We’ve seen huge demand from our customers over the past 3-4months for the development of mobile applications and mobile-specific versions of their websites. In fact, “do we need to build a mobile website or app?” has been the most popular question we’ve been asked in the early part of this year.

Clearly how to best capitalise on the mobile market is something on the minds of many business owners. Certainly the coverage of mobile marketing and development has been the hot topic of conversation recently in trade publications, blogs and across social media.

I’m always conscious that when something new comes along in the world of technology and marketing it tends to become the ‘buzz’ topic. With that comes added confusion as all of us ‘marketing and tech experts’ flood you with articles and information on the subject. It’s funny that with the access we get today to so much information and insight from so many different sources, it can actually make it more difficult to find a simple answer to the question you’re asking!

So I don’t want to go off on too many tangents today and answer this really simple question:

If you’re a small-to-medium sized business owner is now the time to build a mobile-specific version of your site, create an app or begin to invest in mobile marketing?

To answer that question I want to share with you a small bit of research we completed last week.

How many users are accessing your site on a mobile device?

Firstly, you can find this bit of information out really simply (and for free) if you have an analytics tracker such as Google Analytics on your site. It will tell you (as a percentage of overall users) how many people are accessing your website via a mobile browser. It will even tell you whether they’re an Android, Windows, RIM or iPhone user.

As an experiment, we looked at all of our client websites to see what the average percentage of mobile users on the site was historically, what it is today and how fast the change in percentage, if any, was.

Well, the results are really interesting and it’s fair to say that visits to our client websites via mobile device are growing at an ever-increasing rate. Take a look:

If you’ve read our blog before then you’ll know that, at Brinn, we believe that your website should at be the centre of any good marketing strategy. Visiting your website is the first action you want someone to take having responded to one of your marketing messages via social media, email, advertising, PR, search, an event or any other marketing channel you’re using. It should also act as the central place for great content that you can then push out across all of these different marketing channels.

So does the uptake of mobile technology change this approach? Definitely not, but it does mean that to stay relevant, we need to make the experience of visiting your website and taking the desired action just as engaging on a mobile website or app as it is on a traditional desktop device.

If your website is well coded and put together in the first place (and doesn’t contain too much Flash), then it should render the same on a mobile screen as it does on a desktop one. That’s great, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean your site will engage users in the same way. Mobile-specific websites need to be clearer, contain less information and allow the user to undertake a specific task quickly.

To illustrate this point, here are a couple of interesting facts about the difference between mobile users and desktop users:

- According to Microsoft 70% of desktop search tasks are completed in one week, while 70% of mobile search tasks are done in one hour. In other words, mobile searchers are ready to take action right now!

- 40% of mobile search is location based, which presents great opportunities if you run a local business. Many businesses are already making great use of apps and mobile sites that target a local user at the time they’re ready to make a purchase.

Basically, mobile users have a different set of needs and expectations than desktop users and building a mobile-specific site or app is a great way of targeting these users and getting their business. Unfortunately, your current desktop optimised website won’t do that. As more people move away from the desktop format as a means to access information via the web, the more your business will need to engage customers properly on a plethora of different formats including mobile and tablet devices. There may be 12% of users accessing websites via a mobile today but the numbers are going up fast!

What we’ve hopefully shown you is that now is the time to begin thinking about how your business can best utilise the mobile platform. We’re not saying you need to assign your whole marketing budget to ‘going mobile’ but be aware of this trend and get involved sooner rather than later.

So I’ve answered the question I set out to and have hopefully excited you about the new opportunities that mobile marketing can bring. Now it’s up to you to begin reading up on the subject further and deciding what your next step should be… or you can just give us a call and we’ll take care if it for you! We’ll leave that decision up to you!

As always, any feedback, comments or further insight are welcomed. Speak to you all soon.