How to Make Connections With Increasingly Mobile Consumers

Smartphones are capturing the gaze of an increasing amount of people, for an increasingly long period at a time. According to a recent report published in Geekwire, the average American spends 162 minutes per day staring at the screen of their smartphone — surfing the internet, playing games, communicating with others, and interacting with apps. That’s 2.7 hours per day, 18.9 hours per week, or 41 days per year.

So how does a small business owner communicate with a smartphone-obsessed population? Here are a few proven tactics that can help take advantage of the direct link smartphones provide to the consumer.

Use Google AdWords to maximize local search traffic
For most businesses, getting in front of local searcher’s eyes is a powerful way to get the phone ringing, the feet through the door, and ultimately boost the bottom line. Search Engine Watch reports that 50% of searchers will visit a store the same day they complete a local search on a smartphone.

Carefully plan your local search strategy by focusing on keywords that your key customers are most likely to search for. Hone in on the best ones and focus on different variations of phrases that include them. Once you have your chosen keywords, increase the effectiveness of your Google Adwords campaigns by taking advantage of Google’s geographic targeting capabilities.

Bid on your targeted keywords within your region, and be sure to increase the mobile bid modifier in order to increase the chances that your ad will be visible on smartphones. While mobile search results contain less ad space than their desktop counterparts, increasing bids for this limited space can increase your mobile traffic and in store visits quite a bit.

Maximize Click-to-Call CTAs
Click-to-call buttons & extensions are the best Call to Actions (CTAs) to remind the user that the device they are viewing your website or advertisement on is (still) a phone. Click-to-call links also provide the quickest path for them to be instantly connected with your business. By optimizing the amount of click-to-call CTAs as well as their placement on your mobile webpage, you will increase the amount of people that make the call–giving you a chance to close the sale or give more info over the phone.

According to econsultancy, 48% of mobile searchers find it extremely important to be able to call a business when they are about to make a purchase. Be sure that your CTAs are highly visible, and placed in locations that make sense so that your “would be” customers have no trouble making the switch from mobile search to call.

Focus on Boosting Conversions
Marketing is all about agility — finding out what you could be doing better and making the necessary changes. A/B testing is an effective way to make these determinations when it comes to interface.

Have a question about how a new site change or new layout might affect your sales? By creating two versions of your site and funneling a percentage of your users through each, you will be able to isolate which works best for your customers. Using real data to determine what your customers respond to is an effective way to boost conversions of users on your site. This method is useful for deciding the best landing page designs, CTAs, messaging, and so much more.

Focus on available data to determine what will increase traffic and conversions for your business. How did the customers that ultimately converted find you? What landing page did they see? And how did they ultimately convert? Once you have a firm handle on where your sales are coming from, you can work backwards to find out where you are losing people and make changes to keep them online. By rooting your practices in data, you can continue to refine your marketing and convert a larger portion of mobile visitors into customers.

Mark Sullivan is Director of Analytics for CallRail, a call tracking service based out of Atlanta that provides services for more than 10,000 companies in the U.S. and Canada. He can be reached via Twitter at @mpsulli.