There is a 1 in 10 chance that you’re reading about why you should have a mobile app on your cell phone or a tablet like an iPad.I’m writing this in October of 2011. The longer ago that was the more likely it is that you’re using a small screen viewing device.
Of those of you reading on your phone, currently there’s about a 32% chance you’re reading on your iPhone, a 42% chance you’ve got an Android phone and 13% chance you’re using an iPad. You Blackberry users are coming in at a shrinking 4% chance.
More and more people are using small screen devices to browse the web. The practice grew by 153% over the same time period last year according to a report by Walker Sands Communications released this month.
This trend is only going to grow in as the popularity of smart phones and tablets shows no sign of abating.
What this means for you as a business owner is that you need to have to have a mobile strategy in place for your business, like yesterday.
Search engines like Google do deliver mobile optimized sites to mobile searchers but Google, the largest search engine, also delivers regular websites in their search results. For many mobile users the effort to use horizontal scroll and zooming in and out in order to read such websites can be more trouble than it is worth. They will quickly hit the back button to leave.
Given the sheer volume of other websites you’re competing against, most businesses cannot afford to lose prospects in this way.
Since the first domain was registered back in 1985, there are over 266 million active websites. There are literally trillions of individual web pages already indexed.
Business owners spend increasingly high amounts on ad buys, social management and other strategies to try to reach prospects before their competition.
Having a mobile app puts your business into a much less competitive and much more responsive market place. There are only around a million mobile apps in the iPhone and Android app stores. Combined!
Think of app stores as boutique search engines. Users browse them for content for both business and pleasure.
That means that this is a huge opportunity for those businesses that take action and claim their own app local real estate.
In order to use an app the user has to download it. When someone downloads an app it resides on their phone. People build their own mini libraries of useful apps. This becomes their go to place for information.
So if you are on their phone and your competitor is not, they’ll find you first. And that is what you want.