MOBILE is the most widely used media channel globally, with over one billion mobile devices sold each year. The medium is referred to as 'always on and always connected' and provides new ways for organisations and brands to connect with customers across all sectors.
Perhaps that's why eMarketer predicts that UK mobile advertising spend will break the £1 billion mark this year after a 126 per cent year-on-year increase.
Mobile marketing isn't a standalone tactic, but fits within the communications mix. For many the assumption is that mobile marketing is all about sending messages to the consumer, be it via SMS, Apps, coupons, advertising and so on. Only ever use this medium to proactively contact your customers if you know for certain that the message will be of value to them and where they have given explicit permission to contact them.
But there's much more to consider when putting mobile marketing into practice. Your website from a few years ago isn't going to automatically resize on a small screen, and Flash won't work on the iPad anyway, so the first step is to ensure your website is mobile compliant, and is as far as possible 'future-proofed'.
Retailers are sometimes reported as cursing 'showrooming' where people enter the shop, mobile in hand, to physically see the product but then scan the barcode and then leave to order online.
In a recent article, The Meaning of Shopping Experiences Augmented By Mobile Internet Devices, published in the Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice, University of Tennessee academics Brian I Spaid and Daniel J Flint argue that it is important for managers to realise that shoppers use mobile devices for widely differing purposes. "A customer taking a picture of a product may be scanning the bar code to price check or just as likely taking a snapshot intended to gauge the opinions of friends or family."
Marketers generally are now faced with increasingly savvy shoppers who have almost instant access to all the information they need before making a purchase, so mobile should be seen as an opportunity. One thing's for sure: it's not going away.
So brand marketers need to understand mobile use so that their customers want to engage with them and join the conversation. The Tennessee research revealed that mobile use injected fun into the shopping experience, for example by tapping into one's social network for real-time clothing advice so retailers need to think how to encourage that.
Spaid and Flint argue that another consequence of mobile use in-store is that shoppers may spend longer in the shop, but they're not 'shopping' all that time. Shops that measure "dwell time" need to interpret the stats to take account of new shopping behaviours and "retailers should help them relax and enjoy this time" because they say research has revealed that "heightened relaxation increases the monetary valuation of products". So a happy and relaxed shopper is less likely to spend time on price comparison sites.
Another recent report from America provides some fascinating signs for the way things are going. It calls into question whether 'showrooming' really is an issue because most mobile research is happening outside of the store: only 6% of users were at a retail store the last time they accessed retail-related information on their mobile.
The research also distinguishes between smartphones and tablets, both of which are of course 'mobile' but their use is quite different. So as marketers we need to use different tactics depending on the device being used, so for example location is important for smartphone users, directing them to the nearest store, whereas pricing and deals may be more important for Tablet users.
Shopping with a smart-phone will also increasingly mean using the phone as your wallet, using your mobile as a payment method at point-of-sale. Between 2011 and 2012, proximity payment transaction value in the US tripled, eMarketer estimates, and is predicted to increase almost tenfold between 2013 and 2015.
* Richard Houdmont is Ireland director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Visit www. cim.co.uk for more information.