The Right Way to Market to Mobile Phone Users

For many consumers, their mobile phones have become an important connection to the world and a constant link to family, friends, and co-workers. They often check them when they are walking, standing in line, or waiting on something: a ride, an elevator, or the beginning of a meeting.

If your company wants to entice these busy, multitasking mobile users to do business with you, you’ll need to communicate with them in a way that fits in seamlessly with what they expect on a phone. Forget about trying to adapt your latest brochure, your website copy, or a favorite email promotion to the mobile phone. All these methods are out of sync with today’s phone chatter and would feel as stilted as if your company left a radio ad on a prospective customer's voice mail.

Instead, start by studying how big brands communicate on Twitter, the micro-blogging site. Messages tailored to Twitter are brief (Twitter’s limit is 140 characters), direct, upbeat, and informal. To get results, Twitterers have learned to talk short and be useful. For instance, JetBlue Airways recently posted this tweet with a link to its site: “Today only! The Keep-on-Summering Sale! More summer. Less price. Book now for travel 7/13–10/5/11.”

Beyond practicing on Twitter, here are some strategies for thinking about how to “talk” to people in your mobile marketing efforts, whether it is via text messages, mobile websites, or mobile apps:

• Keep it short: Your pitch should fit on a user’s screen without scrolling, and keep to a minimum the number of pages that users have to click through. Also, make sure any graphics are simple enough that they don’t take a long time to load on the screen. Multitaskers will not wait.
• Focus only on a single goal: People looking at their phones don’t care about tangents or related issues, no matter how clever.
• Upgrade your verbs: Can your action words be shorter and more powerful? For instance, instead of saying “we evaluate and analyze,” say “we study.” Replace “pricing plans run from” with “it costs.”
• Test your copy: It’s always a good idea to ask a few people to check out your prospective mobile content on an actual cell phone to see how it feels. Is it easy to read, easy to use, and quick to load? In addition, you can use free tools such as Google Website Optimizer to compare different iterations of your message. To compare two versions against each other, you might want to sign up for a service such as Optimizely, which costs about $80 for a month.

Marketing on mobile phones provides you with a personal and direct tie to prospects that was unheard of in years past. But for many small businesses, the process of learning to “talk short” can be a challenge. The good news: Marketing on a tiny screen can help clear out the clutter and zoom in on what you have to offer in the marketplace.

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