Local Business Marketing With Mobile Devices

Consumer Mobile Use Is Growing Fast In many of my conversations with potential clients, especially those local businesses selling physical products or services with a bricks and mortar storefront, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of mobile search of their potential customer. Smartphone and tablet use, to research and find local businesses offering what they want is growing year on year. This past year Google has stated that mobile searches in countries like the USA and UK have exceeded desktop searches, but they didn’t offer any exact figures. Some interesting information can be found here at the Mobile Marketing Association UK and in a different original article written by Josh Manion the following points confirm the growing importance of mobile in retail sales.   As Halloween looms, marketers have their eyes trained on this year’s holiday season — but slower retail sales in September may portend less robust spending. How can retailers improve their share of holiday sales? One way is mobile. I’d like to think this is the year mobile comes of age, graduating from a “nice to have” piece of the holiday retail strategy to something that is mission-critical. But that means more than building mobile-friendly websites and launching great-looking apps. Mobile can deliver real competitive clout, but its real power lies in enhancing the cross-channel customer experience. Mobile devices have become omnipresent extensions of our lives as we move through the day. So it’s not surprising that nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of consumers respond to calls to action delivered on a mobile device within sight of a retailer, according to an MDG Advertising infographic. Yet just 23 percent of marketers are using location-based data in marketing campaigns, despite the power to engage consumers in-store and near-store. This is symptomatic of a bigger question — how to use all sources of omni-channel data to support coordinated, end-to-end marketing strategies and campaigns. Mobile Commerce At The Holidays Let’s start with the numbers. IBM’s online holiday report for 2014 reported mobile commerce made up about 23 percent of online sales in the last two months of the year. In fact, you’ll recall that one of the big retail stories of last year showed mobile’s strength in driving visitors to websites. Walmart, for example, reported online visitors viewed more than 1.5 billion pages in the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, with 70 percent of that traffic coming from mobile websites. Forrester reported that slightly more than two-thirds of multi-screen consumers began their shopping process from a smartphone last year, while 68 percent used them in stores. This year, the impact of mobile commerce on holiday sales is likely to be higher, with more mobile technology shipped this year, better-optimized mobile sites (think Google’s new algorithm) and better mobile payment choices. Industry analysts at Gartner are particularly bullish about mobile’s future. Gartner this year predicted that mobile would comprise fully half of all US digital commerce revenue by 2017, driven by changing customer behaviors as they engage using mobile devices. And Forrester forecasts that tablets will comprise […]

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