The Importance of Mobile Marketing
Your website is optimized for mobile surfers (if not: that's step 1), so why aren't you marketing to mobile users? That is like a party with no invites, or a party with no beer. The two go hand in hand.
If you have not already begun an aggressive mobile marketing strategy, now is the time. There are 40 million Americans using their mobile devices to search the web; that's over 15% of American web users—and that number is growing...fast. And that is just in the continental U.S. In many developing nations most users' primary method of connecting to the Internet is via mobile devices. There are another 40 million mobile Internet surfers in India alone (a quickly-growing demographic).
If that wasn't reason enough to mobilely-optimize and market your site, then think about this: Google is highly focused on mobile, they have even created lists called mserps just to cater to the growing trend. They have also built mobile elements into their Google Analytics tools.
You with me so far? The good news is that creating a mobile marketing strategy doesn't mean starting from scratch. It can be easily integrated into your current internet-based marketing initiatives. The first and foremost thing that needs to be done is to optimize your site for mobile spiders—similar to the way it is optimized for SEO.
Currently mobile algorithms for search engines are still in their infancy, and are nowhere near as sophisticated as traditional SEO spiders. The primary thing that mobile spiders are looking for is the bounce rate of your page; so that the faster your page(s) load on a mobile device the more likely you are to be ranked well.
In order to optimize your mobile strategy you need to create style sheets for the major mobile operating systems, for the iPhone for Blackberry and for Android. Be sure to in include a mobile site map and handle transcoding issues and other adaptations.
Getting in on this trend while the spiders are still learning the ropes will give you a competitive edge over those who wait until the spiders are more thorough. So act quickly to incorporate mobile marketing into your overall marketing strategy.
