I'll tell you my story. Up until about a year ago I didn't have a smart phone, I only had a cell phone, in fact I was rather annoyed that I couldn't just buy a phone without a camera. I just wanted a phone to talk to my family and friends. Then, along came my growing interest in marketing, which led me to mobile marketing, (thank you Adam, Mack and others). What I learned opened my eyes and I began to realize that we were no longer really in the phone industry, we were in the mobile computer industry. I wasn't going to buy a phone, I was buying a computer that happened to let me make calls.
But, let me back up a few years before this. My daughter was away at school and we shared a mobile cell phone plan and my bills kept getting bigger, and when I looked at my statements to see why I saw hundreds, sometimes more than a thousand text messages that had been sent and received. What's a mother to do? Get an unlimited texting plan for her daughter. Of course I still wasn't texting my friends but I noticed more and more online marketers asking for your phone number so that they could text you and remind you of the seminar that you signed up for. And now my phone bill started to go up a few dollars here and there.
One of the next observations I made was that I would hear people talking in the store or down the street and there wasn't anyone around. Were they talking to me? Definitely not, they were absorbed with the cans of soup on the shelf, they weren't looking at me. And then there were all those people I was with at lunch who stopped in the middle of a conversation to check their messages every time they heard the alert. Everywhere I looked people were glued to their "phones".
Now, I have a Samsung Galaxy and wonder what I would do without it. And guess what I discovered? Most of the websites that I visit on my cell phone I can't read, I can't navigate, and I leave. What surprises me and has me wondering is why aren't webmasters building mobile sites for their clients?
It is becoming more apparent everyday that with the shift in mobile usage small businesses need to shift their marketing to include a mobile platform to reach their customers. Big businesses are leading the way and they are conditioning consumer behavior and expectations. Consumers are looking for a click to call button and the ability to make purchases right from their phones. In 2011, 10% of online purchases were made using a smart phone. Can any business afford to ignore 10% of their current and potential customer base?
So if you are a business owner and asking yourself why you need a mobile website - look at your customers behavior. Are they talking on their phones in your stores? Are they texting? Are they so caught up with their mobile device that they can't even stop to check out?
With a MobiVantage website you can have a mobile optimized website with the features that consumers are expecting when they search on a mobile device. Mobile websites provide you with reports that allow you to see where your customers are coming from and how many people viewed your site. You can't get that kind of information when your run a newspaper or television ad.
I know business owners who are paying over $1500 a month for Yellow Page ads that they can't drive traffic to or get customers to interact with. The price of a 1x1.5 ad in a local shopper paper is $20.63 per week and for a 1x2 is $27.50. So that is roughly $100 a month to run a small ad in a small local paper that you don't know who will pick up and read and see your ad.
Mobile websites are really inexpensive and I honestly think that most of of them aren't price high enough, and because of that business owners could be undervaluing their, especially if the site is monetized with adsense, and a shopping cart using paypal or google. The value that can be gained from having a mobile site, combined with the smart use of QR codes, print ads, ppc ads, sms text messaging, and local search, can all come together to create part of a very solid marketing strategy for any local businesses that needs foot traffic.
Below you can see the results of a comScore survey and notice that over 70% of people use their phones to text and over 44% to use a browser. And other studies have shown that people that most searches on smart phones are local searches where people are looking for a particular store or service, and these searches lead to people visiting a local store and making a purchase. More likely than those searching at home on their computers.
The question is can you afford not to have a mobile optimized website?
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