Last weekend, Kim Rust (founder and CEO of Rustcraft Digital and consultant with Capacity Interactive) spoke at Capacity Interactive's Digital Marketing Boot camp for the Arts. 
Here is a recap of he session:
In the session, “Mobile Matters,” digital consultant Kim Rust opened with a question: why do marketers spend so little on mobile advertising?  According to 2014 data, only 4% of total US media consumption is in print but marketers spend 18% of their budget on print.  By comparison, 24% of total media consumption is on mobile but marketers only spend 8% of their budget on mobile.  Rust then gave tips on designing mobile-friendly websites:
  1. Only build what you can manage.  Upload photos to your smartphone so you can see how they will look on your mobile site.
  2. Keep clickable buttons at the bottom of the screen – be mindful of where a person’s fingers can comfortably reach on a phone. 
  3. Limit your site navigation to just 4-6 primary categories.  As Rust joked, “We’re all special snowflakes, but we don’t all get to be on the website.”
  4. Adopt a “mobile-first” culture.  Prioritize the platform your customers are on when approaching marketing tasks.
  5. Make sure your site moves fast. Speed matters. On average, 40% of all people visiting a website will click away it the content hasn’t loaded in three seconds.  Google uses a 1-second load time as a factor in its search algorithm. 
  6. Use short, ‘smart’ forms.  Pro tip: use the zip code field to auto-fill the city and state fields to avoid making the user type in unnecessary information.
  7. Constantly test and optimize. A/B testing tools are now self-service.  Let usage data drive decision-making on web design.
Some other things to keep in mind: Make sure your emails are mobile-optimized.  53% of all emails are opened on a mobile device – up from 8% just four years ago. 70% of people skip past emails they can’t easily read on their phones. In your emails, make sure you are ‘deeplinking’ to the appropriate mobile landing page.  Also, Rust stated that social media is now happening almost exclusively on mobile, so avoid long copy, use shortened URLs, optimize your images and deeplink to mobile webpages when posting on social media.