MarketingSherpa Blog

“Mobile is a behavior, not a technology. It’s about accessing content wherever you are. It’s really the use that is mobile, not the device,” Anna Bager, VP and GM, Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, said in an interview with ClickZ.

This leads to part of the challenge facing marketers. How do you optimize for this emerging behavior? After all, technology is easier to optimize for than fickle people. If you were just optimizing for technology, you could simply, or not so simply, make sure something reads well on mobile.

So to remix an ancient Greek aphorism …

With all thy knowing, know thy customer

In today’s MarketingSherpa blog post, we’ll give you an abbreviated look at some data and resources compiled by the MECLABS Business Intelligence team to help you understand this new and still-evolving customer behavior.

“According to a recent Adobe survey, mobile optimization has been identified as the most exciting digital opportunity of this year,” said Gaby Paez, Associated Director of Research, MECLABS. “As marketers, we need to learn as much as possible how consumers of all ages are using their smartphones; how and when they are visiting our websites, checking their emails, etc. More and more people are using their phones instead of laptop or PC to buy online.”

“We put together this summary to help our team get a quick snapshot of key takeaways they can incorporate now in their optimization projects. We hope this summary helps many of our readers, too,” Gaby offered.

Key Data Point #1: Users are spending a growing amount of time with their devices

What struck me about visiting New York City a few months ago is the sea-change in behavior of office workers. You used to walk through Midtown Manhattan and see people on the street in front of office buildings taking a smoking break. Now, everyone is milling around checking their smartphones.

Website traffic coming from mobile devices increased 84% from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012, according to a report from Walker Sands.

Nielsen also shows mobile growth but breaks it down slightly differently and looks at a slightly different timeframe – July 2011 to July 2012. Its study shows a significant difference in time spent in mobile Web versus apps. Time spent in mobile Web grew 22% while mobile apps grew by 120%.

How you can use this data: First off, this data is a great proof point to secure the budget necessary to reach mobile customers.

Second, you can use these mobile growing habits to help grow other, more traditional channels as well. For one way to do this, read the MarketingSherpa how-to article, “Mobile Drives Email List Growth: How to use SMS and relevant content to add opt-ins.”

Of course, that growth isn’t occurring in broad brush strokes …

Read more…

Fun Fact: the iPhone can make phone calls. I say this because two years ago, when Consumer Reports found that the iPhone 4 was prone to dropping calls, media reports were filled with people who didn’t care.

They didn’t care … that their phone … couldn’t make phone calls.

Because people no longer use phones to make calls—they use them to check Facebook and Twitter— the issue of call quality was simply not of importance.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but not by much. According to Nielsen’s State of the Media: Social Media Report 2012, use of the mobile Web has increased 82% from July 2011 to July 2012 and app usage time has more than doubled. Of course, many people connect to social media through an app.

While less people are using the computer to connect to social media, more people are using mobile phones and tablets to receive their daily Timeline fix.

“The Nielsen report has demonstrated significant evidence to support the idea that the growth of social media and mobile technology are mutually supporting,” said Jonathan Greene, Business Intelligence Analyst, MECLABS.

“According to Nielsen, people continue to spend more time on social networks than any other category of sites – 20% of that time spent on PCs and 30% on mobile devices. This leads to a loose hypothesis that the increase in mobile usage and the increase in social media usage are related, with more people being able to access their social platforms with more frequency and increased lengths of time as a result of the proliferation of mobile technology,” Jonathan explained.

Here’s why this all matters to you, the marketer. We all hear about the meteoric growth of mobile devices. If people are using these mobile devices in large part for social media, that should inform your mobile strategy.

Here are three tips to help you improve the way you communicate with mobile social media users …

Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their challenges …

Q: Which barriers exist to overcoming your organization’s top challenges?

The MarketingSherpa community members shared their insights based on this data, which I hope you find helpful …

Challenge #1: Mobile site or mobile app?

“Strategy and staffing are (not surprising) linked. The resources required to fund a well-researched and well-structured mobile marketing strategy – or even a mobile strategy at large to address the primary question: mobile site or mobile app – are the very same resources necessary to staff such an initiative,” said Aaron Orendorff, Copywriter, Content Strategist & Project Manager, CREO Agency.

Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their local mobile marketing efforts …

Q: What percentage of customers/prospects interact with your organization’s LOCAL mobile marketing tactics?

While marketers who do track these numbers saw some very impressive results (about a quarter of marketers finding that more than half of their customers engage with social check-in, opt in to geo-fencing communications, and redeem mobile coupons), the biggest surprise is the number of marketers who simply don’t know.

“The fact that the research suggests 50% don’t know how effective they are is evidence that although mobile consumption is increasing and marketers are increasingly adopting it as a marketing channel, analytics and measurement have still yet to catch up,” said Grant Osborne, head of agency, FIRST. “I believe tracking and analysis of mobile (both mobile Web and apps) will be a great source of gaining competitive advantage in this space this year.”

  Read more…

In the MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their business objectives for mobile marketing …

Q: What are your TOP BUSINESS OBJECTIVES for mobile marketing in the next 12 months?

As always, we turned to our audience for insights on this data. Here’s what they had to say …

  Read more…

It’s always fascinating to dig into research on the world of marketing. While recently looking over the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, I found this chart:

Fast loading mobile pages should certainly be a priority, but one finding in this chart disappointed me. Look way down, close to the bottom, and see where only 11% of surveyed B2B marketers reported planning on using dynamically personalized mobile content to improve relevance and engagement.

I think this is a great oversight on the part of marketers active in the mobile marketing channel.

When someone interacts with your mobile website — or your regular website — on a mobile device, that engagement is almost certainly going to be a more intimate experience than someone viewing on a laptop or ultrabook, and certainly more so than on a desktop.

And, that person is very possibly interacting with your content in a more personal space than a dedicated work area or desk.

For B2B marketers, that means you are potentially reaching that person away from a traditional business setting.

Additionally, consumer marketers must consider the possibility that the mobile customer might even be actively shopping and engaging in showrooming, where they are in a brick-and-mortar store and looking at price or feature comparisons.

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In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), we asked …

Q: How much do you expect your organization’s mobile marketing budget to change from 2012 to 2013?             

Click to enlarge

A combined 71% of respondents said they would see budget increases, with over half of those reporting increases seeing more than 10%.

While this is great news for many marketing teams, it’s also a tough challenge: Mobile is still a new channel with several unknowns. So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will share our discoveries in the hopes that our findings can aid your strategy planning efforts for the upcoming year.

I sat down with Benjamin Filip, Research Manager, Data Sciences, MECLABS, and a lead data analyst for the report, for a look at what we can learn from the data to help you get the best use of your (hopefully bigger) mobile budget.

“It really depends on what an organization’s goals are,” Benjamin said. “Some factors to consider in planning how to spend a bigger budget are usage, effectiveness and difficulty.”

According to the data below, from the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, when comparing the factors of usage, effectiveness and difficulty, we can find some good opportunities. For example, our respondents reported “Includes video content” as a highly effective tactic that is not very difficult to implement, yet it is not highly utilized.

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For the recently released MarketingSherpa Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, we asked marketers about their understanding of customer mobile device adoption …

Q: How well does your organization know the level of mobile device adoption of its customers?

Damir Saracevic, Director of Digital Marketing, Catalyst, shared his thoughts on the data …

Read more…

Since cavemen gathered around the first fire, technology has changed the way humans relate to each other, and modern times are no different. For marketers, it’s about figuring out at which fire their consumers are.

So W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst at MECLABS, has a point when he says, “I believe smartphones have changed not only the way we interact, but what our expectations are.”

For more than half of Americans, 50.4%, their smartphones are that gathering place, according to a March 2012 study by Nielson. Really, that number only stands to grow (and it already has — up from 47.8% in the same study in December 2011) since 33% of Gen Y Internet-user moms have let their children use a smartphone by the age of two, according to a BlogHer study. Laptops barely beat them out at one percent more.

Essentially, smartphones are babysitting your future consumers.

According to research by Antenna Software, many businesses are planning to invest in mobile projects in the coming year, but where to begin? Jeff’s advice when entering the world of mobile email marketing is simple:

  Read more…

How can small and medium businesses take advantage of mobile marketing? Aman Devgan, VP of Marketing, Web.com, joined us in the studio for the latest episode of Marketing Research in Action to talk about how you can apply discoveries from recent research by Web.com and MarketingSherpa …

If you’d like to jump ahead in the video, here is what Aman and I discussed:

0:32 – 84% of SMBs saw an increase in new business activity due to their mobile marketing efforts

1:12 – Surprisingly, providing better service to existing customers is a bigger motivator to invest in a mobile presence than attracting more local customers

1:54 – Top 2 hurdles in leveraging mobile marketing

  Read more…