Today, more than half the planet owns and uses a smart phone. By 2020, it’ll be 80%.
Only a few things have made as profound an impact on the way we live, work and play as mobile devices. “Most people check their phones 150 times a day, but spend only 177 minutes on their phones per day [and] Google calculates that mobile sessions, on average, are just one minute and ten seconds long. Well, that’s a relief. I was afraid that it was shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, which is nine seconds,” says Greg Jarboe at ReelSEO.
People have been saying for the last few years that you should think mobile first, before web, and now companies are doing just that by prioritizing their mobile websites and apps. According to eMarketer, the global mobile advertising market will account for more than 50 percent of all digital ad expenditure for the first time, and cross more than a cool $100 billion in spending. U.S. mobile ad expenditures alone are expected to cross $40 billion. There’s no escaping the mobile tipping point now. Making meaningful mobile interactions with your consumers in 2016 will be key. Here are two things you can start doing today to improve your mobile marketing strategy.
#1: Leverage location
Location matters for mobile, and with location data you can have a bigger impact on your marketing and results. Do you have a trade show coming up where you know all of your customers will be in one place? With geo-fencing, you can target your customers, and continue to geo-retarget them with your message once they’ve left the showroom floor.
Want to reach people within miles of your business? With location context, you can create rich audience segments based on real-time user location through mobile devices. Research shows that if you target mobile devices within 1-2 miles of your business, engagement increases by 48%. Add in timing considerations, and watch this number grow.
#2: Focus on native advertising
Native advertising matches and blends in with the medium it appears on, and it is often referred to as sponsored content. Native advertising is dominating mobile marketing, and rebuilding the trust between consumers and advertisers while yielding high impact results for marketers. Seventy-three percent of U.S. media buyers are now investing in native. By 2018, spending on native will reach $21 billion.
Native advertising is drawing double the click-though rate (CTR) of display banner ads, and in many cases, bypasses ad blockers to reach the right audience in context. Viewers have been so inundated with display banner ads that now they just mentally block them out. They are becoming blind to them, and with the increase of ad blockers and the decrease of human attention spans, advertisers have to grab someone’s attention quicker and fight to keep it. The good news for mobile advertisers is that only 2% of the mobile user base has installed ad blockers.
It’s no surprise that today’s customers want to be cared for everywhere. As we move further into the mobile era, it’s crucial that companies create a human experience inside mobile. Few other things are as pivotal to sealing the deal as a device that the customer now carries with them everywhere.
