Mobile Internet Use Now Exceeds PC: Here’s How to Be Mobile Friendly
What’s been anticipated since the dawn of the smartphones has finally happened and has galvanized the biggest change since the beginning of the Internet . If you’re still struggling with leveraging your website to accomplish your marketing goals, you have some catching up to do.
As reported on Search Engine Watch, early 2014 saw a major shift where Internet usage on mobile devices exceeded PC usage.
While many businesses recognize the importance of the Internet and its role as the foundation for many of a business’s components such as customer relationship management (CRM), sales, and customer service…some are still struggling, especially when it comes to mobile.
Now is the time (if you haven’t started yet) to integrate to mobile friendly versions of your properties, including applications, data, storage, communications, sales materials, website, and customer service.
What Are Customers Doing on Mobile?
- 99.5% access content/information
- 63.1% access the Internet
- 62.1% check email
- 49.2% listen to music
- 46% play games
- 41.7% download and use apps
- 15% make purchases
- 15% read a book
If you think that mobile usage only involves social media, Internet usage, checking email, finding restaurants, think again. Businesses who lead in mobile adoption have digital assets that serve their target audiences 24/7, not just business hours. This makes them available to their audience wherever they are and whenever that audience is ready to convert into customers.
How to Be Mobile Friendly:
To maximize efforts online, businesses will need to focus their efforts on being mobile friendly. Here are the characteristics of mobile friendliness:
Be Responsive
Responsive websites automatically adjust to a user’s device. The URL, HTML, images, everything remains the same, providing a more consistent, cleaner look for the user, no matter if they’re on mobile, desktop, or tablet.
Simplify Site Design
Pull up your website on your mobile device. If your website is hard to look at, it may be time to make things simpler. To display well on mobile, simpler page designs, cleaner text, and straightforward information “above the fold” are critical for the success of your website on mobile.
“Think with Your Thumb”
Make sure your website is navigable with your thumb and requires no zooming in or out to access. It’s important to ensure that important website links and calls-to-action are clickable with one hand and do not require a second hand to navigate.
Speed It Up
Mobile web is considerably slower than PC. When creating or modifying your website, it’s essential to strip down, edit, and reduce heavy media files, which include images and video, that exist on your desktop site to a lower resolution. This can save on bandwidth, increasing the speed of page load times and improving user experience.
Whether it’s communication, customer relationship management, website, it’s a fact that mobile devices will shift to the forefront of the way we access information. The more quickly and effectively and organization is able to adapt to and embrace this change, the more likely they’ll achieve a competitive advantage over the rest.