The Holiday shopping season is here, is your business mobile ready?

Almost everyone I know owns a smart phone and is typically almost always online. Starting from buying movie tickets online to finding a restaurant… most people today are more dependent on their mobiles than their laptops or desktops.

What does this mean for online businesses?

This simply means that online businesses have to ensure that they are found on searching when search happens from a mobile or a tab. Since a large percentage of searches are being carried out from mobiles it makes sense for businesses to increase their visibility on mobile searches.

Some of the ways by which you can start getting traffic from mobile users are:-

1. GEO Targeting:

By updating local information: Provide exact addresses, store timings, holidays, phone numbers so that mobile users can call you and find your exact location. Most of the mobile users do not have the time to go over lengthy webpages to look for information. They are looking for instant answers. They can get it from your local listings or if you have a mobile optimized ad, they should be able to reach you faster.

2. Accurate contact information:

Phone numbers should be accurate. If you can’t be reached 24X7 then ensure that the timings that you can be reached is mentioned clearly. Or if you can provide an option of reaching you 24X7 it will be most helpful to your potential customers. Searchers will drop off and try to locate another business if they can’t find a way of reaching you, sometimes their need may be urgent and may require to be attended to urgently.

3. Paid services:

Utilize PPC services from Google and BING. BING has introduced a lot of new features in their PPC advertising services. And believe me it does make sense to optimize your ads for mobile users.

4. Landing pages :

Landing pages need to have just enough information that a shopper requires. The lack of space is the one criterion marketers need to take into account while designing landing pages for mobile ads. Providing too much of information especially for mobile end user can sometimes harm than help. Testing out your landing pages is a good way of ensuring that you are indeed pulling and not pushing traffic away from your landing page.

If you are yet to start on marketing your business for the holiday season, some things that businesses can immediately start working on are:-

1. Updating local listings and contact numbers.
2. Set up PPC campaigns- The best part with PPC ads is that you can set up an Ad on Google and BING within no time.

With both the search engines allowing you to customize your ads by scheduling the timings of your ads, by utilizing GEO locations, and various other benefits like using call extensions and Map extensions (BING has added many more features), it is time to take advantage of the features and use it to your benefit . And the best part of PPC ads are that you can stop them anytime you want to.

Here is something to think about:

Nielsen published some interesting stats on mobile shoppers (this was published in 2013 but is quite relevant):

70% of smart phone users use their smart phone to locate stores.
56% to check prices
54% to research items before buying
39% to review recent/future purchases
24% purchase an item on their devise
19% use social media to comment on a purchase
9% write a review on a purchase

If you are interested in more, here is a link to the article http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2013/a-mobile-shoppers-journey–from-the-couch-to-the-store–and-back.html

I look forward to receiving your views on how businesses will need to restrategize their marketing efforts for mobile users.