Is your businesss mobile?

Does my organization even have a mobile version of its key digital assets? Come to think of it, when was the last time I checked our site on phone, hmm .. Isn’t getting a mobile face for our brand quite the undertaking on its own?

image source: appdataroom.com

Lets walk through this inner dialogue you’re having with yourself. Here’s what I think:

Yes, your brand needs a mobile face

We’ve heard the excuses. “Well, our business is a basic bricks-n-mortar shop, catering to local customers with selective tastes for organic-only produce. Why would we need a mobile version of our site or an app for that matter?”

True, your biz may well be enjoying an undisrupted period of success through steady, local traffic and remarkable WOM. But what about your untapped audience? Tourists, wholesalers, international producers of organic products, health professionals, the list goes on.

Mobile is the digital age’s calling card. Sure the power of Word-of-Mouth can be quite unmatched. But WOM also spreads faster online. Why not consider a store app that pings users with online specials, in-store coupons, price comparison charts, nutrition calculator and a host of other mobile offerings? Mobile is no longer a nice-to-have lifestyle feature in our intensely wired world.

No, not everything needs to be mobile

Remember back in the late 90’s when every organization was scrambling mad to get a website up and running? “We need to be on the web. It’s gonna be huge!!” Well, this time, the urgency is about seeking relevance in a mobile mode of existence.

And now that we’ve learned a great deal from the halcyon dot.com days of cutting and pasting printed content onto a digital canvas, we’re more confident about being selective, of not having every aspect of our business made available and accessible on mobile.

At best, your mobile presence should consist of these three content types:

• Information about who you are, why your audience should care (brand ID)
• What you are prepared to do for your audience (task-oriented feature that benefits user)
• How your audience can reach you (CTA mechanism)

Yes, you can do it on the cheap

But only in cases of urgency / emergency. Only because you were blind-sided by the seemingly undisturbed permanence of the old ‘doing business’ model until you ended up having to cross two types of bridges:

1. Band-Aid Bridge. You’ve hemmed and hawed for months but just ended up sweeping the issue under the rug, until one of your prospects actually emails you, asking “Is there a mobile version of that catalogue?” But you must treat this is an interim measure until you’ve fully optimized your digital presence for mobile.
2. Starter Bridge You’ve literally just launched your start up, and having a promising biz model employing the power of one, you want a comprehensive digital profile but have no budget and bandwidth. But, if your startup is about developing mobile apps, then you really have no excuse. Right?

Here are a couple of posts with free tools and tips on how to make your site mobile. Remember: they say “you always get what you pay for” (apparently we all know who ‘they’ are).

No, going cheap is not for big fish

You have the team. You have the money. You have the resources.

You may be a fledgling start up who’s caught the eye of top investors, but your biz model is solid and designed to increase market share in various key geographies. Or you may actually even be an enterprise with in-house resources and smart people.

However, if you think you can treat mobile optimization as a pilot project, then you and your laurels are quietly awaiting disruption to take you down the path that leads to those two bridges.

1. Research your market and audience: optimizing for mobile makes more sense if you know what your target market and audience prefer to do while connecting and accessing information via mobile. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
2. Offer at least 1 useful function that benefits the user: your mobile site or app must be useful to your customer. Being mobile is all about being efficient. If there is functional benefit to your app (be it to entertain or to empower mobile functions) than it’s not really an app, is it?
3. Rely on technical experts: the online collective is teeming with talented developers, designers of every field. Be they programmers, illustrators, animators or cartographers. Collaborate and partner with your creative and tech allies. Finesse and execute on your mobile road map with their help.

Is your company mobile? Has it matured in the mobile space or is it just about to cross that bridge?