"Smartphones cover more thant 60 % out of all sold mobile phones."I wrote about mobile convergence earlier this year and it is really happening. Mobile usage of Helsingin Sanomat has tripled in a year. In Netherlands, usage of mobile web has already overtaken the traditional web usage. In Finland there are more than a million mobile users and same amount of mobile searches per day. Visits in mobile services in general has doubled in a year and the growth is approximately 40 % per year. It's very likely that also mobile advertising will follow and start growing soon.
Global spent for mobile advertising was 2,3 billion euros in 2011 and the prediction is 14,4 billion euros in four years. Mobile advertising spent will grow from 0,5 % to 4 % in five years when it comes to advertisers' total media budget. When volumes are growing fast, you need to have a solid back end infrastructure. And of course, you need to think what kind of mobile services you are offering?
Consider multichannel publishing and whether to have mobile optimized website, hybrid or native mobile application. I guess the mobile optimized website or responsive design solution may be easier, but on the other hand, then you are losing some of the mobile device features such as camera and GPS. I know that planning is not an easy task but that's the beauty of mobile marketing.
Geo locations services are very important if you think about location targeted advertising or guiding people to your store. Of course, you should consider independent or third party technology, services and platforms like QR codes, Foursquare, Facebook and Layar.You can find some of these technologies from Gartner's hype trend below presented by Jarno from Aller Media.
You can see more and more QR codes nowadays and just a couple weeks ago Citymarket announced Facebook check-in deals in Finland. Still, I think the augmented reality is the coolest technology (although probably not the cheapest one) as you can see from the videos below. You can easily test it yourself when you get the Layar to your mobile device (from App Store, Android Market or Ovi Store etc.).
Fonecta is in Layar but they also launched a new smartphone application called Fonecta Caller. This (free?) application connects to Fonecta's database so you will always know who called you, and it will also get other contact details of the caller. You can filter certain callers and see offers from companies near you. If you wish to use an offer you can call to a company or get a discount code to your phone. This application can be very useful and I hope it stays free for end users. Check your mobile app store or Fonecta Caller's Facebook page during the upcoming couple of months.
And then back to analytics and summary. Here are couple of bullet points for you:
- mobile usage is overtaking traditional web usage in couple of years
- check from your web analytics system amount of mobile users and devices
- what services and technologies you could already use?
- are we able to do multichannel publishing?
- should we create mobile site, hybrid solution or native application?
- should we use mobile advertising?
- how this can help our business, where is the money?
- there are multiple amount of page views in mobile (power of touch screen)
- click through rate (CTR) is multiple in mobile advertising
- you can use geolocation and geo-targeting in advertising
- you can guide mobile users to your offline store
- you should measure cost per action (e.g. downloaded offers)
- you should measure cost per customer acquisition (CPA)
- you should measure return on investment (ROI) of mobile channel