With the explosive growth of the smartphone and tablet markets, it’s extremely important that you have a mobile marketing strategy for your business. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized website, chances are you’re losing customers to your competition.
If someone looks up your company on the internet through their iPhone, for example, and your website is designed for full-size browsers, it’s going to be extremely hard to read and to navigate. Many people who land on your site will simply click away and find an alternative, which is usually going to be one of your competitors.
But simply having a mobile-optimized layout isn’t really enough. You also need to be sure that your mobile website is providing the information that people are looking for.
People visiting your website from a mobile device tend to be looking for different information than they would if they were accessing it from their computer.
Usually people on a mobile device are on the go and looking for some very specific things:
– Your phone number
– Your address
– Hours of operation
– etc.
And they’re often looking for this information when they need to contact you, or get to your place of business. Those customers are highly qualified, since they’re actively seeking you out to provide them with a solution to their problem. If your website doesn’t give them what they’re looking for, they’ll just move on.
It’s critical that you have a mobile-optimized layout to work well with these devices, but beyond the layout you also need to be sure your site makes this type of information easy to find.
Think of it in these terms – someone should be able to load your site and find the information they need with one hand while they’re sitting at a stoplight. If your site passes that test, it’s going to work well for mobile access.
There’s rarely any need to provide information such as product specifications, company history and other such things on a mobile site. When people are looking for that kind of information, they’re much more likely to do it on a full-size screen.
If you really feel the need to include it, you can always have a link to the “standard” version of your website on the mobile layout. Most mobile devices are able to display the standard layouts, it just makes it a lot harder to navigate.
