Creating a Mobile Strategy for Your Customers
There's been a lot of hype about mobile so far this year. It seems that everyone's talking about it, but very few are doing it. And sadly, the majority of those who are doing it aren't doing a very good job.
Contrary to popular belief, mobile isn't all that tricky. In fact, for the most part, it's very simple as long as you have the right strategy for your business before going into it.
That's right. The No. 1 key to mobile is designing a strategy that works for your customers. With mobile, you essentially have four choices:
- enhance your regular site;
- build an optimized site;
- develop a mobile native application; or
- do one or more of the above.
How do you pick the one that's best for your business? Consider the following 10 factors:
1. What are your users currently doing with mobile? You can get this info from your stats. Then ask them. Surveys about mobile experiences are often very effective, especially if you can use Facebook and Twitter as drivers. Everyone has mobile traffic these days; how much traffic you're getting is what ranges.
Once you've figured your traffic out, look at what they're doing. Are they using your on-site text search? Signing up for your email program? Liking your page on Facebook? Attempting to purchase something? As a side note, this is the place where companies usually screw up. Some muckety-muck decides they need a full-fledged e-commerce site with a robust checkout and all the company's mobile resources get dumped into that. Six months later when they've received few orders from the specially designed mobile site someone does some research and finds out that consumers aren't in fact using the site for ordering but as a store-locator tool. Granted, that's an extreme example, but the point is that you need to know what your users are doing on your site now before you can change their ways of the future.
