Is mobile marketing worth your consideration this year?

Happy New Year – I do hope you're up for trying new marketing things to make this year more prosperous?

There are many predictions for marketing trends to watch in 2013, but one which consistently appears is mobile marketing – in other words marketing using the mobile phone.

I’ve previously talked about QR readers and QR codes, I’ve also talked about SMS texting but  I believe the one thing you may really need to consider this year is whether your website needs to be mobile compliant for easy access by your potential customers.

Smartphones now represent more than 50% of new mobile phones being purchased and Ericsson estimates that there will be over 50 billion connected devices in circulation by 2020. In the US it's predicted that 2013 will mark the time that online access is greater from mobile devices than from PC’s or laptops. I’m sure we will not be far behind in the UK.

The point is we spend more than double the time using our phones to access the internet than we do for making calls. And 50% more time accessing social media sites as we do texting.  Take a look at O2’s information from last summer:

Activity	Min/day
Browsing the internet	24.81
Checking social networks	17.49
Playing games	14.44
Listening to music	15.64
Making calls	12.13
Checking/writing emails	11.1
Text messaging	10.2
Watching TV/films	9.39
Reading books	9.3
Taking photographs	3.42
Total	128

So how is your website viewed on mobile devices? Have you looked?  If it’s not compatible and difficult to navigate you may be losing custom.  This is not smart in a tough trading climate - people are accessing their smartphones ALL THE TIME not just in office hours so you have more opportunity than ever to engage.

On a similar note have you restricted access to your social media messages by posting these only during working hours?  I was amazed to find the uplift in Twitter followers I got when I set up tweets to go out at evenings and weekends – and it’s likely to be because people are accessing social media via their phone (one of the main activities people do whilst they are watching TV apparently!) 

if you’re targeting commuters this is a no-brainer - accessing social media as they travel to and from work is essentially a given…

Have you made your website mobile compatible and did it increase business for you?  I’d love to hear.

Tweetables:

It's a growing trend - find out more about mobile marketing click to tweet

We use mobiles twice as much for surfing as calling! click to tweet



Thanks to IntelFreePress on Flickr for the pic