With the rapidly growing global smartphone user rate, making your web content and marketing emails optimized to work on these platforms is an absolute must. Adding to this, nearly 90% of consumers who search for local businesses tend to follow up with a visit or call within the next 24 hours. With all this information in hand, it’s sad to note that many businesses haven’t considered optimizing their content for mobile platforms as of yet. If you are such a marketer, you are not only missing out on a valuable audience, you are in fact irritating them – particularly when they try to open your content on mobile and wearable tech devices, giving them a bad experience. Essentially you may be risking the loss of existing customers by not making this vital change to your web design immediately.
A responsive website design is one that responds to the platform it is accessed on resulting in a better user experience. Irrespective of the device the website is opened on, if the design is responsive it will work anywhere and be easy to navigate through when a visitor lands on your site.
Mobile and wearable tech growth rates will not be slowing down any time soon, while the latter is still taking off, it is the logical next step in consumer technological advancement. This means the longer you take to optimize, the more customers you could be losing on a daily basis.
Another thing to note is that Google tends to prefer responsive websites and tend to pick these sites for their top lists over non-responsive ones. These responsive sites also load faster due to its already pre-programmed multiple device optimizations. The issue with sites that take long to load is that they irritate viewers who will move on after a few seconds. Mobile device users are impatient – they are on the go and need their information faster. A responsive website on the other hand adapts to any screen size on a device automatically and also makes the user experience a better one in the process. This means the design has been adapted in a manner that is pleasing to the eye and information is easily searchable.
If your online marketing strategy is an effective one, then it is a strategy that undoubtedly has a strong focus on social media and blogs. As a marketer, you know that most of the time this information is accessed on mobile devices as a means to save ‘desk time’ for work related digital matter. Again, if you are not optimized for mobile devices you are losing out on the potential of your content being accessed, read and shared – making it go viral.
The crux of the matter is, if you don’t have a responsive site, you are hurting your business. This is not a concept to look into at a future date – it is something to adapt to now!