The explosion of Social Media in the last 24 months has been great for the businesses that have harnessed it's power. With consumers liking and preferring the recommendation of their peers this way, Facebook and Twitter has become the arena where businesses have been very successful at reaching their targeted audience. The same is true of mobile marketing today. Smartphone users spend hours a day using them to solve of all their problems, although the majority of businesses are not exploiting this enough. Many business websites are not mobile-friendly and appear too small on a Smartphone. The alternative is to develop a clear and easy to read, interactive mobile site that caters for the screen size of a Smartphone.
A mobile site aids a Smartphone owner to have a better user experience, giving them the tools to find what they want fast; that is clear, with readable easy to understand navigation, able to interact freely and make contact within a few clicks on their touchscreen.
Smart web Apps based in the Midlands,UK are urging Businesses that don’t already have a mobile-friendly site to smarten up to the mobile web and to deliver an acceptable mobile user experience to improve customer care and increse sales enquiries. Paul Wykes, owner of Smart Web Apps, said that if you don’t have a mobile site, your business might as well not exist to Smartphone owners.”
The rate at which people are acquiring Smartphones and browsing the internet on them is increasing year on year and it’s estimated that by 2013, browsing the internet this way will exceed the amount of time that people spend browsing the internet on standard desktop computers. Smartphones are replacing normal computers; it’s becoming the norm for consumers to own Smartphones and busineseses need to worry about what their website looks like on a hand-held device.
In order to meet this challenge Paul Wykes gave this advice to businesses that recognise that they need to keep up with this fast-paced echnology for fear of being left behind.
1) Develop a mobile-friendly site with the user in mind. What features do you think they would find most useful. The internet experience on a hand-held device is going to be far different to how people use normal desktop computers.
2) Make sure that you develop a mobile friendly site that mirrors your standard website. It should include your logo, icon/buttons that match your colour scheme and imparticularly your branding.
3) Work with Mobile web experts that are keen to understand your business, how your customers behave and can deliver all of the points so far.
4) Finally, the investment you make to develop a mobile site for Smartphones needs to be matched by the endeavour of the mobile web expert to help you market it by using an appropriate data collection method to track customers, SMS messaging, QR Codes and Social Media marketing.
Some final thoughts that Paul Wykes gives is, if you don’t have a Smartphone friendly website soon this will become a barrier for your business and if you’re not using mobile as part of your business marketing strategy, you will exit this year behind and lose ground to your competitors who do.
