Go Mobile or Die

If you don’t have a serious mobile marketing strategy by the end of this year, you might as well just post to Craigslist and call it a day.

In 2014, mobile users outnumbered laptop and desktop users. The average person now spends 51 percent or more of their Internet time on a mobile device compared with just 42 percent or less on a desktop or laptop.

Back in 2008, the average person used a laptop or desktop 91 percent of the time. The very first iPhone had only hit the market six months earlier, and iPads didn’t even exist yet.

In the digital era, 2008 was an eternity ago. It’s practically the old days of grainy black-and-white photography. No business needed a mobile marketing strategy back when flip phones were shiny and new (and expensive!), but mobile is now where your customers are.

Most businesses have some kind of mobile marketing strategy, but many haven’t thought it through. It’s just a checklist item. As Stephen Moyers at SPINX Digital Agency put it, “Those companies will likely be forgotten and become obsolete.”

That’s especially true if their customers are primarily young people.

MarketingCharts published an info graphic comparing users’ responses to mobile ads between Millennials (age 16-34) and GenXers (age 35-54). Ten percent of GenXers added a product to their wish list, while 15 percent of Millennials did. Eleven percent of GenXers saved a page, while 25 percent of Millennials did. Thirteen percent of GenXers purchased a product, while 23 percent of Millennials did.

Young people are growing up with smart phones and tablets. They don’t need to switch from a big lug of a computer on their desk to a tiny one in their pocket. They’re used to everything, and they prefer mobile more than anyone else.

Until cybernetic implants comes along, mobile devices will only grow in popularity. Some older folks can’t be bothered with all the newfangled gadgetry out there, but nobody lives forever. When retirement homes are full of GenXers, everyone in the country will have been using mobile devices for decades. We’ll have forgotten that we ever lived without them. Your sturdy old desktop may be tomorrow’s Commodore 64.

If your primary business right now is selling dumb phones to grandma—you know, the kind with the gigantic buttons that even a blind person can see—you probably don’t need much of a mobile marketing strategy.

Otherwise? Yeah. You do.

We’re already past the tipping point. If your marketing team is still just phoning it in (yes, that pun was intended), now would be a good time for a re-think.

Why Digital Marketing Matters

We all know digital marketing is the future. The Internet revolution has been slamming into legacy media with the force of Hurricane Katrina for more than a decade now.

But aside from the obvious fact that old media like newspapers and magazines are on the decline, why does digital marketing matter?

Because your customers are in the digital space. And they expect you to be there alongside them. Fortunately, that space provides a bounty of goodies that were unheard of in the past.

Dirt cheap ads. Digital ads are, or at least can be, cheaper than print ads. You can aim them precisely at your target demographic rather than using the spray-and-pray approach of traditional media that blasted your ads to the universe.

They’re also scaleable. Rather than paying full freight for a flat fee, you can cap your costs as low as you want to keep your campaigns under budget.

Everything is forever. Magazine ads are thrown into recycling bins after a month or even a week. Today’s newspaper ads are tomorrow’s fish wrap. Radio spots evaporate instantly, as if they weren’t even there.

Content you publish on your web site can linger forever if you want, and it costs virtually nothing.

Potential customers can and will find your content years after you’ve written it just by Googling. Two years from now, you can get paid thanks to work you did last year.

Two decades have passed since Bill Gates declared that content is king, and it’s still true. And Google agrees.

Your customers would hate you, of course, if you just dumped a bunch of keywords on your business web site and called it a day, but you wouldn’t have many customers anyway. They wouldn’t be able to find you. You’re dead to both Google and potential customers if you don’t produce authoritative, credible and relevant content.

It’s a requirement, yes, but it’s also an opportunity to turn your web site into a magazine for your products, your services, and your industry and start hoovering up some new prospects.

Reach customers everywhere. According to Smart Insights, technology users now spend more time on mobile devices than they do using desktop computers.

Almost everyone has a mobile device in their pocket except when they’re showering or asleep. That won’t change until we start wiring technology directly into our eyeballs and brains, and since that’s not happening any time soon, your marketing strategy had better be mobile.

Mobile is where you want to be, though. If someone tells you about an exciting new product or service that sounds interesting, odds are good that the first thing you’ll do is tap it into your phone. Your customers do the same thing. That’s where the conversion process begins.

Which brings us to:

Easy-peasy calls to action. Calls to action are always a long shot, but they were over the horizon back in the old days.

How many times have you seen an ad on TV for a product that looked interesting and followed it by actually calling the 1-800 number to buy it? Compare that to the number of times you found something awesome on Amazon and added it to your shopping cart.

Amazon makes it even easier now with one-click ordering. Returning customers can skip the whole shopping cart thing altogether. Just one click and, boom. They’re done.

You can’t built that functionality into a newspaper ad.

The Internet is still littered with struggling business sites without any buy buttons, which is like having empty shelves in a strip mall. But if you do everything right, your digital ads, your social media strategy, your content marketing and your buy buttons mean you can attract new customers and sell them your products while bypassing brick, mortar and legacy media entirely.

Search and Destroy Your Corporate Gobbledygook

Your corporate gobbledygook is killing your copywriting.

Mumbo jumbo. Bafflegab. Gibberish.

Those are great words. You know what’s not a great word? Solution. Not if you’re selling software. You want a better word than “solution” for software? Try “software.”

If you’re using words that normal people don’t use—or worse, if they have no idea what you’re talking about—you’re doing it wrong.

The same applies to novelists, by the way. Fiction writers should write with the words they use in their heads every day. That way they’ll be sure to use the words that everyone else uses in their heads every day. Novelists who consult a thesaurus for every second or third sentence to find words that aren’t in everyone’s heads barf up inpenetrable prose that gives the rest of us headaches.

Likewise, when corporate gobbledygook creeps into your copywriting, it’s time to go on a search and destroy mission.

Want a longer example? Here’s Sarah Mitchell over at Global Copywriting:

Are you a leading provider of innovative, cost-effective solutions with world-class service and a unique portfolio of robust products? Are you pleased to announce a next-generation partnership to become an industry leader in quality assurance to optimise customer satisfaction? Are you focused on flexibility, scalability and high-performance outcomes? I hope not. I really hope not.

Most of the words in that paragraph are gobbledygook.

“From a business perspective,” she adds, “they’re so overused they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Our hat is off to Sarah for bringing this problem to everybody’s attention, but she accidentally did it herself.

That phrase. “From a business perspective.” It’s also corporate gobbledygook.

It means nothing and it’s structurally kludgy.

Here’s a new and improved sentence: “They’re so overused in business they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Those of us in the business world have heard the phrase “from a [blank] perspective” so many times that we sometimes forget it means nothing. “From a business perspective.” “From a finance perspective.” “From an IT perspective.” “From a marketing perspective.”

Its awkwardness is so familiar we hardly even notice it anymore.

We forget it sounds awful and weird and forced and just…wrong to everyone else.

We don’t mean to pick on Sarah here. Really, we don’t. She just absorbed that cringe-worthy phrase like the rest of us. Using it is a habit, like saying “he was like” instead of “he said.”

It’s sort of okay if you talk that way (nothing bad will happen to anybody, at least), but for goodness sake don’t write that way.

The folks at Mule Design created what they call the Unsuck It tool that transforms sucky language into language everyday people can tolerate.

“Going forward” should be replaced with “in the future.”

In finance, “spend” should be replaced with “spending.” Spend is a verb, not a noun. Slang is okay in the office, but keep it out of your copywriting.

“Leverage technology” should be replaced with “use technology.”

We could do this all day. David Meerman Scott at Web Ink Now compiled a list of 325 examples of gobbledygook words and phrases that he found over and over again in 711,123 corporate press releases.

Maury Maverick coined the word “gobbledygook” in 1944 when he was a U.S. Representative in Texas. He wrote a mock-threatening memo banning nonsense language and declared that  “anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.”

We won’t shoot you if you write, “from a call center perspective, we’re trying to optimize customer satisfaction going forward,” but we guarantee that hardly anyone will read past that sentence.

So knock it off already. You’re only hurting yourself.

What are Facebook “Likes” Actually Worth?

Facebook “likes” by themselves are worth nothing.

There. We said it.

But how can that be true if you need a comprehensive social media marketing strategy to succeed in business these days?

Your Facebook page and other owned media gives you a chance to engage with your customers, to share useful information, and to build trust. That’s how you build and expand a loyal customer base.

It doesn’t matter how many “likes” you have if you’re not doing any of those things. If people “like” your page, but you aren’t regularly publishing and sharing relevant content, your posts won’t show up in their feeds and there won’t be much to actually like.

You might attract some new customers if they see that you have a huge number of “likes,” but if your new prospects don’t have a good first-time customer experience, they won’t be back.

Does your company magically get a dollar every time someone on Facebook clicks “like”? Nope.

Is a person who clicks “like” guaranteed to purchase one of your products or services? Nope.

Will customers learning about you for the first time line up outside your door because they saw that your Facebook page has hundreds of thousands of “likes”? Nope.

A large number of Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers can be a decent reflection of how much people like your company and your social media presence, but if you’re doing it right those figures are a by-product of your success. They should never be the objective.

Far better to have a small loyal customer base than a legion of people on the Internet who once clicked the “like” button but have moved on and forgotten all about you—or worse—in the meantime.

By all means, rack up those “likes.” Just remember that you can’t take them to the bank.