Despite the impressive growth and success of mobile device advertising, there still remain marketers who have yet to recognize the increasing importance of reaching consumers when they’re on the go. It wasn’t until the recent back to school season that retailers started to more heavily pursue customers through the device on which they spend the majority of their time.

Retailers such as Target, Kmart, JCPenny, Kohl’s, Best Buy and Sears rolled out mobile marketing initiatives in time to reach their customer prior to the busy back to school shopping season. These retailers are just a handful of those who have begun to offer mobile coupons, send text promotion alerts and promote their mobile sites all in an effort to gain more visibility and revenue.

Mobile coupons can help to increase the frequency of current customers using your product or service.  In order for customers to receive current coupons, they must first voluntarily opt-in to receiving promotions. Mobile coupons will allow you to get loyal customers to purchase from you more frequently. Rewarding current customers for their faithfulness by sending special mobile promotions gives them more of a reason to maintain a relationship with you and keep you at the forefront for future purchases. 

According to Borrell Associates, the 2010 U.S. Local Mobile Advertising & Promotions Forecast estimates that mobile coupon spending will grow from $90 million in 2009 to $6.52 billion in the next four years. It is expected that customers will buy $2.1 billion worth of goods and services using their mobile phones this year, which is a huge jump from $400 million in sales via mobile phone in 2008. Now more then ever is the time to tap into the ever emerging mobile promotion world.

It is important to understand that when you are creating a mobile version of your website, you only want to capture the essential data that mobile searchers are looking for.  When people are looking for your website on a mobile device, they are looking for quick information that they need in a hurry.  Include the following on your mobile website:

• Abbreviated home page content
• Simplified contact form
• Phone number
• Map and address
• Main product or service information

Including only the important information will give users of all mobile devices a good user experience, regardless of the type of device.  Even smart phones have their limitations as to what types of content they can display properly.  It is especially important to have a good mobile website if your main site is comprised of Flash technology.  Currently no mobile device has the capability to display flash based websites.  A flash website appears to be broken when viewed on a mobile device, leaving the user with little options to get in contact with you, or view your services or products.

Have you ever wondered how to test a website designed for mobile phones? There are a couple of sites that can be of great help to test for websites designed for mobile phones. When creating a site to be viewed in a small screen, it is important to make a simple design, it will be easier to fix when testing, for good performance.

When creating a mobile website for the first time it is good to look at other websites that have been designed for mobile phones, this provides you with ideas of how to create a site. A way to view mobile websites in a computer is by using a Firefox plug-in called User Agent Switcher, this plug-in allows you to add user agents of mobile phones you would like to test your website on or view someone else’s website. After you have your design in mind and you have implemented it, you can begin testing the site. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a mobileOK Checker that checks if a mobile website is mobile friendly. The site url that is placed on this site to be checked will return a result ranging from 0 to 100, 100 being the most mobile friendly site. Another site you can use to check for performance is mobiReady.com; this site uses the W3C mobileOk and also provides device emulators to check how a site looks. 

After fixing the errors on your site, you can continue to check the site look and feel in more devices. There is an application called Keynote, which provides a wide range of user agents and an emulator to view your site. The application also shows the code being used, the access time for each individual page, any syntax warnings, among a lot of other useful information.

It is important to keep in mind a website that loads faster will be more user-friendly and when it comes to mobile websites this factor is very important. When it comes to SEO, it is important to make sure your site has GA coding to help its ranking position as well as adding content that contains special keywords.