There was a great post on Amex’s Open Forum yesterday about making sure that Mobile Integration is on your marketing roadmap. As a developer of mobile websites and native applications, we couldn’t agree more.

If you are sitting there thinking that you have many projects to tackle before you even think about building a mobile website or an app, you may be missing out on a large portion of your client-base.

Take a Look at the Stats

Any analytics program should be able to easily show you what operating system and device your users are using. Take a look at your analytics package and see just how your people are viewing your site. Taking a look at our web stats from the past month, over 5% of users are accessing our website via a mobile device. Of those users, four visitors are coming from an iOS device for every Android user that visits our site. With that data, we know that having a mobile website is important to our business and shouldn’t be overlooked. While our entire site is not completely mobile, we do have four or five pages which give a viewer a basic overview of who Accella is, what we do, and how to contact us.

Additionally, seeing that 80% of the people that access our site using a mobile device do so with an iOS device, if we wanted to create a native application for our audience, it is a pretty compelling argument to start with an iOS version before creating an Android App.

A Mobile Website Should Easy to Use, and Quick to Navigate

When you create a mobile site, there are quite a few things to consider before diving in. We’ve covered them in a previous post, but the basics are:

• Keep it simple – Smartphones typically have a lower bandwidth than laptops or PCs, so don’t load your site with a ton of images
• Keep it Big – Make sure buttons are easy to click using a finger – don’t group links and buttons super close together making it hard to click on the right one
• Keep it Small – Don’t overdo it, visitors don’t need to see everything from your site. Think about why they are there and what they are looking for, give them that and not much more
• Click to Call – One of the reasons they are on your site is quite possibly looking for a way to contact you, make it super easy to do that
• Test Across Platforms & Devices – Make sure to test your mobile site across a variety of operating systems and devices, ensuring that your site looks good

Don’t forget about adding in mobile marketing to your mix. Running mobile ads, whether embedded in native apps or on search engine results pages, can result in an increase of conversions to your marketing efforts.