A 12 Month Marketing Strategy Should Include Mobile

Start sarcasm...

Are you ready to have your mind blown? Hold on to your hats...

Lots of people use smartphones and tablets to browse the web!

Feel free to take a minute to recover from that astonishing fact. I understand. New information can really be a shock at first.

...end sarcasm.

Seriously though, if you were to look at your website's analytics, you'd probably be surprised at the number of visitors to your site that are on smartphones or other mobile devices. If you want to know how many for sure and you use google analytics, here're the steps when you're logged in:

Now you need to ask yourself if you want to be friends or foes to the mobile device using people that are viewing your site. Additionally, you need to ask if your competitors are being friendly to mobile device users.

The Past Is The Past. The Present Is The Present. The Future Will Be Different Too.

Like anything based on technology, the best way to do something last year is not necessarily the best way to do the same thing this year. Unfortunately, it might be different next year too. The important part is that you are willing and able to adapt. A couple of years ago, we would have suggested that you have a set of mobile-friendly pages that your site directs mobile devices to. This worked, but it meant duplicate sets of pages. And reinventing the wheel with some functionality. That's no fun.

More recently we have moved to creating responsive sites that reformat themselves to accommodate the screen size that they are being used on. This means they may hide aspects of the site for smartphones, while show them for tablets, etc... They key difference is that the site exists singularly. One site reformats itself (responds) to look correct on many devices:

Your Prospects Won't Deal With This

I don't mean to pick on businesses/sites, but you get the idea here. The screenshots above are from my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that is enormous. The experience is even worse on a smaller smartphone. Zooming in and panning around looking for things is not a good user experience. Don't make your prospects do it. Instead, use responsive design or mobile-specific pages.