In a recent survey by IAB, 32% of participants now have mobile marketing budgets exceeding $300,000 (300 brand marketer participated). One year ago only 7% made the same claim. Mobile budgets are expected to increase in the future as nearly three fourths of participants predict that their spending on mobile advertising will continue to increase over the next few years. A significant number, 19%, stated that they felt that their mobile budgets will increase by 50% or more over that same period.
“Studies like this serve to drive home the point that companies need to make mobile a top priority right now to keep up with their competition,” says Kimber Johnson, Managing Director, Vanity Point. “with advertising it is important to put your message where consumers eyes are and right now they are on their mobile devices.”
Furthermore, in the survey, participants were asked what they ranked as “very important” or “important” mobile advertising developments and 87% said responsive design followed by HTML5 (77%) and mobile native advertising (74%).
Responsive web design is a hot trend right now that allows business to address the needs of a mobile web site without building a separate web site for mobile devices. “We see several of our customers opting for responsive web design right now,” continues Kimber Johnson, “it is an affordable and effective first step to address mobile marketing needs”.
According to a new study from Eptica, mobile web site users demand the same standard of website usability on their devices that they experience using the traditional web. But unlike with the traditional web, many companies are not meeting user expectations. Since more and more consumers are accessing websites via their mobile devices, the usability of mobile web sites is more important than ever and right now many users are disappointed. A survey of 1,000 adults by Eptica found that over 50 percent said over half of the websites they visited on their mobile devices were not optimized for the mobile web.
Eptica goes on to detail the issues that plague consumers’ mobile web experiences: the leading issue was the lack of functionality both on the mobile web and within mobile apps (36 percent), while 34 percent mentioned slow loading speeds and 34 percent were frustrated by websites that were not optimized for smaller mobile screens.
Clearly there are great opportunities that exist for savvy companies that offer users what they are looking for on their mobile devices. Mobile optimized web sites that offer solid fundamentals of usability and load rapidly will keep consumers coming back. Mobile apps must offer users a solid user experience or will be deleted soon in favor of other apps that offer the experience users are looking for.
“With the rapid growth of the mobile arena, there is a huge opportunity for companies that choose to give customers what they are looking for,” says Kimber Johnson, Managing Director of Vanity Point “It isn’t enough just to have a mobile offering. The medium is starting to mature and customers are looking for quality experiences. By not giving your customers the experience they are expecting you are just letting them know you don’t understand mobile and are sending them to someone who does.”
It is more and more important that marketers understand mobile and how to succeed and companies that that do understand mobile are starting to separate themselves from those that do not.
Jumptap and comScore have released a new study showing that half of all online time now spent occurs via mobile devices. Additionally it is interesting to note the growth of time spent online. Back in February of 2010 people spent 451 billion minutes online, while this year that number jumped in February of 2013 to people spending 890 billion minutes online. Clearly mobile optimized web sites are more important than ever.
The study also shows that 14 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 49 “only access” the internet from mobile devices, meanwhile, 65 percent of 18-24 year olds are screen jumpers – accessing from pc and mobile devices.
When it comes to users for mobile devices, three-quarters of users stream music from mobile devices, 55 percent check weather, and 48 percent play games. Meanwhile the pc platform leads in other areas. 68 percent prefer accessing business and finance content via pc, 62 percent access sports content and 56 percent access food information.
New data out from Experian Marketing Services states that email volume increased nearly 18 percent over the past year and that half of all emails opened are now opened on mobile devices. Regarding mobile devices, iPads were found to be the most effective for email conversions.
“With half of all emails opened on mobile devices in Q2 2013, we noticed that people who open email on more than one device, two or more times, have a greater propensity to buy or buy more,” said Peter DeNunzio, general manager at Experian Marketing Services. “Insight like this helps marketers plan the timing of their email marketing, and its best to include reminders to customers to engage them when they are less busy and are more inclined to purchase. As such, it is important for marketers to leverage platform preferences and engagement metrics to identify key subscribers for future targeted offers.”