How Mobile Friendly is Your Brand?

How can you get customers to share your brand?

So what’s your story? We’ve been talking about all the great qualities that mobile technologies possess, but haven’t gotten down to the most important factor to consider when looking at what mobile can do for you as a business. Mobile provides a great opportunity to tell your story. It allows your brand to stand out from your peers by leveraging your brand’s unique connection through a new platform.  I’ve recently had several discussions with clients on the East Coast about getting their businesses ready for sale and our discussions have come back to the same challenges.  What is their brand worth and, if we plan to sell over the next several years, what must they do to begin sharing their brand on a mobile platform?  I share with you what I shared with them.

Mobile branding is a different media. Because it’s a different media we need to adapt their story to fit mobile’s unique strengths and weaknesses. Mobile messaging provides an exceptional opportunity to connect with your clients in real time. For a smaller business, mobile offers the ability to connect with others in a more immediate and cost effective way.

Review your story and determine how you connect to clients and customers. Every brand has its own set of unique qualities and connectedness.  Take time to understand your brand before trying to transfer it to the mobile platform.  For more traditional brands, it may mean that you have to begin tying your brand to an experience your customers have with your brand. Is your brand cool, irreverent, dependable, or conservative? Consider the people who use your brand and decide what qualities your brand has that appeals to them.  Mobile offers an incredible opportunity to target market your products and services to smaller groups of clients more likely to buy your products and services than other traditional media.  Each of your target segments can receive a different message from you and probably should.  You will see how target marketing and mobile work well together.  Many large organizations continue to think it’s all about the large numbers and message saturation. Many have failed to build connections with their best clients.

Mobile requires you to be brief in your message. People check their mobile messages more frequently than traditional email.  Many younger mobile customers are used to Twitter.  If you can’t make your point brief and interesting, you’ll lose their attention fast. You must get their attention quickly if you hope to avoid the dreaded delete button.

Consider using images to help tell your story better.  A picture is worth a thousand words and a great image can stop people in their tracks. A great image can also be shared quickly with others. Consider developing graphics that are easy to read on smartphones.  You can do serial storytelling by sharing images over several messages to keep your customers interested in the story.  The other thing you might consider is letting your best clients and customers help tell your story. Smartphones allow others to tell your story in real time. Create your campaigns to allow your customers to participate in the marketing of your brand.  Create campaigns that have more edge than traditional advertising.

Create better content.  Learn how to create material that can help educate your client during their down time. Many people commute to work and would love to use that time more effectively. People working out often listen to audio programs to occupy their minds while using the treadmill or stationary bike. Consider creating podcasts for listening to during workouts.  When you create content, consider designing it so it gets passed around your community.

Be aware Mobile is more than just smartphones. Your audience might be usingNook and KindleTablets, iPads, and larger mobile phones.  Your content appears differently on different devices.  Your message needs to be designed for these many platforms.  It’s really not as hard as it sounds.  Make sure that your designers consider all these platforms when designing your solution.  There’s nothing worse that creating a great message, involving your customers and communities, and then discovering it doesn’t transfer to larger or smaller platforms well.

Going mobile is more than just shrinking the font size of your website.  Take the time to review your story and how it connects with your customers and clients.  Creating a strategy to build your brand to go mobile increases the value of both the brand and your company, so it’s well worth the time and effort.