What is one important way you are adjusting your marketing strategy now that mobile browsing is poised to exceed desktop browsing, and why?
The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Created an App to Reach Clients
We introduced an app that meets the needs of our on-the-go clients. It features up-to-date listings in real time, simple sharing options to social outlets and email, an option to save favored listings for later, information on neighborhood amenities and a GPS map of listings with user-friendly navigation.
– Kuba Jewgieniew, Realty ONE Group
2. Design With Mobile in Mind
One of the problems with most Web designers is that they create sites with the desktop in mind. They’re beautiful, but take a long time to load on mobile. Instead, you should design your website with the smaller screen and slower load times first, and then make sure it looks good on a bigger screen.
– Nathalie Lussier, Nathalie Lussier Media Inc.
3. Decide Using Data
Regardless of the hype, we never make decisions without data. And for that reason, we track everything and confirmed that mobile was important. For example, we noticed our SocialCentiv users were primarily on mobile (more than 60 percent). As a result, we are now building an iPhone application; we also optimized all of our sign-up pages for mobile devices.
– Adam Root, Hiplogiq
4. Link Your Phone Number
On mobile, users are often searching for a quick solution, and they have the capability of clicking your number to reach you. Especially as a service business, it’s critical to make your number easily accessible on the home page.
– Andrew Fayad, eLearning Mind
5. Remember That Less Is More
Gone are the days of long-winded copy, long sales pages and other lengthy content forms. Take the ‘less is more” approach, and imagine (and then actually test drive) what the experience would be like on mobile. Are people scrolling forever to get to what’s most important? Are they able to get to the conversion point easily, or is it taking some effort? Design for mobile first, and you’ll win out.
– Erin Blaskie, Next Dev Media
6. Implement Responsive Web Design
We’re in the process of switching to responsive website designs, which means our sites will dynamically adjust their layout based on the size of your screen. This eliminates the need for additional apps, which can be problematic because they need to be built and maintained separately for various platforms and are limiting because you need to conform to each platform’s terms of service.
– Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net
7. Focus on the App Store vs. Google
We’re focusing our content efforts on a newsstand digital magazine downloaded from Apple’s App Store. It sets us apart from the other writing and publishing blogs and websites and allows us to capture the huge market that is now searching the App Store for content rather than Google.
– Laura Pepper Wu, 30 Day Books/ The Write Life Magazine
8. Realize Mobile Clients and Desktop Clients Aren’t the Same
One key insight for us in the past year has been realizing customers care about different aspects of our service when they are on mobile versus desktop. We had a mobile-responsive design on our website, but it wasn’t enough. We realized our product had a truly different value proposition for mobile users versus desktop clients. This insight changed our conversion rates on both mediums.
– Gerard Murphy, Mosaic Storage Systems, Inc.
9. Look at the Data First
Just because mobile browsing is going to overtake desktop browsing doesn’t mean you have to make any changes. When we looked at how many people access our site through mobile browsers, we discovered it was 4 percent. Our site really extends itself to the desktop experience, and until we see significant increases in mobile browsing, we won’t put significant resources into it.
– Liam Martin, Staff.com