You know your company can’t afford to ignore the rise of mobile technologies when it comes to marketing your products or services and to better understanding your customers.

But what do you do when your marketing department isn’t on board just yet? It’s a tricky issue because you’re talking about a serious shift in culture in order to make the most of the mobile opportunity. Here are five steps to get the right conversation started.

Image source: visual.ly

1. Identify Internal Champions and Educate Them. 

Although your marketing team overall may not have jumped onto the mobile bandwagon, the chances are good that there are some key individuals who realize both the inevitability as well as the opportunity of going mobile. You need to grab those key individuals and get them up to speed on the basics. That includes understanding differences between a mobile-optimized website that can be accessed via a mobile device’s Internet browser and mobile apps that are software applications downloaded and used on mobile devices. The latter can involve significantly more time and resources in the development and deployment phases than the former.

Image source: venturebeat.com

2. Start Small and then Grow the Effort.

The first place to start is to make sure your internal champions start communicating the need to create a mobile-optimized website. The Internet is already being accessed more by mobile devices than desktop computers, and web-ready devices in the form of smartphones and tablets are on track to hit 1 billion units sold in 2013, up from 800 million in 2012. If you use a website content management system, find out if it includes responsive-design features that can detect what kind of device the visitor is using and then render the site in a way that is most compatible with the device.

Just remember that in the mobile environment, less is more. You need to strip your site down to the bare essentials while still making it look good – that means no Flash, less emphasis on big graphics and features that suck up bandwidth and cost the end user more in terms of data use with their mobile provider.

3. Design Everything with Mobile in Mind.

You know that everyone these days is checking their email and social networking on their mobile devices. Some companies are evenadopting bring your own device (BYOD) policies. That means you need to design everything with mobile in mind. How will that email look on a mobile device? What about that HTML newsletter? Better yet, what about your marketing research surveys? Yes, the culture shift in going mobile will extend into all of your efforts, but it can and should be done now to stay current with mobile revolution.

Image source: linkstechnology.com

4. Advanced Mobile Marketing.

Once you get some of these basics down, then you’ll have a solid foundation from which to launch more advanced efforts, which might include geofencing, real-time marketing, QR codes, SMS (text messaging), MMS (multimedia messaging service) and a host of other mobile advertising possibilities. And make sure you have robust analytics in place to benchmark and track the progress, results and ROI of your mobile efforts.

5. Integrate Mobile Market Research into Your Plans.

Mobile market research has opened up tremendous possibilities for marketers to better understand their customers. From technologies that allow you to get real-time feedback to mobile surveys that dramatically improve response time, mobile market research is another great way to introduce your team to the potential of mobile technologies.

Image source: client-bridge.com

If the thought of taking your business mobile makes your head swim, you’re not alone. But delaying any longer will only increase the difficulty of making this inevitable shift. Start laying the groundwork today for a mobile-friendly marketing culture – both you and the bottom line of your business will be glad you did. For more information on how mobile services can help your business, check out Instant.ly’s extensive database of mobile and market research resources.