The world has shifted. It is time to stop thinking about mobile AND desktop, and put all the focus on mobile. 

The old way of thinking was that desktops were the platform for people to do their research and mobile was where they got their directions. That is no longer the situation. Most of your customers are bypassing the desktop completely and interacting entirely with your site on a mobile device.

Perhaps you are thinking: Well our site is responsive so we're fine. Being "responsive" usually means that what is built for your desktop version rearranges for people when they get to your site using a mobile device. Let's be clear... that is not enough. In a mobile-first world it's going to take more than a "responsive" website to be a successful strategy. 

It was my privilege April 9 to moderate a pivotal workshop at the DrivingSales Presidents Club event. The topic was Marketing in a Mobile First World with our two presenters Carlos McEwan from Jazel and Eric Brown from LotLinx. There was too much discussion in the room to give you a full tutorial, but here are the top 6 things you need to know:

1. Mobile is King 
   At DrivingSales we collect trends in website traffic from thousands of dealers across the country. Last month 57% of traffic to dealer sites was on a mobile device. The surprising thing about that number is that it is grew at a 10% rate over last year. When you look at your website you need to do it on your phone, or tablet.... not on your computer.


2. User First
   It is tempting to build the website for ourselves. We want to focus on things that are important to us: our beautiful building, our leadership team, fancy technology. News flash, your customer doesn't care about what you care about. Building for the consumer experience first means eliminating everything that gets in the way of what your customer wants to do. This lesson is even more vital on mobile where you only have a small screen to present. One dealer in the room talked about how he removed their chat pop-ups to decrease distractions on their mobile site. The result? They see people spending more time on their site.


3. Think of Your Site as a Live Interaction
   This approach came from Carlos and I feel it is a great way to think through your site strategy. His suggestion is to think about your site as a customer lot visit. Would you attack your customer as soon as they got on the lot to get their phone, email, address, phone number? Would you interrupt them shopping your lot with a service offer? Thinking this way helps you understand how your site should flow, and help eliminate distractions.


4. You Won't be There to Hold Your Customers' Hand
   During the end of the session we had an exercise where dealers sitting next to each other had to exchange their website address with the person next to them. They then had to perform 7 common customer tasks on their mobile sites. It was interesting to see how many people had to ask questions or give directions to each other to perform these basic tasks. The problem is that you can't be there to show your customers how to request information. If someone sitting right next to you can't find the click to call button, neither can your customers.


5. It's Time to Rethink Your Goals
   If you are just measuring your site's performance based on lead generation, you could be vastly disappointed. From one dealer case study we found that the likelihood of a customer filling in a form from the phone decreased by 61%. Simply put, people on mobile devices don't want to fill out forms. 


6. What Happens When There's No Web Searches?
   Eric provided a glimpse into the future when artificial intelligence integrates itself into our buying processes. Think of the amount of data you are sending back to Google, Apple and Amazon about your preferences, frequented locations, sites visited, purchases and habits.
   
   The arms race is on to turn that data into artificial intelligence that will insert itself into our buying processes. Suddenly we'll start getting notifications that inform us that our car has reached maximum trade-in ROI, and that there are 3 cars within a 10 mile radius that would fit our style.
   
   This new approach of artificial intelligence decision making may be only a few years away and the technology is most likely going to outpace the human acceptance of it. However, we are starting to see these automated, decision making applications sneak into our lives. Think of how your phone looks at your calendar, finds events with locations in them and then warns you when you need to leave to get there on time. You probably didn't even notice, but your phone is already taking away decision making. You didn't have to search it, it happened automatically and that is coming from every decision you make. This brave new world may not even need websites.
   
   So, how will we compete when artificial intelligence steps in? It will be based on the speed of information you produce and your experience, ranked by your past customers. In this scenario it is crucial to get your cars on your site as soon as possible and reputation management will be where you sink or swim.

I wish I could capture all of the conversations that happened during the workshop in New York, but I guess that's why you need to be there. The one clear message though was mobile is king and it certainly isn't going away.

One of the comments I made during the session was that I have 5 kids (yes, I'm from Utah) all of them from the 11 year old to the 1 year old know how to operate my phone, but none of them really know how to use it as a PHONE.

Every time I call them I have to explain how to put the receiver near their face and the transmitter to their ear. What happens when that generation starts buying cars? They see devices as an integral part of life and they have a hard time understanding why they're called phones.

We may have a hard time accepting what's next in artificial intelligence decision making, but the next generation won't and we need to prepare.