How using a CMS can help you engage with mobile visitors
In this article, we’ll look at the importance of a mobile strategy in particular, and explain how a CMS can help you engage with your mobile audience by creating great customer experiences.
In a previous post, we looked at how a content management system (CMS) can help you improve customer experience across devices and channels. In this article, we’ll look at the importance of a mobile strategy in particular, and explain how a CMS can help you engage with your mobile audience by creating great customer experiences.
Before we look at the mobile-friendly capabilities of the CMS, let’s consider why adopting a mobile strategy is so important.
It’s where your customers are
Mobile has become the default way of getting online for most of us. In 2015, Google announced that, on a global scale, more than half of all search queries came from mobile devices. In October the following year, web analytics company StatCounter found that, for the first time, more web pages were viewed on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, than on desktop.
It keeps Google happy
In an effort to incentivise optimising sites for mobile, Google has increased the importance of having a mobile page in its algorithm for ranking search results. It also penalises pages that aren’t optimised for mobile. Therefore, it’s well worth your while ensuring your site renders well on all devices. If you’re unsure of whether your web page is mobile-friendly, you can check with this tool, helpfully developed by Google.
It can help you reach new audiences
On average, generation Z (those born in 2000 or later) and millennials (those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s) are spending more time on their smartphones than their older counterparts, so adopting a strategy that favours mobile is more likely to engage this audience. The New York Times has adopted a mobile-first strategy and, in 2017, reported that 40% of its traffic comes from users aged 18 to 34.
With so many potential customers clocking up hours of screen time, particularly on mobile, and your search-engine ranking at stake, it makes sense to make optimising the mobile experience a priority. How can a CMS, a system that lets your marketing team create, publish, manage and edit content from a single location, do this?
It ensures your content works on any device
Rather than having to build individual sites for different devices, you can choose the right CMS that will automatically optimise your content for every device, ensuring all text is legible and presenting the correct image size and quality. If you’re in the market for a new system, ensure the one in which you invest can detect the site visitor’s type of device and optimise the content accordingly.
This is an important consideration as, in the world of mobile, you only have a few seconds to make a good impression. No one wants to have to pinch to zoom. And if poorly rendered media on your site mean that pages take more than a few seconds to load, your customer will leave (and may never come back). The right CMS lets marketers manage their sites, apps and campaigns from a single location, and ensures that the content looks great on every screen.
It helps you understand your customer
Once you put your mobile strategy into effect, you can take advantage of all the capabilities the device brings. Being with the customer at all times, the smartphone can give you another dimension of insight, allowing you to link together their online behaviours, such as activity on social media, or even location data with the existing customer profile in your database. This access to real-time data allows you to update content on the fly, which leads us to the next point.
It allows you to build personalised experiences customers expect
The mobile features on some CMSs will let you tailor your content to individual site users based on their location, device, language or other details you might know about them. This means your customer receives more relevant content, has a better experience and is more likely to engage with you.
Other mobile capabilities offered by specialised content management systems include the ability to design different layouts that are optimised for different mobile devices, or to deliver different types of media depending on what device the user is reaching you from. Linking this content across sites makes it possible to automatically update content, all without coding expertise.
It allows your developers to create apps
Maybe your audience would prefer to engage with you via app, rather than mobile web (we’ll save the debate about the pros of each for another day). This is not a problem with the right CMS, which can pull assets you already have or create new ones in native iOS or Android apps. By integrating with third-party APIs (application processing interfaces), which allow apps to “talk” to each other, you can gain further insight about your audience and connect all your data together.
Download our CMS Vendor Selection Pack for more information about how to select the best web CMS for your business.