We have long passed the mobile tipping point, says Michael Osterloh, CEO of Host Africa which provide hosting and domain check services. He suggests that it’s no longer a question of whether mobile marketing is important, but rather how mobile marketing can be improved, using mobile trends and consumer behaviours.
Host Africa have compiled a few reasons as to why you should care about your mobile presence and regularly maintain it.
Perhaps ‘consume’ is slightly too weak a word to describe the adoption rate of mobile media. ‘Devour’ may be more apt. One study reported that as much as 51% of American Internet traffic is via mobile and that the average American spends as much as 5.6 hours per day on mobile devices. That’s roughly 23% of their day. This love affair with mobile consumption gives you the opportunity to engage, and if you’re not at the races, then you’re losing out.
The sheer volume of information available has created a ‘goldfish syndrome’ in markets, where users are so spoilt for choice, that they’ll only afford you three or four seconds to give them what they want before moving off. This impatience takes two forms: Bounce rate and click back. Bounce rate is when a user leaves your website after viewing only one page (the goldfish hasn’t found what they wanted on that particular page and so leaves).
Click back is when a user reaches your website but clicks the back button when they find the site lacking or irrelevant. Google will take these factors into account and penalise your website accordingly, thus damaging your marketing momentum.
Despite the enormous leaps that mobile consumption has taken in recent years, it appears that advertisers haven’t kept pace. In 2015, a total of $50bn was spent on Internet advertising, of which only $13bn was spent on mobile advertising. If you recall the 51% adoption rate mentioned earlier, then you’ll see the massive opportunity in this. Mobile is definitely the future, and predictions have it dominating digital ad spend within three years. The time to strike is now.
A responsive, user-friendly and well-designed mobile site is an increasingly important weapon in your marketing arsenal. If you want to stay relevant in today’s rollercoaster markets and to your goldfish consumers, then it’s best you keep yours handy.
