As you may know, Builder Designs has been hard at work becoming a Google Partner over this past year. Becoming a Google Partner has had its perks (yay free swag!), but most notably, we were able to host a live-stream event from Google at our office in Olathe last week. During the presentations, we heard Tim Reis, the Director of Performance Agencies, and David Chung, a Mobile Site Transformer, talk about trends in mobile consumer behaviors and the impact those behaviors have on marketing efforts. If you missed the event, you’re in luck! We’ve gathered some highlights from the live stream as well as our Builder Designs Twitter feed.

We're constantly connected - we live online #partnersconnect

— Builder Designs, Inc (@builderdesigns) September 28, 2016

What drives consumer behavior remains unchanged - they want to be entertained, want to learn, be informed & acquire items #partnersconnect

— Builder Designs, Inc (@builderdesigns) September 28, 2016

  The presenters opened with some pretty jaw-dropping statistics regarding mobile usage.  

The average person spends 162 minutes per day on their phone and swipes the unlock screen 150 times per day.

  Tim Reis states, “We don’t go online, we live online.” People now have answers and solutions immediately, all in the palm of their hand. Because of this, consumers' expectations of your website have gone up. They want the information and they want it now. If you can't provide that, someone else will. Increasingly, people are utilizing their phones to access information in place of traditional advertising methods. For instance, TV shows and commercials are now more often viewed via mobile device. We now go online to read the news rather than signing up for a newspaper subscription. Of course billboards are still prevalent, but more often than not, we are seeking out information on our mobile devices rather than waiting for the information to come to us.  

Untapped Opportunities

Marketers are spending less time on mobile while consumers are spending more time on mobile 🤔 #partnersconnect

— Builder Designs, Inc (@builderdesigns) September 28, 2016

  Marketers are actually spending significantly less in comparison to the exponential growth in mobile marketing. This translates to missed opportunities. So how do you take advantage of these opportunities? Our biggest takeaway from the Google Partners event was the concept of removing friction. For all intents and purposes, friction is defined as unnecessary pain points in the buying process. For mobile users, frictions occur when forms require multiple finger-taps and typing points to fill out, when small buttons cause them to click the wrong content, and when pages take more than three seconds to load. In fact, 29% of users will immediately abandon a webpage that fails to load in three seconds or less. These frictions are your customers' biggest barriers to filling out a contact form.  

"Businesses with better mobile sites have up to 140% of conversions compared to those with poor mobile sites."

  Have you ever been trying to access information on your phone that was designed for desktop? If you don’t have a mobile responsive website yet, it is a must before considering driving traffic from online marketing, since about half of your customers will be using mobile devices. Businesses with better mobile sites have up to 140% of conversions compared to those with poor mobile sites. Due to this, many website owners are now opting to design a website mobile-first, meaning special care is given to crafting a website that directly addresses the nuances of accessing a website on a mobile device. Providing an intuitive user experience on mobile will not only improve your conversion rates, it will also positively affect your site's SEO ranking since Google favors websites with a great mobile experience. While a mobile friendly site is one of the largest opportunities we see for builders, there are other things you can do to reduce friction for your customers. Take a look at the contact form on your website--does it require users to fill out unnecessary information that you could obtain later?  Do your conversion pages take a long time to load? Adjusting this experience could pay off in the long run if users have less friction in the conversion process. Be proactive and creative on ways to eliminate these frictions in your customer's journey.  

Helpful Resources

Google has created some resources to test your website's speed and mobile experience. We encourage you to use this tool to test your site and find where your opportunities are. If you would like to watch the full live stream, you can view it here. If you have any questions about your site’s mobile experience or want to take your marketing to the next level, feel free to reach out to us at marketing@builderdesigns.com.

Work to deliver a frictionless experience to your users - make the process from Intent to Action easy #partnersconnect

— Builder Designs, Inc (@builderdesigns) September 28, 2016

 

Many Thanks

Thank you to all that attended! It was a great time and we appreciate the presentation and Starbucks treats from Google. We hope to have more of these in the future so be sure to Sign Up for our Email List to stay in the loop!

A photo posted by Builder Designs (@builder.designs) on Sep 28, 2016 at 9:06am PDT