Mobilegeddon is Over; Do You Still Need a Mobile-Friendly Website?

Even though “Mobilegeddon-the disaster nobody showed up for” has passed from the public eye, many B2B businesses are still receiving frantic email from digital agencies about their non-mobile friendly websites. Several surveys before and prior to the April 21 “deadline” estimated that over 40% of US businesses resisted the pressure and did not convert to a mobile-friendly website template, a substantial amount of business that the agencies want. Citing dark statistics about lost business and pressure from supposedly more enlightened competitors, agencies are trying to keep the mobile-friendly pot stirred up.

Is there anything to it? Yes, there is. You might believe that your target market comprises mature business-oriented professionals who still do most of their real work on a desktop. You might also believe that your Clients are mature enough not to make a snap judgment about you based on the web experience. You might also know for a fact that you get very little business from Google search, so for your business the Google initiative was never a problem. You are probably right about all of these points, but lets consider some very realistic use cases:

• Your Rep finally gets a potential customer on the phone while the Customer is waiting for a delayed flight. During the conversation, the Customer opens up your last mass email on his/her device, and clicks the link to your website.
• Your social media marketer sends an extremely timely and highly relevant tweet that gets several hundred (or even thousand) favorites. Many of these click the shortlink to the content on your website. According to ComScore over 85% of Twitter clients are accessing Twitter on mobile devices. Twitter is currently used by more Sales Professionals for business than LinkedIn.
• One of your people strikes a chord with a LinkedIn Pulse article, which draws 25,000 eyeballs. Of those, several thousand take a look at the Author’s profile, and of those several hundred make it to the company website. Again according to ComScore, one in four of those users are on mobile devices.

In all three of these cases, a moment of opportunity led to a critical first impression (or many first impressions). While you may not be worried about Google, or your installed base, this opportunity for new business is being compromised. Millenial decision-makers are now a major force in the decision process and they spend more time researching their buying decisions on mobile. It is time to plan for a new site. Many opportunities exist in websites based on Content Management Systems like WordPress that are affordable and provide better control over content than you probably have now. If you would like a fair evaluation of your current website and a realistic discussion about your options, contact us.