Should you be doing more with mobile online marketing?
Well yes…and no. Fact is, most homeowners doing research online use a full-sized screen, i.e. they consider your offerings in front of their laptop or desktop computer. That means they’re not using a mobile device when checking you out.
But Todd, you say, everything I read tells me that mobile online marketing is growing, growing, growing! Indeed, that’s what the statistics tell us. From those statistics, I estimate that 10-11%% of all visitors arrive at home improvement Web sites via mobile devices.
Unfortunately, the statistics mislead!
When you hear about mobile devices, consider the major differences between “mobile devices” and “smartphones.”
A smartphone is exactly what you think it is. An iPhone. A Droid. A Blackberry.
But a “mobile device” a homeowner uses to access your Web site is far more likely to be a tablet computer; think “iPad”. Tablets have considerably larger screens than smartphones. As such, homeowners are much more likely to use these mobile devices to research purchases than mobile phones with their tiny screens.
In fact, some tablets have screens that are comparable in size to those of laptops. So when viewed on tablets, your Web site (and most Web sites for that matter) looks pretty much the same as on your computer.
So, of the 10-11% of your visitors using mobile devices, I suspect perhaps five of those percentage points are a result of smartphones. And the balance is from tablets.
Should you develop a mobile version of your Web site? Only if the five visitors out of a hundred who insist on doing their research via smartphones are important enough for you to spend real money on.
In short, mobile online marketing for home improvement companies is much closer to what you’ve been doing all along…than the statistics would have you believe. And so my vote is: stay the course.
Homeowner Connections Through Performance Online Advertising
