Research reveals rise of small business mobile adoption
Today, more than three-quarters (77%) of small businesses are using mobile, compared with 66% last year. The 23% who do not use mobile, and have no plans to, cite various reasons such as lack of customer demand (40%), lack of know-how in using them for their business needs (36%), no time to implement mobile strategies (31%), not owning a work-related mobile (21%) and that mobile is not relevant to their business (13%).
Among the growing majority that do use mobile, 60% now have a mobile-optimized website, compared to just 34% in 2013, and 32% expressed plans to optimize their website for mobile within the next six months. Just 8% said they had no plans to optimize their website for mobile, a considerable drop from 28% who said so in 2013.
While mobile advertising has seen significant adoption among small businesses in the last year – rising from 10% of businesses to 21% – other mobile activities haven’t been as attractive. Location-based activity has risen just two percentage points from 17% in 2013 to today’s 19%, and the use of text message marketing has dropped from 15% to 13%.
