Small businesses are an under served market in mobility. We constantly hear about the importance of small businesses to our economies, yet today few would argue that this sector is properly served and serviced from a mobility standpoint. Of course, carriers have plans but many times they simply rebrand a family plan as a small business plan and push it out. The effort to sell to the smallest of small businesses is often not worth the return to some of the larger players. This is all improving and will continue to do so as the cloud and open source makes business models that cater to the smallest firms much more attractive and manageable. As a small business owner you may already be seeing some improvement and your mobile strategy is starting to take shape.
Or maybe as a small business owner you still feel ignored and you don’t know what to do with this mobility thing. My humble guess would be that the vast majority of small business owners are not thinking or even remotely contemplating a mobile strategy. There are many different angles to take on the topic of small business and mobility, but for today and for now let’s just focus on one part of it: as a small business would you benefit from a mobile application?
Small Business and Mobile Applications
The simple answer, and I am sure many would agree with this, is no. The time and effort required to design, build, distribute, market and maintain a mobile application is not what you are in business for. A few may try to sell the idea of a mobile application to you but you will be hard pressed to make a case for it.
Without a mobile app you are seemingly left without mobile options. The thought of not being present when the need arises in your customers (when mobile) may worry you. In fact it may even terrify you. This is where search in general and local search in particular become your best option.
A Case for Local Search
Human geographers will tell you that everything happens in space; a particular point in space. All human interactions happen somewhere. For you as a small business owner your work, your clients and customers are mostly local. This is why local search is your friend, why competition in this space will heat up and why existing players with key advantages stand to benefit the most.
It is about convenience … local convenience!
It is the middle of January and you and your family are returning from Costa Rica where you just had a wonderful eco-tourism vacation. You are happy to hear that you just missed some of the coldest weather in years… unfortunately you walk into a freezing cold house due to a broken down furnace.
What do you do?
- Blame the kids?
- Boot up your computer in the basement?
- Go back to Costa Rica?
- Take out your smartphone?
If you answered ‘take out your smartphone‘ you answered the way I did. The other option of digging through night tables and recycling boxes to find a telephone directory doesn’t even enter my mind for this scenario. Your phone is right there with you.
Now what would you do?
- Browse to your favourite search engine?
- Then search for ‘emergency furnace services Toronto‘
- Click on the first few options?
- Click on an ad?
Or would you instead…
- Open up a local search application
- Search for ‘emergency furnace services Toronto?‘
- Click on ‘closest to your home‘ option
- Look at the first few (perhaps check a video)
- Pick one and call them immediately!
We spend our money and buy a majority of our services locally. Our context is local! We may research products on the web from around the world… but when it comes to actually purchasing them we do a lot of that locally.
As a small business owner seeking presence in the minds and wallets of mobile consumers you want to be there when the moment of need arises. Lots to think about. We will try and come back to this topic over the next few weeks.
Here are some other things to consider…
How social can a local search app be?
What about product availability and inventory?
Menu and prices?
So what other things could be leveraged on top of a local search application?
In your opinion is local search the best option for small business?
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Hi Jose,
Couldn’t agree with you more. Fanminder is 100% focused on helping local small businesses go mobile – and I mean VERY local, very small, not the chains. We do it with humble SMS and not smartphone applications yet because SMS is very effective at getting their message read and it’s easy to implement. Any way just wanted to write and say I appreciated your point of view.
Paul
Just as the web was hailed for the consumer and for new lines of business as liberation from bricks and mortar, mobile is the rennaisance technology for the local community, & the local economy.
Done well, it can take back the territory from national brands’ and online middlemen’s long and spammy tentacles. The problem I sense looming in this polemic is the all in the concept “search.” It’s a carry-over from the web, and its baggage is crawling with pests: bidding for rank, interpretative and presumptive results, irrelevent junk and the company of tag-along offers that travel with each and every search. And that’s not the worst of the negatives. After all, one defense of search, and a sad testiment, is that audience has become skilled in pulling coins out of the internet trash.
The fundamental failing of local search, especially mobile search, is failing to recognize the power of mobile technology. That is, we’re standing in our own way, everytime we resort to the search box, every time we ask a search engine to figure out what is actually local.
Mobile technology gives us independently a true way to determine location, and network technology lets us connect directly to places that have actual physical addresses, geo-coordinates. And put them together with database interst matching, you now are letting machines do the job of keeping track of where you are, what mode you’re in, and if any place nearby has a match for any of the limitless things or people or places that meet our needs, interests or desires.
All of this is not only possible, but practical, and in effect. We do this with our service comprehensively in the US, and others do portions or special themed slices. None of it will work to its potential, however, and we all won’t see the boom, as long as we maintain the tedious component of search-box keyed entry and allow manual search to choke traffic.
Good post Jose. Your comments about the barrier to entry are right on and are the exact reason we created and launched Ruxter. We wanted to help small businesses become part of the mobile internet in a cost effective way and the response by small business owners has been incredible. Any small business with a Ruxter site can send alerts to their customers and in turn customers can visit Ruxter sites when they need information like your furnace trouble example. Think how useful the mobile internet would be if everyone had a mobile optimized web site.
Hi Jose,
Thanks for opening a topic of mobile strategy for small businesses. Like any strategy, a recommendation needs to be informed by an understanding of goals, resources, competition, and customers.
For SMBs without much of a budget who want to increase visibility, I would agree with your point that building their own mobile app is unlikely to be worth the investment. (http://bit.ly/5g3Wv9) A great thing about the mobile channel is that there are many free or cheap ways to help customers find your business. Much has already been made of mobile businesses using Twitter to broadcast changes in location, daily specials, or even fresh-baked items to followers. (Examples: http://bit.ly/4TuFnQ and http://bit.ly/5JbABm) Existing services like Yelp might be a free or cheap way to reach customers, especially with their augmented reality tool that takes advantage of knowing the customer’s location.
Some industries have targeted services. In the case of restaurants, being visible on OpenTable’s mobile app might drive incremental reservations. (They recently launched v2.0 of their iPhone app: http://bit.ly/7kgCbh.) Also leaning toward restaurants and bars, Foursquare (http://bit.ly/7r6ETu) turns local commerce into a fun game where customers vie to become “mayor” through frequent visits and some businesses offering perks to their mayor.
If the SMB has a need of allowing convenient payment options, I’m intrigued by the new startup Square (http://bit.ly/5yWRIn) that is piloting card payment acceptance through a card swipe attachment to the iPhone. I especially like the loyalty component of their product as it enables SMBs to track and reward repeat customers. Thinking of your example of the broken hot water heater, wouldn’t both parties be better off if the repairman she could accept card payment rather than leaving the customer to search for cash or a paper check?
Other thoughts?
-Jay Badenhope (Wells Fargo)