The Smartphone revolution: why mobile is THE channel marketers need to embrace

Mobile is literally in our faces. Marketers can't ignore the impact it's had on the industry, but just how can we fully embrace the power of it?  Some pretty sensational statistics to pay attention to in this article too!

The Smartphone revolution: why mobile is THE channel marketers need to embrace

The first mobile telephone call from a handheld device was made on 3 April 1973 when Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, placed a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. Now, in 2014, an amazing 60% of the world’s population own a mobile phone, with 1.75 billion of these devices being categorised as ‘Smartphones’. Although this rate of adoption is it in itself amazing, it is the degree to which mobile devices have penetrated every aspect of modern life that now effectively makes mobile a channel that marketers cannot afford to ignore.

In fact, here as 3radical we would argue that mobile is THE channel which should be keeping marketers awake night…

Here are some more astonishing facts for you:

• More than 90% of consumers consider mobile devices so central to their day-to-day lives that they keep them within arm’s reach 24 hours a day.
• It takes just over an hour for the average consumer to report a lost phone, compared to over 24 hours to report a lost wallet.
• Over 25% of all internet searches are now performed on mobile devices.
• Smartphone users spend an average of 12 minutes a day on calls, 14 minutes playing games, 16 minutes listening to music, 17 minutes using social media and 25 minutes browsing online.

So, not only are smartphones increasingly becoming the primary channel for remaining connected with friends and colleagues, they are now increasingly also acting as the bridge between the online and the physical world. Or, in the case of retailers, the link between the digital showroom and ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets. Conduct a straw poll among consumers and you’ll typically find that over 70% of people now make purchases using their smartphones. But it is not simply the final purchase transaction that mobiles are being used for.

Increasingly mobiles are also the tool of choice for research, enabling consumers to check reviews, compare prices and locate physical outlets, as well as instantly sharing their purchases and purchasing experiences – good or bad – with friends and followers.

And throughout this lifecycle consumers are demanding that engagement must be a fun and rewarding experience. This is especially true ‘Millennials’, the younger segment of consumers for whom texting and instant messaging are the preferred mechanisms of communication. For this segment of society – as is the case increasingly for all consumers – traditional marketing channels and techniques are simply no longer working.

However, that is not to say that traditional marketing techniques cannot be applied to the mobile channel. Due to the intensely personal nature of the mobile channel, it is vital that marketers don’t just attempt to deploy ‘one size fits all’ mobile applications or simply shrink the desktop experience to fit smaller screens. Likewise ‘spray and pray’ type communications also don’t work on the mobile channel. After all, when was the last time you responded to a text about PPI claims?

And that’s because when marketers are attempting to engage via mobile channels they are effectively entering the consumer’s mobile space, where every interaction is closely scrutinised and messages are frequently classified as (at best) irrelevant or (at worst) interruptive.

But don’t have nightmares – in our next post we’ll start to explain how marketers can successfully leverage mobile engagement to generate mutually rewarding conversations capable of driving a wide range of positive business outcomes.

By: Will Stuart-Jones, 3radical

Source: 3Radical