Mobile marketing isn’t the next big thing. It’s already been the big thing since several big things ago. People are buying more on mobile than ever before (more on this later). The pandemic spurred eCommerce into overdrive, and while we might see a slight reduction in the next couple of years, we are never going entirely back. That means people are finding products online. And this in turn means that people are finding things on their smartphones. If your business isn’t marketing on smartphones, it is missing out.
Yet if you’re reading this, you might already know of some of the importance of mobile marketing but are working for a business or organization that isn’t on it as much as it should be. Some people need convincing. And in these situations, the facts are the things that matter most and can sway people’s minds. To that end, here are some key facts to convince the powers that be that mobile marketing should be your next strategy:
When we say that everyone is doing mobile marketing and that large sums of money are spent on mobile marketing, we mean it. Traditional advertising isn’t as effective or wide-reaching as it used to be, with more people cutting the cord than ever before. Furthermore, more people are using ad-blockers and getting used to tactics on desktops. And with more people spending more time on their phones each day (more on that soon), tmobile devices are the top place for marketers to reach potential customers. The sooner your boss can realize this, the better. It might be easiest to ask them about their own smartphone habits and work from there. After all, they cannot deny the ads that are right in front of them.
And overall, other marketers are truly getting in on the trend based on the spending. Not all mobile marketing spending will be equal, and desktop spending might not match other forms of advertising or marketing just yet, but there is a trend, and your brand will need to match the competition on all fronts. How will your boss deal with the competition they might be losing to already? With more of the same?
That is not to say that desktop spending will not have its place. Some industries certainly have people look more at desktops, perhaps when they want to sit down and analyze the facts or get a clearer comparison. After all, a desktop can provide more focus and a bigger picture. For the big-ticket items or for in-depth research as needed for important decisions and purchases, people will want a more focused approach.
The exact amount of time varies depending on which demographics were studied and which study you are looking at, but the consensus is that people are spending at least a quarter of their waking time on their smartphones. Is that time you want to be locked out of due to an out-of-date marketing strategy?
What they do on their phone during this time varies, though social media is possibly the most common activity, so that is where you might want to start. On average, a person will spend 147 minutes a day on social media, with much or all of that time on a smartphone. That’s more than two hours a day you might be missing. Make sure ads are optimized for a great mobile social media presence, and that you aren’t just putting your social media pages on autopilot. Potential consumers will take notice and assume your social media page is dead when it's not (or perhaps it effectively is).
On top of the time on social media, they will spend several hours consuming video content of some kind. Getting ads on Netflix or most other streaming platforms might be a bit difficult, but YouTube, TikTok (depending on how you count it), and other platforms certainly have easy ways for your business to reach out to potential customers for a price.
Talk to your boss about trying some of these new avenues, and make sure they understand both how much time people spend on their phones and what they do on them. Once again, going directly to the source and asking how much time they spend on their phone can be a good queue. Just be a good sport about it.
As we’ve made clear, people spend a lot of time on their phones. And while it seems as though people are constantly on the internet in some way, a lot of that time is on phones now. Your boss might think they are talking with people, texting, or doing other things on their phone during this time. They might be, but they’re also online. And they are online a lot.
And due to the development of smartphones over the years and mobile data, practically anything that can be done on another device can be done on a smartphone, and the smartphone is more convenient. It might not always be as efficient, but one cannot bring a desktop computer on the bus with them without getting a few funny looks (except perhaps in a few cities, and they’d still have problems getting it running on the bus).
While your business might have a strong online marketing strategy, avoiding mobile means that the campaigns are unoptimized half of the time. Those are impressions being left on the table, and they are going to cost a lot in potential opportunities. Explain this to your boss, and hopefully, they’ll understand and change course.
What do you personally do when you need to find a business of a certain type? What do you do when you’re considering trying out a new restaurant but don’t know where to go? What do you do when you need specialized services? You go online and you search for it. So does everyone else. And how do some results appear before others? Mostly SEO practices and mobile marketing techniques.
Mobile marketing is key and mobile optimization of your site (if you have one, but you should have one) is also key. You will want to find a professional who can help with your site if you can, and you will want to try and give them the resources and information they can. If you already have people on your team that can do the job, then it would be best to make sure that they can do their jobs properly and engage in best SEO practices to rank for local search terms. There’s a lot more to it than we can reasonably express here, so do more research before going to your boss with a proposal.
And even if your business isn’t local, or has multiple locations, then you should still pay attention to this. If you are competing with local businesses in some way, then you should understand that at the very least having a relevant local page will go a long way towards making sure potential customers aren’t confused about your business. A lot of places closed down because of COVID or have different hours or guidelines. People might not trust old information that is labeled as such, even if it is technically correct now
Finally, ad campaigns can easily be done in a local area, at least with many platforms and search engines. Investigate your options, explain to your boss as best as you are able the potential savings and potential value of such a targeted campaign, and work from there.
That is several hundred million people that mobile marketing potentially has access to. And while you will not reach all of them, you want to reach as many of them as possible within your target demographic.
Also, that is not a huge jump from where it is today, which is roughly 84.2 percent of Americans. There can only be so much improvement there, it seems, and some people will try to avoid the use of smartphones for the rest of their lives (which might be somewhat wise). Yet look for demographics to change, and more people of all ages (including children) to be using smartphones for many different reasons.
The difference between the two does tell us that there is relatively slow growth in the adoption rate and that we are going to need to prepare for a future where even more people are on their phones and regularly access the internet on those phones. Websites will need to be optimized for mobile on the double, and mobile marketing will be regular marketing. If your boss doesn’t realize the importance of mobile marketing by 2025, the business will be far behind and will have to be succeeding on other merits.
This is the oldest statistic we will have on this list, but it will remain relevant for decades to come even if the number slightly changes. You likely notice it and practice it yourself. People don’t trust ads as much as they’ll trust their own experiences. Barring that, they’ll trust the experiences and thoughts of people whose opinions they care about.
In the context of mobile marketing, that means reviews and comments online. You will want to garner as many reviews as possible and make sure that those reviews are visible and reach people. A few specific testimonials on your webpage (mobile-optimized, of course) can make a big difference and keep people on your product. You do not want to fake or pay for these reviews, as tempting as it might be to you or your boss. More sites and search engines are clued in to the signs of a paid review, and you will find that getting caught can lead to horrible consequences when it comes to discoverability.
Word of mouth is already important to the smartphone, recommendations for apps from friends and people close to them are a key point of influence on whether someone will download a given app. If it is a digital product or service you are trying to sell on mobile (in which case you need to get on mobile marketing even more), seek a strategy that not only grabs the attention of consumers but also provides a great experience people will talk about. Once you have a great reputation, there’s nothing that can replace it. Conversely, if your product has a bad reputation, then you have a major problem, and nothing will be more important than fixing it.
Mobile marketing doesn’t have to just be banner ads. It can take several forms, including influencer marketing, content marketing, and more. It does not have to be in-your-face, abrasive, or relatively crude. It does not have to annoy the potential customer. It can instead engage with the customer in a meaningful way and act in more subtle ways. It can be a way to engage in link building and provide connections with other brands.
It will often take a change in strategy or at least a dedicated team, but you may want to talk to your boss about one of these alternative methods. Their experience with mobile ads might have left them with a bad impression. You can fix that and create a strategy worthy of the business you work for. Perhaps show them a piece of well-written content marketing, or show them a few influencers in your industry (how effective this is may vary). Finally, tell them about this statistic.
Content marketing will also be something that takes some time to truly see results. Either ranking pages for topics or trying to reach an audience is not easy. Yet it is worth it, whether focused on mobile or not.
When it comes to search engine rankings, you have to go big or go home. Most people only look at the first page of results, and even then, people will generally pick from the top few choices on the search results. This information might be a little older, but it still holds today.
On mobile, where screen space is limited and people might not want to scroll so much, the same is true. They’ll click on the first thing that looks interesting to them. How would they know otherwise, especially when second-page results haven’t helped them much in the past?
What does this mean for your business? It means that you can’t just hope that people will spontaneously find your business even if your product is amazing. Word of mouth is great and with many businesses the most important thing, but natural traffic helps a lot and is necessary for most long-term marketing efforts, especially those that rely on a website.
In short, look into seeing what pages you can rank for, consider recommending an expert if needed, and tell your boss that ranking high is important.
Around the world, this number easily tops 70 percent, so if your business works worldwide then you may wish to make this an even more important topic of discussion.
And as time goes on and smartphones can do more and become even more popular, then you will likely see this number increase, both around the world and in the United States. It may cap eventually as people will always want to use laptops or desktops for some tasks, but mobile may one day (if it's not already) be the major point of investment for your marketing efforts.
As far as tablets are concerned, they mostly run on the same operating system as mobile devices or work in similar ways, just that the screens are larger and they are usually limited compared to phones in other ways. You as a marketer don’t need to worry much about the difference, and mostly just optimize for mobile content.
Before any other efforts are focused on, you need to make sure your boss is aware of the importance of a mobile-friendly website and how many top sites are mobile-friendly. All the mobile marketing efforts in the world will not help much if down the funnel potential customers simply bounce off of your site because it’s a pain to use or near-unusable on mobile.
Once you have a greater understanding of what you might need to do to make your site better for mobile devices, you should try to work on your campaigns from there, with links leading to mobile-friendly pages first if your organization has to do the conversion over time. In any event, the numbers are there for it to be more than well worth it.
Depending on which statistics you use and what one might count as eCommerce, the exact percentage might vary a bit. Nonetheless, is it a clear fact that mobile eCommerce has become the overall dominant force in eCommerce. In terms of just revenue it is impressive, as shown below:
As we’ve mentioned before, the sales are not equally distributed across the board. Some product categories might have different ratios than others. Make sure you do more research about your specific industry before you talk to your boss or set up a new campaign.
You will also want to see how this number changes its trend or stabilizes over the next year or two. The pandemic changed things up and there was heavy growth in eCommerce across the board. People relied on their smartphones more. Also, people might have been on their laptops or desktops more because of remote work, which means more opportunities to shop there. Several factors are at play, and you, as a marketer, will need to adjust as needed.
That is a significant amount of growth over just four years, even considering the growth of smartphone accessibility over the same period. By 2016 smartphones were still widespread, and a lack of them compared to now wouldn’t account for the astonishing growth that was found at the time.
Furthermore, eCommerce, in general, has been growing significantly ever since the start of the pandemic, where more people have been relying on shipping and remote services than ever before. We’ve had to rethink a lot of what we do. As a result, there have been more people trying out mobile eCommerce than ever before. It’s too late to hop on that particular train from the start now, but ignoring mobile eCommerce (and mobile marketing as a natural extension) will only ensure that an organization gets further behind the rest of the pack.
There’s a lot to take in here, and you might need a reference, so come back to this page as you feel the need. You might not be able to do it today but talk to your boss (or your boss’ boss if need be) about the importance of mobile marketing. It’s only going to become more important as time goes on, and eventually, your boss will see how important it is. It might just be too late when they do.
We hope that this information has helped you understand what you need to talk about and given you some points to bring up. It will not only help you but your boss and your organization as well.
