5 Tips to Ensure That Your Marketing is Mobile-Friendly

Establishing an online marketing plan for your business is no longer enough.  With so many potential customers using mobile devices, you now need to ensure that your marketing materials can all be viewed on a variety of mobile devices as well.

Consider a few of the frustrations experienced by your customers when they try to use their mobile devices to access websites or Facebook pages that are not mobile-friendly.  The writing is so small on the smaller screen of a mobile device that the reader needs to zoom in.  The reader may need to scroll in both directions to read if the text is not designed to fit the screen horizontally.  Links are often too small and located too close to other links for the reader to press the correct link button.  Large graphics can make websites take too long to download, causing your customers to search out one of your more mobile-friendly competitors.

In order to ensure that your online marketing plan caters to your mobile device-using customers, try implementing the following:

1. Create a website that is mobile-optimized.  Your website should be the centre of your online marketing plan so it is essential that your clients or customers can access your website from their mobile devices.  In order to ensure this, you will need to minimize your website while still making it look good.  The use of Flash and large graphics will either: not work on a mobile device; load too slowly; or use more data than your customer will appreciate.
2. Consider how everything will look (and work) on various mobile devices.  Giving some thought to how your website, emails, newsletters, etc. will look on different mobile devices will enable you to offer consistent marketing to all of your potential customers.
3. Consider using responsive design techniques.  This will allow your website, emails, advertisements or other marketing materials to adapt their layout depending on what device is being used to view them.
4. Keep your content concise.  Remember that your customers may be using their mobile devices while they are on the go and surrounded by distractions.  Locate your important points in headings and at the beginning of a page or paragraph.
5. Test everything on a few different mobile devices.  To avoid inconsistent results, make sure that you test all your apps, advertisements, emails, websites and newsletters on a variety of mobile devices.