8 Critical Considerations for Developing a Successful Mobile Strategy: Mobile Strategy Series Part 1

A good mobile strategy isn’t just for large businesses or retail anymore. Over 75% of Americans own a smart phone, with an incredible 96% ownership in the 18 to 29 demographic. More people are transitioning to using their mobile devices for their internet usage, with 53.3% of internet traffic and 50.1% of all internet time spent on a mobile device.

This data suggests that soon the primary avenue for interacting with your users and customers will be through mobile technologies. Is your business ready for this shift? Or have you already implemented a mobile strategy, but the results are not what you expected?

In this blog series, we will dive deeper into each of these topics to give specific recommendations and perspectives on how to enhance your mobile strategy. This blog post will serve to give an overview of eight key topics to consider when developing your mobile strategy:

1. Create Consistent User Experiences Across Web and Mobile

Customer satisfaction begins with an engaging and memorable experience. Your overall mobile experience should be recognizable across devices, web pages, and app platforms. Adopt consistent branding and simplify the user flow, focusing on the core features of your business that can be improved with mobile technologies.

2. Understand Your User Base

Your user base will span demographics, languages, countries, and continents, each of which have different mobile OS and hardware preferences. Understanding your current and potential user base should impact your mobile strategy. Prioritize operating system support, localization, and rollout betas to reach your targeted population quickly.

3. Acknowledge the Physical Limitation of Users’ Screens

When designing websites and marketing campaigns for mobile devices, do away with the patterns used in traditional desktop web browsers, such as pop ups, long forms with multiple input fields, scrolling data feeds, and flashy images that don’t translate well to phone screen real estate. Adopting a “mobile first design” approach will reduce the complexity of this, but companies with existing legacy systems and applications will need to carefully address these scenarios when adapting them to mobile devices.

4. Keep up With the Pace of Technology

The capabilities of mobile devices keep evolving at a rapid pace, and building a team that can learn to make use of them is a challenge. The team must be able to integrate and support the tools and technologies used to build mobile solutions while adopting agile software development processes that allow for consistent rollout of new features.

5. Support the Wide Range of Devices in the Market

Smart phones, tablets, and watches require distinctive designs and user experiences, but building these experiences also greatly increases the need for testing and complicates the quality assurance/control process. Ensure you can provide a solid foundation for testing to handle the complexities around your mobile strategy.

6. Follow Your Users’ Mobile Journeys

Your user base will update their smartphones with the latest technology every three years or more. What new technology encouraged them to upgrade to a new device? Position yourself to take advantage of the latest imaging technology, security, payment, bandwidth, and processing power your users are purchasing.

7. Respect Your Users’ Attention and Devices

Taking too much storage space, excessive advertising, and excessive notifications are some of the top reasons people uninstall an app from their device. Provide a solid platform that provides features they use, prune code and features that are no longer needed, and send notifications only when you have something important to say.

8. And Respect Your Users’ Privacy

Mobile users can provide an enormous amount of personal information by using your services including: demographics, location data, voice recordings, personal photos, and advertisement preferences. Your mobile strategy should use only what provides a tangible benefit to your users—asking for unnecessary personal information without a noticeable benefit to your user will alienate them and cause them to uninstall your app.

The information that users do choose to provide is incredibly valuable, and you should build a data strategy around what your users provide. Build an omnichannel profile of each user to identify how they are using your applications, identifying engagement hot spots or where participation is falling.

Let’s Go Deeper

Our series will continue with Part 2 where we’ll cover how to craft memorable experiences with novel technology and mobile design. In Part 3, we’ll discuss keeping up with technology and testing. Part 4 will focus on how to engage your base with marketing, notifications, and data privacy. Finally, we’ll wrap up Part 5 with practiced ways to get started on mobile software design life cycles.

Need help now? Reach out to findoutmore@credera.com.

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