Mobile Digital Marketing Tips and Action Items from SMX East

I attended the recent Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East in New York City, a gathering of the savviest digital marketers and search marketing geeks in the world.

As a result, I brought back some powerful tactics to implement for Altitude’s clients, as well as some key takeaways any business can use.

Mobile Digital Marketing Trends and Action Items

From the big perspective, there was a lot of talk about the accelerating increase in mobile (smartphone and iPad) use, and how it’s impacting digital marketing and customer and client behaviors. Yes, we already knew mobile was big, but the blazing pace of change is surprising many.

Case in point: A number of major sites now get nearly half of their overall traffic from mobile.

This means it’s a good idea to understand how much of your traffic comes from mobile (this data is in your site’s analytics); how fast it’s growing in your specific case, and whether your site is mobile-friendly. Some sectors are going mobile much faster than others. For example, in real estate, mobile is beginning to dominate almost every customer touch-point.

Increasing mobile use, and the improvement in advertising tools we can use to reach people based on their locations, are providing powerful opportunities. For example, would you like to show a specific ad to everyone on a mobile device who is within five miles of your business and searching for goods or services that you offer? We can do that.

Giving mobile even more oomph is improved tap-to-call capability on smartphones, and the power of the phone call lead. In a study presented by Wordstream, calls were three times more likely to result in a new customer than a clickthrough to a website.

Capping off the mobile news, Google AdWords (as of November), will be adding new types of conversion tracking, including in-store visits. You read that correctly: mobile users who are logged into Google when then enter a store may have their data anonymously aggregated into store walk-in conversion tracking metrics for advertisers.

More mobile takeaways from SMX:

• More than half of mobile queries have local intent.
• You can lose 25 percent or more of your audience if you’re not optimized for mobile.
• Many of your best customers are on mobile.
• Mobile is about more than the search engines. Pay attention to and manage your business profile in Yelp and other apps.