On May 5 Google announced that the num­ber of search­es on mobile had final­ly grown larg­er than those on desk­top. The grow­ing use of mobile devices for search­ing and find­ing infor­ma­tion has forced brands and mar­keters to re-eval­u­ate how to bet­ter engage with mobile users.

More peo­ple are using smart­phones and tablets to access the web. That means con­tent, which used to be pre­sent­ed pri­mar­i­ly for desk­top users, must suit mobile users, too.

Although a high pro­por­tion of users search on their mobile devices at home and at work, bounce rates are 9 per­cent high­er on aver­age. So what does that mean?

Either our con­tent just isn’t per­form­ing well on mobile, or per­haps our land­ing pages are so good that users are going from search result page to web page and instant­ly find­ing the infor­ma­tion they need then con­tin­u­ing about their day. Most of us can relate to this – how often have you Googled a film to find the name of an actor, gone straight to IMDb, and then resumed your con­ver­sa­tion?

The appear­ance of Knowl­edge Graph results in Google’s search results should slow­ly reduce the vol­ume of bounces on a site, so if we don’t start to see this mobile bounce rate decline then it will become clear that this is the result of just poor­ly for­mat­ted con­tent.

In order to be proac­tive in our mar­ket­ing we need to deter­mine what kind of con­tent makes sense to users on mobile. To do this we first need to under­stand what the user intent is.

1. Focus On Understanding Mobile Intent

Search­es con­duct­ed on mobile devices and search­es con­duct­ed on desk­top com­put­ers are dif­fer­ent moments at which you can reach and influ­ence con­sumers. This means the con­tent you pro­duce for mobile must be based on a deep­er under­stand­ing of the user and their behav­ior while on those devices.

A high per­cent­age of mobile search­es are aimed at find­ing a quick answer, com­pared with using a desk­top to car­ry out exten­sive research, mean­ing the time between the pri­ma­ry point of intent and action is like­ly to be short­er on a smart­phone.

If your goal is to reach more mobile con­sumers, you have a small­er win­dow of time to engage with them and dri­ve the con­ver­sions you’re look­ing for.

Think about when peo­ple use a smart­phone. Often it’s while they’re on the move or in an infor­mal set­ting.

The amount of time peo­ple will spend on their smart­phone is far less. Phone bat­ter­ies have a ten­den­cy to decline pret­ty quick­ly. Peo­ple are inter­rupt­ed in social sit­u­a­tions. Long mobile brows­ing is rare.

The ele­ment of time also plays into the types of prod­ucts that are researched on devices.

Let’s take cars as an exam­ple. Con­sumers spend an exten­sive amount of time research­ing cars on a desk­top (e.g., man­u­fac­tur­ers, mod­els). But on mobile, con­sumers gen­er­al­ly are seek­ing price com­par­i­son infor­ma­tion. Accord­ing to Placed Inc, 63 per­cent of those shop­ping for a car used their smart­phones to research, com­pare prices and mod­els, and make deci­sions when they are actu­al­ly at the deal­er­ship.

On a desk­top, user intent is rel­a­tive­ly easy to gath­er, inter­pret, and use for effec­tive mar­ket­ing. Under­stand­ing user intent on mobile is more dif­fi­cult. For exam­ple, you don’t know if your user is engaged in the con­tent or is flick­ing through the screens while talk­ing to a friend.

2. Focus On Localized Content

Every day peo­ple con­duct local search­es to find the near­est restau­rant, hair­dress­er, Star­bucks – you name it. But what do con­sumers search for when they want to find things near­by? And what poten­tial does this hold for mar­keters?

Accord­ing to a Google sur­vey, look­ing into local­ized user intent, more con­sumers who used smart­phones to search led to a pur­chase with­in a day com­pared with only 7 per­cent who used non-local search­es.

Hav­ing a web­site that is mobile-friend­ly and local­ly opti­mized is crit­i­cal. Smart­phones allow quick access to local infor­ma­tion. Ensur­ing your site meets those require­ments can only be ben­e­fi­cial.

So how do you dis­cov­er what your con­sumers are search­ing for local­ly? One easy method is to use Google Trends.

Google Trends lets you research local search trends by geo­graph­i­cal area. Sim­ply enter the search terms you’re look­ing to tar­get in your con­tent efforts and choose a geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion to get some valu­able com­pet­i­tive per­for­mance insight.

Let’s look at an exam­ple of “mobile mar­ket­ing” and “online mar­ket­ing” and choose the Unit­ed King­dom.

So if you’re tar­get­ing cus­tomers in North­ern Ire­land, it will be more impact­ful for you to use the term “online mar­ket­ing” with­in your con­tent. Insight such as this can be high­ly advan­ta­geous, as local­ized search terms are less com­pet­i­tive than the glob­al ones.

Con­fig­ur­ing Google Alerts will allow you to receive reg­u­lar updates on trend­ing region­al top­ics, pro­vid­ing some insight into new con­tent top­ics. You can take this a step fur­ther by doing things like scrap­ing Face­book groups about local areas to see the top­ics peo­ple are dis­cussing, or build­ing Twit­ter lists of influ­en­tial accounts in each main area to deter­mine the main trends or phras­es used.

3. Mobile Conversion Points

Down­load­ing a PDF guide or sign­ing up for a newslet­ter are two desired con­ver­sion points for con­tent mar­keters, but mobile devices aren’t nat­u­ral­ly suit­ed for users com­plet­ing these tasks. These actions gen­er­al­ly involve com­plet­ing forms, which can be dif­fi­cult to view or com­plete on small­er device screens.

It’s vital to define real­is­tic con­ver­sion goals as part of your over­all con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.

On the plus side, on mobile a user rarely signs out of their accounts. If you’re tar­get­ing some­thing on social, then the like­li­hood of users being signed in and able to instant­ly like or engage with your brand is extreme­ly high.

If you must use web forms on mobile, make sure you only ask users infor­ma­tion you absolute­ly require so you don’t waste users’ time. If you want to boost mobile con­ver­sions, keep forms sim­ple or use 1‑click check­outs for return­ing cus­tomers. It might be help­ful to use auto-pop­u­lat­ed fields or drop down menus wher­ev­er pos­si­ble com­pared with text fields.

There are ways to offer mobile users a more seam­less expe­ri­ence and reduce the num­ber of peo­ple aban­don­ing the site or their shop­ping cart. For exam­ple, sug­gest­ing the address in Google Maps plu­g­in while users are fill­ing out ship­ping address infor­ma­tion or using a cal­en­dar instead of numer­ic dates for a more visu­al dis­play.

4. Leveraging Video Marketing

If we were five years into the future, would you be read­ing this arti­cle or would you be watch­ing it? As online video con­tin­ues its inim­itable rise, it’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion to pon­der.

The growth in mobile device tech­nol­o­gy, broad­band cov­er­age, and 4G ser­vices (as well as the size of device screens) are just a few of the obvi­ous dri­ving forces behind the pop­u­lar­i­ty of video con­sump­tion.

When it comes to poten­tial reach, YouTube receives more than 1 bil­lion unique vis­i­tors each month. A robust video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy will help you reach more of those bil­lion vis­i­tors. To get a few ideas on rel­e­vant top­ics for cre­at­ing video con­tent for mobile con­sump­tion, try using the “View YouTube Search” results in Google Trends.

Some tips when lever­ag­ing video con­tent:

1. Tar­get spe­cif­ic types of users. Like all mar­ket­ing, a video cam­paign should be high­ly tar­get­ed.
2. Dis­trib­ute beyond YouTube. Use alter­na­tive stream­ing sites, such as Vimeo or indus­try-spe­cif­ic sites. Make sure the video is prop­er­ly indexed!
3. Keep it short and not too sales focused. The trick for mobile video mar­ket­ing is much the same with most oth­er online mar­ket­ing efforts: find­ing that bal­ance between a fun and high­ly engag­ing video with pro­mot­ing a busi­ness.
4. Keep the video qual­i­ty high. Where rel­e­vant, invest in a pro­fes­sion­al ser­vice.

You have an over­whelm­ing num­ber of pos­si­bil­i­ties for mobile mar­ket­ing. Your chal­lenge is to choose which method suits your busi­ness and will help con­vert users into cus­tomers.

While mobile usage and local search con­tin­ues to rise, how will you ensure your brand has a sol­id mobile con­tent strat­e­gy?