may undergo incisive changes in the future. The harbinger of change will be semantic semblance between inputs and outputs. And the handheld environment will be the catalyst to this change.

You may find it confusing as to what mobile has to do with semantic web.

Today, online communications is dominated by “strings” instead of “things.” Strings are a set of words or phrases that have syntactical semblance instead of semantic closeness between them. Semantic closeness is similarity in terms of meaning.

The conversational web, poised to outweigh today’s “string” driven web will prioritize meaning, context and intention above all else. Search engines will show results based on a searcher’s intentions.

The voice-driven search is a rudimentary form of semantic searching. It will extend to other areas of the web and the extension will run parallel to handheld devices replacing desktop devices.

Will handheld device users be receptive to a context-driven web experience? Apparently, they will be. Otherwise, voice-activated digital assistants wouldn’t have become that popular.

Your takeaway is framing the content in a manner as though it answers the questions of a curious mind. That will endow visibility as well as popularity on your content.

Mobile site or app?

It’s very tough for a brand to decide between a mobile site and a mobile app. Which one would suit it better? There’s no one-line answer to this question.

Choosing app makes sense if the brand operates in the gaming, entertainment or animation industry. But for product/service based brands, a mobile site is a much better option. Mobile websites have a couple of advantages which apps lack. The advantages include compatibility, upgradability, availability, lifecycle, etc.

Downloading an app is a time-consuming affair. Users delete apps shortly after installing them. The average lifespan of an app is 30 days. I already mentioned the difficulty of marketing around apps in one of my previous articles, so these are not new information.

However, ruling out app marketing doesn’t strike me as a good idea. Apps should be developed, but the largest chunk of promotional efforts should go towards the mobile site.

By the year 2020, more than 70% of mobile content will be video. The avalanche of multimedia-dominated data is coming and 2020 is not very far away. To catch up, make sure your mobile site has enough video and animated content on it.

Conclusion

When we think of the sales funnel, we have desktop traffic in mind. As the mobile web is growing at a tremendous pace, the mobile traffic will be our sole concern very soon. The four tips, shared here can help you stay on top of the game then.

Image Courtesy: pixabay.com