We are all more mobile these days, so shouldn’t your marketing strategy be just as mobile too? Mobile is fast becoming one of the most important delivery channels for businesses and brands today, with smartphone shipments surpassing PC shipments in back in 2012. Now is the time when businesses absolutely must either adapt advertising strategies to mobile phones and tablets or else be left behind in the mobile marketing race for good.
You might conclude that we’d be recommending investing in advertising for mobile devices. However, before jumping into the mobile advertising arena, take this fact into consideration: A 2012 study by Pretarget and ComScore discovered that clicks on mobile ads lead to nearly zero sales conversions. In another study by the Pew Research Center only 12 percent of smartphone users said that they had ever intentionally clicked on an ad. And Trademob, which aggregates more than 100 mobile ad networks and provides post-download conversion tracking to measure advertising efficiency, studied 6 million clicks around the world over six weeks, finding that 40% of clicks are essentially worthless. They found that 22% of clicks are accidental, while 18% are fraudulent. That could be one thing holding back mobile advertising as some advertisers question how effective their spend is on mobile.
So, while more consumers than ever are viewing marketing content via mobile phones, very few of those consumers are interested in online advertisements. As a result, we’re not recommending significant focus on mobile advertising to our clients just yet. Rather we recommend focusing on deploying apps that enhance the customer experience, and content that looks good and is easy to use on a mobile screen. And we’ll watch this space…