Developing a successful mobile strategy for your small business is not something that is easy to do, but is very important for your business’s overall success. According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of Americans now own a smartphone. This number is up from 35% in 2011, the first year that this study was conducted. Furthermore, according to data from Google Analytics, from June to September 2017, over 40% of online transactions were made on mobile devices.
As you can see, more and more people are starting to use their smartphones in order to make more purchases. This means that as a business owner, you need to be able to market yourself correctly on a mobile platform or else you could be missing out on a huge revenue stream. In this article, I will be discussing how to develop a successful mobile strategy for your small business.
1. Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Before you do anything else, the first thing that you should do is make sure that your website is mobile friendly. If your website is not mobile friendly, then nothing else matters. This is because users will not stick around to navigate your site if it is not optimized for mobile, or if it isn’t aesthetically pleasing. Some things that you can do to help ensure that your site is mobile friendly is to limit the number of embedded videos and oversized images on your pages. Doing so will increase your site speed, and as a result, will make your site more mobile friendly.
2. Use Responsive Design
After you have made sure that your website is optimized for mobile, the next thing you should do is make sure that your website adjusts its layout and content based on the size of the screen and the type of device that it’s being viewed upon. This is called responsive design.
Using responsive design is important because most people who visit your mobile site do not want to have to zoom in or out of your websites page constantly when they are navigating it. By using responsive design, you ensure that no matter which type of mobile device your site is being viewed upon, the layout and content will not change.
3. Implement SMS Marketing
After you have done steps one and two, the next thing that you should do is implement some SMS marketing. SMS marketing is basically marketing via text message, and has been increasing in popularity over the past couple of years. Due to the fact that most people check their phones constantly throughout the day, directly sending your customers text messages is the most efficient way to communicate something with them. However, you need to be careful about what you send, and when you send it. You can send your customers text messages about things like upcoming sales or new products, but make sure that you don’t come off as too sales oriented.
Also, try to avoid sending your customers text messages early in the morning and late at night because the likelihood of them actually reading the messages are much lower at those times. SMS marketing is definitely something every successful mobile strategy entails, but you need to make sure you know how to do it correctly or else it could backfire on you.
4. Buy Mobile Ads
It’s been proven that advertisements in general work, so to not implement them in your mobile strategy would be foolish. Although all types of advertisements are effective, I would argue that mobile ads are even more effective than traditional ads. This is because traditional ads such as commercials or billboards do not allow you to target a specific audience.
They only allow you to target a mass amount of people. However, mobile ads do allow you to target a specific audience, which enables you to market your product or service directly to people who may actually be interested in what you are selling. When it comes to advertisements, quality is more important than quantity. It is much better to advertise to 100 people who are potentially interested in what you are selling than to 1,000 who do not care about your service.
In summary, a good mobile strategy is something that is very important for a business’s overall success. Due to the fact that more and more people are beginning to shop for products and/or services via mobile device, making sure that you know how to effectively market to them on these platforms is becoming mandatory. All you have to do is follow these four tips, and you will be well on your way to developing a very successful mobile strategy.
