Look around next time you are out in public. How many people do you see surfing the internet on their smartphones or tablets? If your website isn’t mobile friendly, it’s a guarantee that it won’t be yours they are looking at.

Today’s world is all about speed and convenience. If your business or products cannot be quickly and easily located, consumers will not stop and hunt for you. They will simply go to the businesses they can actually find. With Google’s new local searching tied to the GPS in their smartphone, many people don’t even look at billboards or newspaper ads anymore. The smartphone has become the new, easier-to-use Yellow Pages.

Consider the following scenarios:

• A person has a flat tire on the highway. Odds are that they will not walk home and fire up the desktop to find a towing company. No, they will likely get out their mobile device and search for local towing services. If your towing service is not mobile-friendly and your competitor’s is, which one will the consumer likely hire?
• A woman and her friend are out for lunch, and see another person admiring a sweater that you (and several competitors) happen to sell. When they proceed to try and look up the cost and availability of the sweater on their smartphone, they pass over your standard website for your competitor, whose site just happens to be optimized to be viewed on smartphones. You lose another sale.

Starting to see a trend? Let’s look at the numbers:

In 2012, there were 256 million 3G network subscribers in the United States alone. That’s 81% penetration. That means 4 out of every 5 people have access to a broadband-capable mobile device, and statistics show that of those people, 80% of them use their mobile device for shopping. In addition, 78% of people who own a tablet PC use it for web browsing. These screens are small. Many people aren’t willing to zoom in just to see a website. They want one they can easily interact with.

Got a business? You should have an App for that!

Convenience. The all-important trend of today. Consumers demand speed and simplicity from the businesses they patronize, and businesses are listening. 47% of the top retailers have a mobile app for their business. Why? There are several reasons.

First, if a consumer likes your products or services, they are likely to become a repeat customer. So why make it hard for them to do so? An app makes all of your products available at the tap of an icon, instead of having to hunt through a website on an internet browser.

Secondly, apps help prevent consumers from shopping around to competitors. If they are using your app, they are using just your business, and it makes for that many more steps to browse the competition. They would have to close their app, fire up a web browser, do a search, and sift through the search results to find your competitors. This is often a step app users aren’t willing to take.

Don’t fall behind your competition!

The experts predict that smartphones and tablets will achieve market parity with their desktop counterparts in the next few years. Businesses that are already mobile friendly will be well positioned to take advantage of this growing market. Don’t be one of those business who loses sales for failing to keep up with technology!