We’ve all heard that marketing to the mobile market is something that we need to pay attention to for both our online and offline businesses.
To that I say “Thanks. I’ll add that to my stack of things to get to when I have time pile” and then go back to what I was already doing. The chant has almost become like an info-mercial for me I’ve heard it so much.
Then I was doing some research this past weekend and got a WOW moment out of the chart below.
How big I mobile? HUGE!
As you can see, mobile has deeper penetration than electricity and safe drinking water!
Now, that was a WOW moment for me.
This slide from analyst Chetan Sharma shows that mobile is the most pervasive technology ever invented. Chetan lists a great set of projections and figures on that page (it’s worth a look if you are interested) As I was recovering from the thought that there are more mobile subscriptions that people with clean drinking water or electricity, these two additional facts hit me over the head:
- Mobile Broadband (4G) is being deployed at a faster rate than previous generations, first time data is leading the charge
– Over 1.5 Billion broadband connections by 2012
- Mobile has become the single most important digital channel for engaging consumers and it shows
– In the US, mobile revenues exceeded Music, ISP, Hollywood, and Cable revenues combined
Okay, before you think that I have completely bought in to the hype, I recognize that many people have more than one active phone subscription and some have a subscription and don’t use it often (think On*Star type services). That said, there are a lot of mobile subscriptions out there in the world. And those subscribers are spending an increasingly larger amount of money through their mobile devices.
One assessment on Chetan’s list is a bit more hype driven, but nonetheless is something as business owners we should be paying a lot of attention to:
- In 3-5 years, with few exceptions, if a company is not doing majority of its digital business on mobile, it is going to be irrelevant
– Majority (by a good margin) of the consumer interactions with brands will be on mobile
So, what does this mean to you as a business owner or marketing professional?
Start integration mobile into your plans – today! While I’m not going to say that you will be out of business in 3-5 years if you don’t, I believe that it is safe to say that marketing to the mobile market is an essential part of your marketing and client engagement going forward.
You can start with your company website. Is it mobile friendly? Does it provide your visitors with the information they need when they visit from their mobile device? For some businesses, just having their existing website look good and navigate on a mobile device is all that is needed. For businesses, the site needs to be tailored to the mobile user’s needs that may be quite different from a desktop visitor’s needs
For example, for your restaurant, a mobile visitor will want to easily call you to make reservations, map your location, find your hours of operation, and see what’s on the menu. They most likely do not care about your history, mission, suppliers, or the employee of the month although those could be important for a computer based visitor.
Then let’s consider that Facebook, Foursquare, Google +, Yelp, and a host of others are already mobile friendly and if you have an offline business, you are listed. And, most likely your business has already being reviewed by the community. Good reviews, okay reviews, or awful reviews are there. So what is the community saying about you? Just another reason to bring mobile into your marketing and exposure plans.
So, it’s time for at least me to stop ignoring the hype and over-exaggerations and to start building mobile into my marketing and engagement efforts.
How about you? Have you started to become mobile friendly and build mobile engagement into your business? Let us know what you’re doing in the comments below.
And as always, if you need to know more about mobile engagement or anything else tech, contact us and we will get you going in the right direction.