Much has already been written about the integrated marketing opportunities offered by mobile platforms and the importance of responsive design in adapting your web content to fit mobile devices. After all that, we’re now about to tell you that responsive design is not enough. But more on that in a moment.
First, in case you’re still skeptical about the need for an effective mobile presence in your marketing mix, here’s a statistic that should underscore the opportunity: Mobile is expected to account for fully 50% of all Internet traffic in 2014, according to Mongoose Metrics. Are you ready for it?
Currently, only 10% of advertisers offer a truly responsive website destination that’s optimized for mobile, according to mobile marketing expert Jean-Michel Bernstein of Biz411.mobi. For small business marketers, this presents an opportunity to differentiate.
Watch Your Bounce Rate
Businesses that fail to give customers the mobile-friendly experience they want will see their “bounce rate” go up. Meaning if your website doesn’t grab people in the first 5 or 6 seconds, they’re going to “bounce” away and leave.
Mobile visitors want to quickly know what you do, how to contact you, where you’re located, catalog or product information, and what you want them to do next (“call to action” in marketing parlance).
On a mobile device, all content needs to be simplified, including graphics and calls to action.
Why Responsive Is Not Exactly Mobile Optimized
A responsive platform is designed to just resize images so they fit a mobile device. The result is that graphics with embedded text become harder to read. But people don’t want to “pinch and zoom” websites on their phone anymore.
Bernstein likens the difference between designing a desktop website and a mobile-optimized website to building a bicycle versus a car — both are made for transportation but are totally different in size, design, and speed.
For instance, having a 2MB image is not a big deal for a website viewed from a desktop machine. But for an entire web page to be viewed quickly and easily on a mobile device, the optimum file size should be about 50K.
Getting Mobile
As an interim step to offering fully optimized mobile content, start by migrating your old-fashioned HTML site to a CMS system (Content Management System), such as WordPress (other options include Joomla and Drupal). Responsive design is included as a built-in bonus.
The next step is to offer a truly mobile-optimized destination. For an example, see how Biz411.mobi uses simplified icons used in place of text, and streamlined navigation, which enables users to quickly drill down to the information they need.
Bernstein encourages businesses to put themselves in the place of their mobile customers. “Your customer doesn’t think about the difference between going to Target.com or MomandPop.com. Customers expect the same online mobile experience regardless of the size of the business. But the good news is you don’t have to spend the same amount as the big players – just copy what they’re doing!”
