Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is another tool in your Digital Marketing tool box, to promote your products and services online. Businesses need to be really cautious about driving traffic to their website from mobile devices, from mobile marketing strategies, such as QR codes. Nowadays, everyone has a smart phone and most? likely your target market belongs to this group of users. You can take advantage of this by leveraging the opportunities of mobile browsing experience.

Challenges

PC-friendly websites don?t meet the challenges of mobile browsing.? You need a mobile-friendly website which is separate from your primary website. If website is not designed specifically for mobile devices, it is not going to provide a good mobile browsing experience and it is highly likely that visitor? to the website drops out very quickly. It is critical to make sure the website is mobile-friendly if your target market is active on mobile devices.

There are several reasons why normal version of the website that loads perfectly in IE, Firefox, etc. does not work very well in mobile browsers. Here are few main pain items to keep in mind.

1. Normal version of the website is designed to capture maximum amount of content and information related to products and services. Content pages and graphics associated load fine in normal browsers, but load very slow on mobile devices. This can be frustrating to users and they tend to drop out quickly.
2. If websites contain flash images and videos, these don?t load on mobile devices. This is a limitation on mobile devices and not going to change any time soon.
3. Layouts of the website are designed with resolution to work for the screen size on PCs and laptops and are not compatible with mobile device screens.
4. Navigation of normal websites on mobile devices is not user-friendly. User has to scroll the screen in all directions to access the menu items.
5. Pull down menus don?t work on mobile devices, unless you have Java Script is installed.

How to make your Website Mobile-Friendly

There are tools available online to convert your existing website to a mobile version, Google Mobile Optimizer is an easy tool to use and it is free. But, free tools that are available offer you very basic conversion and often are not customizable. So, your best option is to invest in a paid tool and spend time to build mobile-friendly website. Some of the tools available are MoFuse, & Mippin. These offer greater level of customization. You can also consider consulting a web designer to assist you in building a Mobile-Friendly website.
Biggest challenge you have is in optimizing the content you have generated for primary website to fit well on limited screen size and slow speed of mobile devices. Focus on the most important categories first. Identify one or two areas on the website that would be most useful to your ideal customer.? This varies greatly between industries. Airline industries may have identified flight status check, online check-in as important features in mobile context, Vs. retail industries alert users on mobile when they have a sale item or a new item in the store, so they can browse to their mobile site to shop for those items.

Your goal is to provide more personalized experience to the user and provide them with the information they are looking for at their finger tips!

For more information on this topic contact us on our Digital Marketing Website.

About the Author

Kalpana Murthy, President/CEO at WSI Plano, DBA Kriti Web Solutions, LLC. is a Digital Strategist, Consultant, Speaker/Trainer, & Software Engineer who is passionate about bringing affordable technology solutions to businesses to build online presence. Kalpana Murthy is a certified partner with Google, HubSpot, Sharp Spring, SEMRush and other digital solution providers.