How Are Marketers Seeing Mobile in 2013
Chief Marketer conducted a survey on over 600 respondents that identified themselves as B2B marketers (48.9%), B2C marketers (18.6%) or as a company that targeted both (32.5%) to see how are they including mobile in their mix. Areas of business for respondents included advertising/sales/promotion/DM agency or consultant (31.7%), manufacturer or CPG (9.4%), retailer/cataloger/wholesaler (10.1%), banking/insurance/financial (7.5%) or publisher/media (5.5%).
According to the survey nearly half of respondents (47.8%) plan to run specific campaigns directed to mobile users in 2013, compared to only 35.9% in 2012. Over 60% integrate mobile into their overall marketing mix, however for 68% mobile represents less than 10% of the total marketing budget, because the senior management still offers little support for mobile initiatives.
Many respondents are using mobile tactics to drive traffic to non-mobile platforms like social media, microsites or retail stores, with 50.8% planning to do so this year. The most popular methods used by respondents include scannable QR codes or tags (60.5%), apps (49%) and text messaging (43.9%). For text messaging campaigns, people are seeing benefits from urgency (55%), reaching a wide mobile audience (42.9%), high open rates (36%), other advantages are the low cost, easy to setup, easy to test offers, scheduling options.
When asked what kind of ads are they planning to roll, most of respondents said they are planing campaigns to run ads on mobile ads networks (57.9%), buy ads on mobile specific sites (33.2%), sponsorship of mobile content, ads within apps, or use location based campaigns (gps, check-in).
When asked if they currently offer one or more mobile apps, or if they plan to launch one, 27% responded affirmatively, 20,7% said no but stated they have plans to do so in 2013, while 32% stated they don’t have any plans that include apps, the rest were undecided. The biggest aims with mobile apps is to build engagement and buzz, offer rich content and a great experience on the smartphone, build the brand, gather data from customers. It was no surprise that for these companies, the iPhone (91.7%) and Android devices (79.5%), were the most popular choices for creating apps for this year. Just over 70% will create apps for the iPad, while only 25% and 14% are looking to create apps for Blackberry devices or the Kindle Fire. The most cited reasons why marketers aren’t using mobile apps in their strategy are: an inability to identify a value proposition for users (45.8%), high cost (29.4%) and long development cycle (14.1%), lack of ROI (10.7%), an unwillingness to share data with the app stores (5.1%), difficulty of getting the app noticed in the stores (6.8%) or not knowing where to start (8.5%).
OR codes are pretty popular among marketers, 42.8% of them using qr codes in someway. The most often usecase is to drive traffic to a website 61.1%, bridge an offline campaign to online (54.4%), drive visitors to a specific landing page (44.2%), other goals being to identify most engaged users, to offer content that could be shared, drive participation to contests, get better ROI spend.
