The UK FTSE100 consists of the best 100 blue-chip companies the country has, so you would expect them to be at the cutting edge of everything, especially technology. This is not necessarily the case; Incentivated, a mobile marketing company carried out a piece of research for the Financial Times to determine how many of the FTSE100 companies had optimised mobile web sites.
The result of this research was quite alarming; 69 companies in the FTSE 100 had done nothing to “optimise” their websites for mobile browsers and their users. Twenty two of the companies had taken some steps to optimise their mobile site and only 8 had acceptable mobile versions of their site.
It is very apparent that mobile usage is increasing significantly each year, the introduction of smart phones means that more and more people are now browsing the internet via a phone rather than a traditional desktop or laptop computer. Search giant Google has reported that at the moment 25% of searches come from mobile devices, and it expects this to increase to 50% by 2016.
By not having mobile friendly websites these large companies are in effect blocking potential customers from accessing them! Non mobile friendly sites usually present users with small text, difficult navigations and long page load times. Jonathan Bass of Incentivated said, “FTSE 100 companies are not mobile-ready and are wasting millions of pounds on internet advertising by sending visitors to websites that do not work as users expect them to,”
From a digital marketing point of view this is something that we come across quite regularly, whether it is small businesses or medium size ones. It is worst amongst successful businesses that have been around for a while. Company directors and boards find it difficult to let go of the past and move on with technology.
There are company owners out there who are still adamant that press adverts are superior to online adverts, we would beg to differ. With online ads at least we can track how many visits and sales have occurred, with press ads we are just assuming.
The FTSE100 does have companies like Marks & Spencers, who scored the well and are leading the way. The rest of the companies need to get their acts together really quickly and start adopting technology to help take their business into a new digital era…
