Your SCUBA Diving Center and the Mobile Web

This has been a topic I wanted to tackle for a while now, and an email from Penni yesterday finally turned up the heat to get it out to all of you.

Mobile Web Usage Growth

Let’s take a look at some numbers:

According to Opera, just one of several mobile web browser providers, from December 2008 to December 2009, page views increased 223%.
Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones, all featuring the incredible Mobile Safari browser. That was just for 4th quarter 2009. As of Q4 2009, an estimated 33.75 million iPhones have been sold worldwide.
In the US, smartphone subscribers jumped from 7% in 2007 to 17% in 2009.
Quantcast claims that mobile browsing market share (as a part of total market share) increased globally 148% in 2009.

Okay, if everyone isn’t already doing it, it looks like they will be soon. This doesn’t even take into account netbooks or the new mystery product from Apple due to be announced tomorrow.

ROI for your SCUBA Business

If it costs thousands of dollars to make your site compatible with mobile browsers, is it worth it? I would say not.

But have you visited New SCUBA Marketing on an iPhone or other modern touch screen smart phone? It’s been optimized for mobile. Know how much it cost me? Zero dollars and zero cents (US). I used a great plugin called WPTouch (built into the free version of WordPress.com too). I’m even considering having MotherApp create an iPhone app for my blog – ad-supported for free or no ads for $99/year.

Since I’ve already shared with you several of the reasons why a blog should be your web site, and since we can see that creating a mobile version can cost us nothing, your SCUBA business should be mobile-compatible.

Mobile Advertising Idea for SCUBA Marketing

If someone is driving by your store, they’ll probably just stop by when you’re open. So is a mobile friendly web site necessary?

Again, free+easy=do it. But if you’re still holding out, here’s an idea where mobile marketing would be PERFECT:

At your open water training site, why not have a site that says something like “SCUBA divers in training, for more info, go to http://bit.ly/myshortURL”. Use a free service like Bit.ly to easily track clicks while making it easier for consumers to type in your URL.

If they’re at your dive site, odds are they aren’t driving and don’t have easy access to a computer, so a mobile-friendly site would be perfect.