Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

eMarketer recently called mobile marketing the “linchpin” of retailer success this past holiday season. MarketLive’s Performance Index for Q4 2014 alone revealed that mobile traffic grew 47 percent, while smartphone-driven purchases resulted in mobile revenue increases of more than 100 percent. In short, you can’t afford to not have a mobile marketing strategy for your business. Here are some simple ways you can implement a mobile marketing strategy — even if you don’t consider yourself a mobile marketer....

Mobile shopping may not have any great age barriers.

It turns out that older shoppers are comfortable using their phones to shop, with a fourth (25%) of mobile shoppers in the U.S. being 55 or older, based on a new study.

The only other age group that accounts for a larger share of mobile shoppers are those between the ages of 25 and 34, according to a report by Business Insider Intelligence.

Aggregating various research studies, BI Intelligence analyzed the buying patterns by various factors, such as age, with males 18-34 among the most active. Here’s that breakdown....

Are you interested in learning more about B2B mobile marketing? If you’re like many people, you can think of a lot of ways B2C companies use mobile marketing. But if you work in the B2B world, then you might be stuck trying to come up with B2B mobile marketing ideas.

The good news is that B2B mobile marketing can be every bit as useful in the business marketplace as it is in the consumer marketplace.With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of the best uses of B2B mobile marketing so that you can apply some of the ideas to your business. But before we get started, let’s recap a few mobile marketing statistics so that you can get familiar with why B2B mobile marketing is such an important tool....

Mobile commerce sales have doubled in the space of a year and now account for almost a quarter of total online sales, according to a new report.

It again highlights the growing importance of m-commerce at a time when many retailers are still struggling to develop effective, user-friendly mobile sites and apps. The new data from IMRG and Capgemini shows that sales completed through mobile devices accounted for 23.2% of total ecommerce sales in Q2 2013, up from 11.6% in the same period last year...

These are the chattiest brands on Snapchat, demonstrating that time-sensitive images can actually be a strength in brand marketing.Mobile apps such as Twitter, Vine, Instagram and Snapchat are turning traditional media marketing upside down, challenging brands in increasingly new ways. Human interactions are key to brand loyalty and building a strong consumer base, and these mobile apps allow for two-way conversations.

Snapchat, which launched in the iTunes App Store in September 2011, is popular with a much younger demographic than some marketing execs are used to, but it takes little or no cost to interact with customers by way of snaps. Compare that to other pricey forms of old-school advertising, and that’s a major plus...

For the growing number of consumers who rely on their mobile devices to search for local business information, their focus is on making a purchase — and fast.

The latest Google/Nielsen “Mobile Path to Purchase” study, released last week, shows that consumers who use their mobile devices to find and research local products and services do so when they are ready to buy....

More than $101.37 billion will be spent on ads served in 2016 to mobile phones and tablets worldwide. That’s a 400 percent increase from 2013. From 2016 to 2019, mobile ads will nearly double again, rising to $195.55 billion. That figure will account for 70.1 percent of all digital advertising as well as more than one-quarter of total media ad spending worldwide.

It’s all about the number of consumers adopting mobile devices. As that number soars, marketers are chasing consumers into mobile markets. Next year, eMarketer estimates, there will be more than 2 billion smartphone users worldwide, more than one-quarter of whom will be in China.

Although $100 billion was purchased last year using mobile devices, brands are still facing a number of challenges that inhibit meeting consumers’ needs, according to a Forrester researcher at Mobile Marketer’s Mobile FirstLook: Strategy 2015 conference.

During the “Forrester Research: The Mobile Mind Shift: Closing the Capability Gap” session, the most daunting challenge presented was that many marketers have approached mobile in the same fashion as they would a PC, by shrinking Web experiences onto a smaller screen. Although this tactic is not necessarily wrong, mobile strategies need to be retooled because there is a fundamental difference between the way consumers interact with smartphones and tablets compared to their PCs.

“Mobile is not a PC, okay, they’re not a PC. With that said, 62 percent of companies still treat mobile as a slimmed down version of what they design for a PC,” said Julie Ask, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research....

Advertisers want to zero in on the mobile-focused consumer.

Yesterday, we provided an in-depth look at how mobile could become the premiere advertising channel. But there's obviously plenty of work to be done.

So we asked industry players: What is mobile's big challenge going forward?Here are the seven most-intriguing responses we gathered....

The modern consumer of today is mobile, social, savvy and smart. Your online and mobile platforms must be able to serve them what they need and want from you how and when they need it.

Take a listen to this episode of the Social Zoom Factor episode for15 steps to build your mobile marketing strategy and plan. I share with you tips, strategies and best practices to help you integrate, create amazing user experiences and drive real business return on your investment. It’s not just about developing a pretty mobile website or application, but instead about how you can develop and launch an integrated platform that serves the needs of your customers and help you achieve your goals and objectives....

With marketers allocating more advertising spend to mobile, a number of recent campaigns highlight how brands are now going beyond basic apps and sites to prominently play up location.

Here are four interesting examples within the past few months that demonstrate what’s happening in mobile and where brands are investing most right now....

Is your marketing reaching your target audience on smartphones and tablets? Here is the 2014 mobile data including charts and research you need.Is your firm, product and/or brand findable when your target audience looks for it on a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device?

If you’re not sure of the answer to this question then you have work to do. Since today’s customers, especially millennials, want information when they’re seeking it, in the form they want and via the device they’re using at the time.

For consumers, information is no longer, one device fits all, especially for digital content formats....

About 70 percent consumers are expected to use their smartphones for shopping in the coming year, a new study has revealed.

The study conducted by research firm IDC found that 69 percent of respondents agree that the smartphone is a critical tool for shopping and is going to transform the shopping experience. It was also revealed that about seven in 10 respondents checked prices using their smartphones, and five in 10 said that they checked reviews from their smartphones.

The research found that one in five survey respondents bought from a competitor while they were shopping in a retail store this holiday season, while one in three purchased much more online versus in a retail store this year compared to last year. The research analysed the app and mobile Web activity of over 10,000 smartphone users during the holiday shopping season and Amazon came on top with more consumer accessing its app while brick-and-mortar retailers lagged behind....