Marketers, who recently integrated social media into their overall marketing plans, are now charged with embarking into mobile. In other words, the agenda of your typical CMO or marketing director is getting even busier.

Published: 06 Jun 2011

Marketers, who recently integrated social media into their overall marketing plans, are now charged with embarking into mobile. In other words, the agenda of your typical CMO or marketing director is getting even busier.

The mobile marketing market is very much in its infancy, meaning that future plans for usage are still in flux, according to a new study.

The study, “Mobile Marketing: Plans, Trends and Measurability” (released by King Fish Media, Maxymiser, HubSpot and Junta42), has indicated that companies are faced with a growing installed base of mobile devices among their customers and several competing platforms. The biggest upside is to use mobile marketing as a relationship building tool and eventually as a sales generator. While actual monetisation is taking off slowly, the opportunity exists to deliver tools, content and branding opportunities. Getting a customer to download an app and claiming a piece of real estate on their phone is one-to-one marketing at its finest. The study features 563 respondents.

Among the key findings:

A third of companies currently have a mobile strategy in place, and among those who don’t two thirds plan to have one within the next 12 months.

Not a lot of investment is currently taking place - only about 12 percent of brands’ marketing spend is on mobile.

However, the vast majority of respondents (82 percent) plan to increase their spending on mobile over the next year, with 30 percent taking the budget from mainstream marketing and advertising.

There seems to be a movement towards having more native apps developed in the future. Currently two-thirds of companies use a mobile website, while 28 percent are using a native app; 27 percent are using both. Next year, they foresee an increase in native app development as 43 percent plan to have an app and 49 percent report they will be using an app and mobile site.

The overall ROI/payback for mobile is slow to develop as evidenced by the fact that 24 percent report that ROI for mobile programs has exceeded or performed as expected and a full one third have not measured it at all. 41 percent say on the future mobile marketing programs will need to show a positive return to continue the program and 34 percent say they will be tracking, but a positive return will not be required at this time.

Most commonly, brands are using mobile initiatives to build/grow relationships, which explain why the most popular content types are currently: social media, branded, email capabilities, geo-location/maps and general reference.

Additional findings:

• Almost three-quarters of all companies are currently planning apps using the iPhone platform vs. Android (45 percent), iPad (41 percent) and Blackberry (41 percent). Looking out 12 months, interest in iPad (76 percent) and Android (75 percent) rises significantly. iPhone and Blackberry stay flat. Interestingly, 68 percent of companies have no plans to develop apps using the Windows operating system.

• Social media, branded content, email, geo-location/maps and general reference are most often mentioned as applications being executed as part of a mobile initiative. Original branded content, ads, expert content and videos are the types of content used most often in mobile format.

• Commerce over mobile channels is slow to take hold among respondents. Less than 20 percent are currently conducting mobile commerce, mostly over a mobile web site. Interest does rise for 2012.

• Nearly 60 percent are tracking visitors to their website from mobile devices, usually with Google Analytics. Among those tracking, companies are finding that a relatively small percentage of traffic is coming from a mobile device—on average 8 percent. And only about 10 percent of customer/prospects are using a mobile app developed by the company.

• While few companies (7 percent) are currently personalising the mobile experience, there is strong interest (42 percent) in doing so in the future. The main reasons to offer mobile personalisation are to increase customer loyalty, cross sell/upsell and set up a recommendations campaign.