5 Tips for Branding Your Mobile Presence

Your business brand encompasses everything that your customers see: from your storefront and logo to your ad campaigns and business cards. It follows that your online and mobile presence needs to reflect your brand just as strongly as any other element of your business.

Follow these 5 tips to successfully extend your business’s brand into the mobile marketplace.

#1: Target Mobile Customers

The qualities of your mobile customers may differ from those of your business’s overall target demographic. Therefore it is important that you focus your mobile presence in a more strategic way in order to appeal to this segment of your demographic.

Mobile is all about customized and personalized experience. If you know who your mobile customers are, how they use mobile, and what they want out of it, you can better facilitate syncing your brand message with their needs and desires.

#2: Mobile Is Not the Web

Know that your mobile presence is not simply a smaller version of your web presence. Customers experience the web much differently from their mobile devices than from their computers – in different ways, at different speeds, and for different purposes.

When building your mobile site, your strategy should recognize and take advantage of this difference to effectively brand your business through mobile.

In general, the mobile version of your website will offer less content and different ways of navigating that content, as necessitated by the limits of the mobile device’s screen size and bandwidth.

Your mobile site may differ in layout and navigation, but it should still reflect your main website’s style, colors, tone, and other branding elements.

#3: Relevant Mobile Apps

Creating a mobile app for your business is a great way to reach and engage customers. While mobile sites are good for browsing, apps are used when a customer wants to frequently access content and services.

Depending on what products or services your business provides, you can offer an app that is functional (a calculator), entertaining (a game), or a source of social connectedness (a customer forum).

The app you create should reflect and augment your business brand, not detract from it. If users can’t link your app to your business, then it’s not helping you find and keep new customers.

#4: Use Social

One of the easiest ways to bring your business into the mobile marketplace is to utilize social media. All of the biggest social networks offer mobile-optimized websites and apps so that consumers can stay connected on their mobile devices.

Be aware that business brand is in competition with the social network’s branding, but is still a valuable tool to share mobile coupons.

Maintain a consistent brand image across every aspect of your business so that customers know who they’re engaging with online, through mobile, and in person.

#5: Ads for Mobile

Mobile marketing, in the form of banner ads can be extremely successful in attracting customers on the mobile marketplace and drawing them in to your business. If you don’t have a mobile optimized website or app for customers to land on, your mobile ad will suffer.

You need to be just as aware of the specific requirements of mobile advertising as you are of mobile web design, especially of image and content use – with a smaller space you have to impress with less.

The fonts, colors, and design you use in your ads should be optimized for mobile devices and reflect your brand in a simplified, easily understood, and effective way.

Branding your mobile presence comes with a unique set of requirements. It needs to translate well to smaller screens and reflect particular ways that your customers use mobile. Effective branding of your mobile presence takes all of these variables into account in order to make a memorable and valuable impression on your customers.

About the Author!

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for lead generation resource, ResourceNation. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as online and mobile marketing, as well as business web design. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too!