I’ve been writing recently about the importance of using a website as the central hub of your marketing. We’ve always done this at Appletree, using our website to bring together different online marketing activities such as our blog and newsletters. We also use the website to support some offline marketing we do, such as promoting workshops and events when we run them.

A few months ago I started thinking about mobile websites and how people access the Appletree site. At the time of writing this blog in June 2016, if you look at our website on a mobile device, you will just see a small version of the main site. Everything is there, squished into whatever size screen you’re using. It is rather tricky to find what you’re looking for and to read the free information in the blogs and newsletters. But does that matter? How many people actually look at our website when they’re out and about, away from the office computer?

We thought we should look into this, so we did. From our analytics we can see that the majority (83%) of the visits to our website come via PCs – people sitting at a computer on a desk somewhere. A small minority use mobile devices including smart phones (13.5%) and tablets (3.5%). While the proportion of mobile visitors is slowly growing, it is still very small. Why is this? The majority of people who visit our site already know us. They’ve met me, or they’ve heard about the business. They search for my name or the company name to find the site, or they visit via a link on Twitter or LinkedIn. Some of these people (particularly those visiting the site via social media) might be using a smart phone or tablet. But most people who look at our site following a recommendation are sitting in their office, at their PC. We work with businesses and many business people spend quite a lot of time at their desks.

Very few people search the internet for something like ‘marketing support for small businesses’ and find our site. We know this because we don’t optimise our website for anything other than my name and the business name. Even if people do find us by searching for a marketing related problem, they are more likely to be at work and at their PC when they’re doing this.

So do we need a mobile website? If I ran a Chinese takeaway in a busy town and I wanted to attract hungry people walking through the town looking for somewhere to pick up something to eat, then I would. I would create a mobile site from which customers could easily find us and just as easily place their order, to be collected half an hour later. But for a Marketing Consultancy? I don’t think we need a mobile website, because no one is going to be driving around Berkshire looking for the closest marketing company to drop in on! Having said all that, I recently commissioned a website company to design and build a new, mobile friendly website for Appletree. Why?! Because I believe that as a leading Marketing Consultancy, we need to lead by example! We need a website that people can access from anywhere and that still looks good. We need to be able to advise our clients on the best marketing to do – including the state of their website – and we need to show that we know what we’re talking about.

So watch this space for the new website and I’ll report back to let you know what effect moving to a mobile website has on the business!