Month: May 2017

Responsive web design – Make your images meaningful on different devices

Desktop screen sizes are becoming larger and at the same time the consumption of content on mobile devices is growing exponentially.

A user browsing your website on a large desktop screen will certainly appreciate the large high quality images your website might be using but those same images can hamper the mobile user experience.

I already follow some of these tips and hence really liked the solutions presented in this article –

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/big-pictures-small-screens/

This basically means your mobile website will be somewhat different from your desktop website. This would help optimize the user experience on each device. Despite this difference, your website could still be “responsive”. You do not need two completely different code bases.

If your website is using popular platforms like WordPress you can use simple plugins for detecting whether the device is a mobile and then customize content as per the device. Media Queries (CSS technique) can also help in this but using media queries may not be efficient for “hiding” large images.

This post is not about the techniques to use but to emphasize that it is important to give your users an excellent experience.

You should definitely take the time to plan how your images are being served on different devices.

The future of marketing – Relevant, Personalized and Assistive. (All 3 are important)

Marketing should be about bringing the right buyers to the right products.

Bombarding ads in name of marketing is something I have always been against.

mobile advertising ppc management

“Consumers always have a choice” and mobile has strengthened this statement even more because now information is so readily available.

As Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP Ads & Commerce at Google himself says in this article :

The expectations for relevant, personalized, and assistive experiences will continue to skyrocket.

I am also of the firm opinion that marketing is going to play a more and more assistive role in future.

Most current websites (especially those of small businesses, local businesses) are just not ready for this change. They are still quite static almost like a brochure or booklet. Even many large companies do not have websites which are really driven by this assistive role.

The advertising also needs to change.

I have always tried to be granular in my approach, trying to align as much as possible with user intent, as much as we can understand it from just the search query. I have also run ads to test “user intent” in cases where the search term does not clarify the intent on its own.

I strongly believe that advertising and marketing must understand user need, and the messaging, as well as the medium of delivering the message, must be relevant to user need.

This is not new but still it is an often ignored situation because there are costs of going “granular”, in trying to understand and align with user intent.

However, now, it is time that marketers must align with user intent and user needs more than ever.

I agree with Sridhar that

We’re heading toward an age of assistance where, for marketers, friction will mean failure, and mass messages will increasingly mean “move on.”

Do read the full article written by Sridhar at this link.

You can also join the Google Marketing Next event livestream on May 23, 2017, at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET.  I am sure it will be interesting. I will be joining for sure.