Hey small business owners: you need to be mobile friendly. Depending on your city and industry, as many as 80% of your customers might use a smartphone regularly. Even if you're on the opposite end of that scale, some of your customers this month will attempt to use a smartphone in relation to your business. There are plenty of fads out there, and mobile isn't one of them. Mobile is important right now, and it just gets bigger the further you go into the future.
How to be a Mobile Friendly Small Business
Probably the biggest relevance mobile has to you is your website. That's the most common place for people to check your hours or your address while they're on the run, and it feeds information to a number of different services like search engines and map listings.
Mobile Friendly Websites
Here are a few rules to keep your website mobile friendly online:
- No flash on your website. I'm serious. I'm sorry about past bad decisions concerning using flash, but it has to go, even if that means buying a new website now. Flash cannot be seen in the majority of smartphones, and even if a small portion of your website (such as a header) is in flash, it can prevent the page from properly resizing.
- Do not use images for text. Occasionally, businesses will want the text of their website to look a certain way, like the way their print materials do. If turning an entire page of text into a big image is the only solution, though, you need to give up on it.
- Prominently list, and religiously update, your relevant addresses, phone numbers, hours, prices, menus, and help finding parking.
- View your site in multiple smartphones, and make sure it's working. In general, a well-made or simple website will look fine on a smartphone without any changes. If something about your website is broken on smartphones, though, such as the content is unreadable due to a weird layout issue at the smaller width, then you'll need to fix that.
- No PDFs. Many restaurants prefer to post their menus as PDFs to keep their illustration intact, however, they can be very inconvenient to download and read on smartphones.
- Add "Call Now" buttons beside phone numbers
- Add "Map address" buttons beside addresses
Small Business Mobile Marketing
Beyond the rules for your website, it's important to consider all of your online marketing efforts in a mobile context. Often, you might think “Oh, we're not targeting this at mobile users, it won't be a problem.” And yet, you will have mobile users. Consider the following scenarios:
- The commuter that mostly checks their email on their smartphone while on a train or bus. They're pretty bored on that train ride, and probably a bit more likely to read your email marketing—but if it's too wide and hard to view in the phone, or your landing page is, they're unlikely to save it and come back later from a PC.
- The low-income user who has to carefully choose their monthly bills is likely to forego home internet service altogether and opt for an unlimited data plan on their cellphone. These people couldn't switch to their home computer to view your website if they wanted to. Since they're doing everything on their phone, the competitor whose website actually works on their phone is the one who will win their business.
- More and more technology professionals who work 10 hour days on computers opt for smartphones or iPads for any evening web browsing they need to do, whether that's shopping, online banking, or researching trips. It helps after-work feel a little more after work.
- A large number of workers don't have access to net-able computers, either because they don't work with computers or because they are heavily restricted on what sites they can reach. These people will resort to their smartphone to make dinner reservations, check-in with friends or even research work-related topics they wish they could use a computer for.
