Mobile internet marketing has become something of a buzz word, to the extent that you might well be feeling left out if you aren’t using it. At the same time though, you won’t want to commit your marketing budget to a campaign based on it until you are sure about exactly what it entails, and until you know that it is the right option for your business.

So what is it? Essentially, it consists of promotion for your business that focuses specifically on the internet as it is accessed through mobile phones or other portable devices. It is different from your normal online presence, which assumes that people will be attempting to search using their normal home computer.

You might be wondering why that is important. After all, the internet is the internet. How you access it is surely only a minor detail? Unfortunately, if you have been thinking like that, you probably aren’t making the most of your efforts online at the moment. It might be true that portable devices differ only slightly in terms of the code they use when compared with computers, but there are several more fundamental differences that mean that approaching them in the same way as personal computers is a bad idea.

One of the principal issues is screen size. A home computer screen is many times larger than that of a phone with internet access. As such, it allows plenty of space for ease of reading, making even large blocks of text quite manageable. On a phone screen, the same blocks simply would not work. If someone types your keywords into a phone based browser and your site comes up with masses of badly focussed text in the result, they will go elsewhere.

One consequence of this change in size is that images become far more important. How many images do you currently use on your site? Do they form an active part of your SEO strategy? They should. Phones have encouraged people to search for relevant images more and more these days, because they provide a quick way of ensuring that they have found what they are looking for.

Even the way people search has changed. People search on the move much more these days, and do so in short bursts rather than extended trawls. You can’t afford to waste their time, or to do anything less than seize their attention. You need to tell them immediately whether you have the solution to their problem. You need to have a presence on mapping sites so that they can find you. You need to be clear, concise, and helpful at all times.

If you do all that, then you should find that your mobile internet marketing improves considerably. In such an unsaturated field, you still have the potential to make a great difference to your business’ results, so make sure that you take the time to get things right first time. Give your campaign the attention it deserves, make sure you take into account the differences involved, and it has a much better chance of succeeding.