By David Cole Jr.

After you have knocked off the heavy visual elements, including the Flash to get more speed on your mobile site, decided on what content is important and the direct action you want your customer to engage in you are now ready to build an integrative mobile strategy.

Just as newspapers and magazines now realize that moving from print to the Web does not make them Web-ready, brands and organizations interested in leveraging the power mobile must think beyond just re-sizing their Web site for mobile devices.

Think engagement, connectivity and measurable actions. Because, even though the screen size is smaller, mobile provides a targeted solution that if executed properly will deliver quantifiable results and a justified ROI.

Here a few ideas.

Making your mobile campaign SEO compliant
No point having a Web site – desktop or mobile – that will not come up in the top ten Google search results, which is poor execution. Have a digital assessment done, get help from an search engine optimization expert, read up on the Internet on what keywords to use and what density to have in your content.

Going social
Marketers estimate that some 91 percent of mobile Internet access is to network with friends and family. Top ways of tapping social medium are:

• Building your brand on Instagram
• Using Facebook to promote your corporate or personal brand
• Using a QR code to engage and drive your Twitter followers

Smart use of short code
Statistics indicate that out of 5 billion mobile phones in the world, 3.05 billion are SMS-enabled and 1.08 billion are smartphones. You can easily use Instagram for pictures and video or Twitter for text and video to target 75 percent of these mobile phone users with SMS/MMS feeds embedded with your brands.

However skeptical you may be of SMS/MMS communications, statistics indicate that more than 95 percent of text messages are read within three minutes of receipt.

Coupons sent via SMS are eight times more likely to be redeemed than those delivered through conventional email campaigns.

Just make sure that your mobile content is engaging, relevant, timely and welcomed.

Other points to bear in mind are:

• Build SMS campaigns into your regular campaigns to engage customers at all touch points
• Use text-to-join campaigns that give them the choice to opt in or out of an email program from their mobile phones
• Use SMS messages to send order confirmations, shipping alerts and other service-focused messages. In addition, make them personal with branded coupons, regular updates on account balances and their current status on your loyalty programs or try tagging GPS data to entice shoppers to visit your bricks-and-mortar store, if that option is available. With all these exercises do not forget to cross and upsell
• Last, but not the least, deliver your call-to-action with a lot of subtlety. Kill them with kindness

Leverage the QR code
Quick Response code, QR code, is an optical machine-readable bar code that records information about your brand. When a smartphone scans a QR code, it instantly converts it into a useful form, such as the URL of your Web site, thereby giving customers the option to access additional content on your brand.

Generating your own QR code is super simple. Just copy your URL and paste it into Mobile-Barcodes’ QR code generator. Voila. You will get your QR code, free-of-charge.

You can also use your QR code on printed materials such as business cards, brochures, posters and merchandise.

Ever tried mobile gaming?
Seek partnerships with game content producers and distributors to have them embed your brands in their gaming content.

It is no secret that 61 percent of all mobile phone users – or, to be more accurate, teenagers – use mobile devices to play games, so use this medium in your marketing strategy.

THE STAGE is set.

With Google’s attempts at mobile search engine optimization, brands and organizations must prepare for the next algorithm.

Digital experiences that are not mobile-ready are going to get knocked off the search giant’s radar. Time to tighten your strategy before that happens.

More than 1 billion consumers across the globe are already smartphone-armed. Mobile Web sites involve not just re-sizing your desktop experience, but also populating it with new strategy and outcomes designed for the mobile mindset.

Stats speak
• 56 percent of U.S. adults are now smartphone users
• 75 percent of these users lug their phones to their bathrooms
• The number of U.S. mobile coupon users will rise from 12.3 million in 2010 to 53.2 million in 2014
• Mobile searches related to restaurants have a conversion rate of 90 percent, with 64 percent converting within an hour
• Mobile messaging ad spend will cross $7.4 billion by 2017

David Cole Jr. currently provides mobile solutions and strategy, defining himself as a mobile alchemist with strategic and creative experience across digital and mobile. Reach him at [email protected].