We’re living in a mobile world, and the sooner we accept that as a fact, the sooner we can start helping our companies adapt accordingly.

People are now actually spending more time on their phones than they are on their computers, and if you want to reach your customers, you have to be where they are. My company, Event Tickets Center, needs to be at a potential customer’s fingertips at their moment of inspiration—when they’re walking by a venue and remember the show they want to see, or when they’re out with friends and making plans to go to a game together.

This is why so many companies have implemented or are developing mobile-first strategies to guide their entire business. Google and Facebook are just two examples of companies that have gone the mobile-first route. If industry giants like these are recognizing the shift in usage patterns and adjusting their business models accordingly, it’s a pretty good indication that you should be considering the same for your company.

I believe that any advice you’re getting today that doesn’t include mobile-first as a strategy is misguided. If you want to maximize your reach, you have to have a responsive website—one that’s fast, intuitive and adaptable to mobile devices. When customers want to use your service, you have to make sure you’re escorting them right in with a site that’s meeting their needs—especially when they’re on their smartphones.

Related to this, you need to have a strong checkout system in place, and it has to be a process that mobile users can navigate easily so they don’t decide, “I’ll just wait until I get home,” and potentially never complete the transaction. You’ve got to convert your mobile users. If you don’t have the right checkout system, it’s something you should invest in.

Those are some of the basics, the essentials for success in mobile retail. Here are the highlights of how we’ve tackled responsiveness at Event Tickets Center.

1. We rebuilt our whole infrastructure as mobile-first.

That allowed us to really address the advertising side, which was always the area we were trying to modify to fit mobile needs. With new infrastructure, we made the commitment to building the right advertising platform to focus primarily on reaching mobile users.

2. We then developed advertising tools so we could bid on mobile-only on its own merits.

This started with figuring out how to effectively segment desktop from mobile, so we’re now able to bid on, manage and optimize mobile separately. And now we’re strictly managing desktop as a separate entity, as that channel is still very competitive and not converting at the rate it used to.

3. We greatly increased the speed of our pages.

Page load speeds are a huge part of keeping people on your site and converting, and having a responsive site means you can deliver all of the site’s information and features in the fastest possible way. To make sure we were giving our customers the absolute best experience, we combed through every element of the site with a specific focus on getting page load times down. I’m proud to say we now have what is arguably the fastest responsive site in the industry.

4. To improve our reach, we are constantly enhancing our search terms.

We have employees who dig for keywords and negative keywords across 30 accounts, and we have millions of keywords and close to 100,000 targeted ad groups. Rather than using services provided by Google or Bing, we have built our own tools to automate the process and make it more streamlined, and we can push data right to the campaign level or shared group level.

Transforming your business to meet the needs of your customers is always a learning process, and we are still learning a lot as we continue to enhance our mobile-first capabilities. But if you’ve recognized the critical need for mobile responsiveness, you’ve taken the first step.

The influence of mobile is only going to continue to grow. If you can determine where your business needs to change, you’ll position yourself to be where your customers are and provide the instant accessibility they expect.

Adam Young got the idea to launch Event Tickets Center in 2005 while at a Dave Mathews concert. With a $100 initial investment, Young and a friend embarked on a mission to build an online ticket selling business. 12 years later, Event Tickets Center has served more than 1 million customers and today handles nine-figure annual sales revenue.