There’s been more than the usual amount of chatter surrounding Mobile technology lately, but three stats in particular made me stop and think:

1. At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 event in Orlando, researchers predicted that “brands that redesign their websites to support visual-and-voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.”
2. 55% of e-commerce searches now originate on Amazon, not Google.
3. Organizations with unified communications, including VoIP, saved an average of 32 minutes per day per employee because it enabled staff to reach one another on the first try.

So how do these stats relate to each other? One pertains to e-commerce, another to brands and search behavior in general, and another to HR departments. They seemingly speak to different verticals altogether.

But here’s the point—mobile culture influences all aspects of the economy now. No longer does it simply mean that phone sales and mobile search queries will be on the rise.

Google’s Mobile-First Index is on the Way

At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 event in Orlando, researchers predicted that “brands that redesign their websites to support visual-and-voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%.”

Optimizing for voice search and mobile search are almost synonymous these days, but brands are running out of time to get mobile-friendly.

Recently, Google rolled out an unnamed experiment that may have been the first widespread test of its mobile-first algorithm. Redesigning your website to be friendly to voice means two things, in my opinion: first, your site has to be mobile-friendly, meaning it’s fast, and responsive (unless you have a m.dot site). Secondly, you need to include text on your key pages that answers questions—many, if not most, voice searches are of the “What is . . .” variety.

Here’s why the second part matters—if you build a page that answers a user’s question, get it to rank on the first page, and fortify it with schema or JSON-LD code, Google might read your answer out loud to the searcher.

Amazon, Apps, and Mobile E-Commerce

You may not be surprised to learn that the app millennials use the most in 2017 is Amazon. 35 percent of the generation regularly makes purchases via the app.

More and more e-commerce is moving mobile, and even Magento 2’s admin dashboard is mobile-responsive. What does all this mean?

First and foremost, that means that 35 percent of millennials are regularly finding the products they need on their phones without using Google at all. They bypass the search engine entirely, and as mobile app downloads increase (spurred on by increased storage on smartphones), that number will increase.

To scale your online business, you may need to move more and more of your inventory to Amazon, who is covertly growing their own search business by leaps and bounds. And remember voice search? Well, tens of thousands of customers find products via Alexa every day.

Mobile Doesn’t Only Impact Consumers – It’s Impacting your Office

If VoIP can really save an average of 32 minutes per day per employee, the economic implications of Unified Communications are pretty hard to fathom.

I mentioned Magento 2’s mobile-responsive dashboard earlier; the right communications strategy can keep your team up and running during natural disasters, travel, work-from-home days, and pretty much any other modern business scenario.

Unified Communications (based in the cloud) basically combine all of your channels—online fax, messaging, email, voice, virtual meeting, etc.—into one mobile-accessible dashboard. You can set up your own system or pay monthly for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). Unless you have a costly and reliable legacy system already in place (and all of the hardware is intact), you might want to consider unifying your communications.

In Conclusion

Google is losing its iron grip on e-commerce referrals (thanks to another giant, Amazon), a mobile-first index is on the way, and employers can now have teams spread out across entire continents thanks to unified communications.

All of these things can be distilled into one observation—that shoppers, employees, and now business owners are making daily mobile demands.