Industry experts are predicting a huge increase in the use of mobile phones next year. And increased mobile phone usage means increased opportunities for marketing to the tech savvy mobile phone users. Brand building, customer service sites, and unveiling company news are all practical applications that are appropriate and can contribute to increased market share.

What are the challenges in creating mobile media websites? How are companies like H-P, Pitney Bowes, or AT&T preparing? The Wall Street Journal today provided some insights.

Challenges:

1. Do we create a simple website that’s accessible by all handhelds, or create fancier applications accessible by  fewer smart phones?

2. How do we practically design sites for the different phones, screen sizes, and platforms?

3. Do we design mobile websites now, or wait and hope mobile browsers will be redesigned to be able to upload the currently designed websites?

4. Should we create a mobile media-ready internet screen, or just create a downloadable application that provides access to corporate sites, like blogs or message boards?

What Companies are Doing:

Hewlett-Packard, Pitney-Bowes, and AT&T are all without current mobile-friendly web sites. They are discussing the above challenges, and currently investigating:

1. Building a Web site specifically for wireless users. Product displays are a start, but they want to include feeds from social networking sites also.

2. Moving their forums, blogs, and other social-networking components to mobile devices. They know their users want it and would use them. Consumers are using forums to get answers to problems rather than calling services lines, saving millions of dollars.

What You Can Do Now:

1. Find out what mobile media your consumers are using, and how they are using them.

2. Start thinking about how your sites are viewed on the various mobile media, and keep that in mind when designing your website.

If you  know how your customers use mobile media, and you are aware of how your website is viewed online, you should be able to determine how quickly you need to be re-focusing and moving your marketing strategy towards the mobile media user.

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009, 1:04 pm   |   Mobile Marketing  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback