Local small businesses face an interesting dilemma when it comes to deciding between using smartphone apps or their website when developing and deploying marketing campaigns.
While almost 90 percent of users are immersed in their apps while on their smartphones or tablets (according to recent studies conducted by Yahoo,Nielson, and comScore), other surveys studying this consumer pattern find that apps are not the preferred platform when using mobile internet, regardless of the device.
One of the most extensive of these, conducted by Burke for the LSA Media Tracking Survey, found that almost 80 percent of tablet users and close to two-thirds of smartphone users prefer a site’s mobile website to its apps when searching the Internet. This corroborates earlier findings from a BrightLocal survey that found that only ten percent of smartphone users relied on mobile apps for local business searches.
How to address this divergence in consumers’ mobile habits is enigmatic, to say the least.
Reference:
Sterling, Greg. “Data: 7 in 10 Consumers Prefer Mobile Sites vs. Mobile Apps in Search,” LSA Insider. August 5, 2015.
