When we start talking about businesses, branding seems to be the single most important topic that keeps generating so much attention. Branding determines whether a business lives or dies! It’s your voice out there, it’s a way to make your presence felt and most importantly its there to engage people with your products and services by forging the basis for a powerful relationship.
But what if you are screaming in a void? A place where no one listens to what you say? When scant attention is paid to what you do, no matter how great your words are? Your efforts will end up in vain and your resources will go to waste.
Online Branding and Marketing will be done with the same ingenuity and creativity but what has changed is the platform to target consumers. Mobiles seem to have conquered all!
The Numbers
Mobiles are everywhere and they are expected to dominate 2017 on a much larger scale, crossing the 4.77 billion user mark the same year. Conventional desktop users are getting low and just last year, Google announced that mobiles also dominated its searches and more than 50% came through the same source, while desktop searches kept on their downward spiral.
The complete domination can be gauged from the fact that there are 1.4 mobiles per person on the planet currently. A mind boggling number and when the quantity of something crosses the number of people who use it, things are in for a radical change.
What does this all mean for online branding and Marketing?
The screen might be smaller on mobiles as compared to desktops but the impact isn’t. Branding directed towards mobile users will need to become more and more customized, intelligent and worthy of getting an engagement, otherwise, just a simple swipe on the screen will take the user elsewhere.
That’s how small a window, businesses will have. Getting a new logo won’t be enough, the logo would need to be attractive in addition to being able to fit on that small screen and be just as effective. This might complicate the work of logo designers or logo design companies but it will definitely bring in ingenuity and greater work quality, benefitting everyone involved.
Is it Time to get a mobile-centric branding strategy for my business?
Google has just announced that it is moving towards a mobile-centric indexing system, which would mean that instead of its bots checking your website and ranking it according to a desktop user, they will now rank them from a mobile user’s perspective. This would signal a paradigm shift in the race to get the best ranking on search engines like Google and would also call for businesses to match their steps as soon as possible.
Not having a mobile-centric branding strategy right now, is going to keep you in the game, but not for a very long time. You are losing out on customers and valuable leads, just because your branding strategy is one-dimensional and is fast losing relevancy. 1-2 years down the road, it would be too late to make the big shift and then get used to its workings. Getting it now will make your marketing team understand how different things work on the mobile platform and develop a custom strategy for your business, optimized according to the mobile industry.
Is getting an app part of the mobile-centric branding strategy?
During the past 3 years, the number of apps downloaded has more than tripled; jumping from an impressive 75 billion downloads in 2014 to a mighty 268 billion app downloads predicted for 2017. The popularity of apps downloaded stem by the virtue of the unmatched ease of access they provide to brands and companies towards gaining the most out of their consumers and giving consumers unparalleled access to whatever they want, whenever they want. A revolution indeed.
Everyone gets to carry your store around with themselves on their phones through the usage of apps. Apps stay there and are not “visited” like websites, definitely making them a high and immensely influential part of the mobile-centric branding strategy.
When it boils down to who gets successful and who fails in the business world has never been down to the quality of the products you make, it’s a big factor yes, but not immensely influential at that. It’s how you portray your products and their quality and how you sell it to your prospective clients is what matters in the end. Mobiles are the future that have pervaded our present, it’s now up to us on how we make the best use of our resources to capture this phenomenon while time is on our hands.
