The Importance of Mobile Marketing
After chatting with some small family-owned local businesses in our area, this is the common question that they posed to us as web developers.
Would an established traditional brick and mortar business that caters local customers need a website? After all, everyone in the vicinity already knows of the business and is already a patron.
Let’s take this story as a scenario and case study.
Okay, so you own a traditional run-of-the-mill business handed down from generations, since your great grandfather’s time. Business is still brisk, and you have established loyal customers and distributors who keep buying from you month after month. Why on earth would you need a website for your business, especially since it is a brick and mortar business, not some whimsical fancy online store?
Here are some hard statistics which may knock you off the chair.
Established traditional businesses that cater to locals would have been doing fine without a website, if it wasn’t for the rapid growth of the internet and even more impactfully, the rapid penetration rate of the smartphone. The invention of the smartphone completely disrupted the market and changed the behaviour of consumers forever. People all over the world are glued to their smartphones all the time. An astounding 1.8 billion photos are taken and shared daily using mobile devices. In fact, as a parent, you are more likely to elicit a response from your teenagers via whatsapp messages or Facebook, than actually just telling it to them, which may seem to bounce off deaf ears.
86% of Smartphone Users Research Products and Prices on Mobile
71% of Malaysians (which is 21.7 million people) own a smartphone. This means that almost every adult owns a mobile phone (and some people carry more than one phone). And according to Google Research, 86% of smartphone users research products and prices on mobile, before making a decision to purchase.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
When a decision-oriented search is performed on a mobile phone, 70% of the ready-to-purchase customers end up visiting the store to make the purchase, and 38% may turn on their laptops to make an online purchase.
This is a whopping statistic that shows the amount of business that you potentially lose out in favour of your competitors, if your business is not found on mobile search. Seasoned marketers would know that “out of sight means out of mind”. If your business is not constantly positioned and placed before consumers who are ready to make a purchase, eventually, the business would become irrelevant to the market as the competitors take over the market share.
64% of All Searches are Performed on Mobile Devices
In the latest statistics released by Google Research on Malaysia’s Mobile Search, as high as 52% of people in Malaysia use their mobile phones to search, 36% on computers or laptops, and 12% on tablets. This makes it a staggering 64% of searches performed on mobile devices (phones and tablets).
Hence, even if you do have a website, but the website is not mobile-friendly, you are essentially losing out on 64% of searches, as your business will not be listed on the mobile search results.
Read more about Google’s New Mobile Algorithm
DON’T BE PUNISHED BY GOOGLE’S NEW MOBILE ALGORITHM
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