Is your business Smartphone ready?

Everywhere I look from advertising to the people on the street, in restaurants, and in my local dry cleaners people are tinkering away on an iPhone, Android or Blackberry.  I live in Los Angeles so it might be truer here than other parts of the country, but across the country smartphones account for 1/3 of the mobile market.   eMarketer predicts by 2014 one in three U.S. citizens will be using a tablet of some kind as well. 

That means when people search for your business they often do so online from their smartphone.  When people need your business address, they look it up on the way to the car from their smartphone.  If customers are wondering if you have any discounts or coupons available, I’m betting they would appreciate getting that information from their smartphone. 

You don’t have to build a mobile website to be ready.  I found an article called Think Beyond the Desktop on Clickz with a few simple tips I thought I would share here. 

1. Your address, phone number and email should be text.  A smartphone will allow the user to dial, email, plug into GPS or into a contact list if it is text.  If it is an image the user has to write it down or plug it in manually.  This is inconvenient. 
2. Dump the Flash.  The upside of flash is that people cannot steal your images.  The downside is that on the iPhone your site will not come up at all, on the Android and Blackberry it will be slow and you will encounter the same problem I mentioned with #1.
3. Test how your site looks in a mobile platform.  If you have a customer designed site make sure you or the person who designed it for you verifies how it looks on mobile and fixes and rendering issues.
4. What apps are your customers using?  Are they on Facebook?  Do they check in with Foursquare?  If they do, are you on Facebook?  Have your registered your business on Foursquare?

 As a NALA member, your business is mobile ready with your directory listing on the NALA site.  If you are not using social media yet, ask your NALA team member what you can do.  Not a NALA member yet?  Learn about membership here.