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Nursery Consumers Are Upwardly Mobile

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I generally dislike Travelodge hotels but frequent them too often for my liking. They desperately want to avoid having any staff in them and would prefer to just put everything guests might want or need in a vending machine that doesn’t take the new pound coin. They will try to sell you anything like they are doing you a favour…even the beds you sleep on in the room are available for sale. You have to buy WIFI access. Come on, who still charges for that?

So, when I’m sat in a Travelodge room and have stumped up my £3 WIFI payment I tend to go all Martin Lewis and try and get my money’s worth by internet-ering as much as possible. These tend to be the occasions where in the privacy of my room, away from prying eyes, I do what any red-blooded middle-aged marketing man would do…

…I dig and delve deep into Google Analytics. One of these sordid data sessions happened just a few nights ago.

My work involves being privy to quite a lot of data across many different clients and organisations and it is a healthy mix of brand and ecommerce activity so all bases are covered, as well as some B2B parts of the industry. Most of these websites have a few years of continual data to play with and the sample is big enough to pick out some consumer behaviour trends.

The one that leapt out the most during this orgy of mouse clicks was just how stuck to their mobile devices website visitors are in our industry.

I’m curious to know how many of you reading this have an accurate handle on the habits of your online audience. I’m sure that most of you do, but how often do you monitor how people are accessing your website?

Taking a sample of 10 consumer facing nursery websites with over 150,000 visitors a month between them I am seeing an average of over 80% of visits are happening on mobile devices (including tablets).

Looking at data from 3 years ago it was around 67% and less than 45% in 2012.

I know, I’m not breaking any new ground here…” Yay, you’ve pointed out that mobile devices are popular…we’re saved!!”

Those numbers are big, but they have bigger implications in the wider context of your digital marketing.

Consider any advertising that you do, either on Facebook or Google AdWords. Have you optimised your campaigns for mobile or did you set them up on your desktop and then just quickly click through the settings for mobile adverts?

Maybe it is time to start building your campaigns around mobile devices exclusively. Have a look in Google Analytics and I am sure you will all be getting at least 70% of your consumer visits from mobiles. If that is the case then it’s time to rethink a lot of your activity if you haven’t changed much of what you do for a while now. Don’t waste money chasing the 20-30% and go after the bigger numbers.

Consider running some campaigns on Instagram…it is pretty much a 100% mobile focussed service with a core audience of baby-making age.

Make sure your Google AdWords campaigns have the Call Extensions added to them so a mobile user can see your advert and tap to call you (these call buttons can be timed to only appear when you are open).

Block a couple of hours out of a day very soon to do a full pass through your website solely on your mobile. Does it hang together OK? Will a pregnant lady or forthcoming first-time father with very little knowledge of baby products feel like they can trust you because of the expertise and guidance you offer or will they just encounter a load of products and prices from brands they know little about?

Is your website responsive? If it isn’t then you have optimised it perfectly for around 20% of your audience while the other 80% will become frustrated.

Can your telephone number be tapped to start a call or is it built into an image so needs to be written down and tapped in manually?

Tweaking for mobile is long overdue if you haven’t done it for a while or at all. A few little changes can make all the difference and testing and learning is a good discipline.
Sort out the website experience first though if it is lacking and then tackle the advertising, not the other way around. It’s a false economy to turn the tap on faster when there is a big hole in the bucket.

Right, back to the Travelodge website…that £29 room they always seem to advertise must be on here somewhere!


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