Mobile marketing has been brought about by the rapidly growing smartphone industry. Smartphones give users access to websites on the go and in spurts throughout the day. With a large amount of people trading their old phones in for smartphones comes an urgency to make websites “mobile friendly,” meaning faster load times and user friendly navigation throughout the site. What do you use your smart phone for? Don’t have one? How would owning a smart phone simplify your life? I can think of a few ways  it would simplify mine: Keeping tabs on my bank account, grocery lists, locating allergen-friendly restaurants, menus and hours…and the list goes on.

One of the biggest challenges marketers struggle with is too much copywriting. Typical marketer intuition is to overly informative. On the web, people are looking to quickly scan the text and then jump to the next best thing. If the marketer isn’t direct and to the point, they’ve just lost a portion of the marketing dollars they just spent.

When it comes to marketing on a mobile device, concise and to the point is even more important than browsing the web on your computer. Copywriting for mobile needs to thought of as an über-distilled version of web copy.

Think about it, you use your smart phone intermittently, usually when looking something up on the go or maybe checking the score of the game. It’s information at your fingertips when you need it. Mobile marketers are writing for people who are usually in the middle of doing something else, and quite frankly, aren’t looking to read a novel, especially on a screen the size of one’s palm.
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Just like writing copy for mobile, designing for mobile needs to be equally concise. Speed and usability are the two most important keys to take into consideration when designing for mobile.
responsive web design makes the transition from your current website to mobile much easier. Responsive design allows websites to automatically adjust to any given device’s resolution. In order to make this work, you need to team up with a designer to design versions of your website for various browser widths and a web developer to plug in the media queries to the back-end of your website.

With a huge shift moving toward mobile, it’s important not to alienate any of your users. Ten years ago there was a big push to help your users find you. Today we see another big push to help users find you when they need you—which means on mobile devices and through increased awareness through social networks.