People rely on their mobile phones and tablets for more than just word processing and telecommunications. A growing number are using them to browse the web, shop online and communicate with others around the world. Yet, surprising only 1.25% of the world’s 240 million websites are mobile friendly (source: DMS 2011).

We have written this blog in order to share our experiences in going mobile. We are currently implementing a strategy that will see our site have a dedicated mobile version to complement our website’s current look and feel (which by the way we love! Thank you Syneka Marketing for our website design!)

Our decision to implement a mobile version of our website, wasn’t just something we decided over breakfast one morning, it was something that we needed to strategically evaluate as to whether it was the right decision for our business. After all, why outlay costs if we don’t need to? In order to determine why we should have a mobile version of our website we looked at the following issues:

1. The strategic intent of Vent2Me

Questions we asked ourselves included:

• Does going mobile help us or hinder our ability to achieve our business goals and objectives?
• Why do we need to go mobile?

Part of Vent2Me’s purpose is to facilitate the complaint resolution process between organisations and consumers as efficiently as possible. Hence, having a mobile friendly version that can be accessed and used with relative ease will assist our strategic intent.

In addition, as 15% of all traffic to the website is currently through mobile devices, there was proof to demonstrate why Vent2Me should have a mobile specific website.

2.  Competitor analysis

Questions we asked ourselves included:

• What are our indirect and direct competitors doing?
• Why would having a mobile friendly website be a competitive advantage?

We won’t reveal the results from our competitor analysis, but all we suggest is ensure you undertake a thorough competitor analysis and use a combination of evaluation tools from mystery shopping through to website analysis reviews and google searches.

3. The content of the mobile friendly website

Questions we asked ourselves included:

• What is the purpose of the mobile friendly website?
• What content should it contain?

It is important to note that mobile friendly websites are a simplistic version of your main website, they shouldn’t contain everything that is on your website or there would be no point in creating a mobile version! To determine what content should be contained on our website was quite a simple task because we referred to Google Analytics. This helped us to determined what pages were the most visited, this helped us to build the most appropriate infrastructure for the mobile website!

There you have it, a simple strategy to determine if a mobile friendly version of your website is needed! For assistance in evaluating your digital marketing strategies, feel free to contact Vent2Me!

Until next time,
Cents & Sensibility