Mobile Isn't for B2B or B2C, It's for Everyone
Mobile is an area that will experience continued growth and user attention with the brands willing to adopt new technologies, analytics, and advertising strategies coming out ahead.
Mobile is an area that will experience continued growth and user attention with the brands willing to adopt new technologies, analytics, and advertising strategies coming out ahead.
The other day I was having a discussion about mobile with a friend who works for a large B2B brand. I was explaining my opinion that mobile is one of the most important considerations for your modern digital marketing mix and you couldn’t possibly overvalue it at this point. My friend pushed back and said something along the lines of: “Well, we’re B2B so mobile doesn’t really matter to us.” Of course, I responded noting that mobile is not a “B2B” or “B2C” thing, it’s simply how the world functions and there is expectation of a great experience with your brand across all devices.
It dawned on me that this is a parallel to the rapid growth of social years ago. It’s easy to recall a day most conservative business brands were scoffing at using tools like blogs, Twitter, and other social sites as channels to reach their audiences because they either didn’t take the tools seriously or simply didn’t understand how to use them for marketing purposes. Similar to social, however, most marketers are now seeing the value and increasing their budgets here in 2013.
The Bigger Picture: Changing Consumer, Behavior, and Meaningful Conversions
According to recent research Google conducted, 90 percent of people now use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time, and 98 percent of those people move between devices in that same day to accomplish a task. It’s in every marketer’s interest to be able to reach users with the right message on the right device at the right time. In mobile, just like in search and social, everything is “to consumer” regardless of your type of business.
And mobile isn’t just hot for usage, it’s hot for conversions. Mobile is now 8 percent of all conversions that we’re seeing in Google Analytics, and mobile conversions have grown by about 180 percent in just the last year. This presents a challenge for most of the brands that are still using the same conversion standards as their desktop campaigns. However, by not considering these in the ROI equation, advertisers are not recognizing the “full value” of their mobile investment.
Mobile changes the game and introduces a whole new set of mobile conversions: and these conversions happen in many different places. As Wilson Kerr, vice president of sales and business development at Unbound Commerce, notes: “Online, performance is measured by clicks and likes and other non-monetized engagement. Mobile, on the other hand, is all about capturing that contextual here-and-now, real-world moment when consumers are most likely to buy.”
Measuring Your Own Success: Establish Effective Mobile Conversions
Measuring your own site and app data can provide useful, actionable insights to drive your broader mobile strategy and help you make a case to increase spend or experiment. But only if you’re tracking conversions specific to your mobile experience. Here are a few key conversion events to think about (of course, as you do on the web, you’ll want to develop the right mix for your brand):
My experience continues to be that mobile is undervalued by businesses and agencies and yet of increasingly high value to consumers. It’s an area that, like social, will experience continued growth and user attention with the brands willing to adopt new technologies, analytics, and advertising strategies coming out ahead. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, measuring (and assigning value to) the conversions that matter to mobile is your key to valuing mobile success.