Digital Marketing Power

In December the author of this article wrote about the new cool gadgets that help you keep track of your exercise targets. Now he brings you the best 5 Mobile Apps that help you get back in shape. Particularly useful just after Christmas.

For Facebook it must look like a no-brainer - exploit its huge consumer loyalty and half a billion mobile phone users as a way of opening up the mobile market to blue chip advertisers. Trouble is, there are reasons for the limited success so far of mobile advertising and none of them have completely gone away. Even if Facebook succeeds, others eyeing this potentially massive market may still struggle to cash in. Earlier this week, Facebook announced new ways for businesses to advertise to its users, including on mobile for the first time, by having marketing messages appear in its members' news feeds -- partly an effort to establish regular revenue streams as it gears up for an initial public offering.

Marketers (40%) are finding that delivering a positive customer experience is harder in mobile marketing than on the web. That’s likely no surprise, but what may be troubling is that 70% of marketers describe their multichannel experience for customers as “okay” or “poor.

These findings, from a new IBM sponsored survey of more than 500 chief marketing officers and ecommerce leaders, revealed that while these leaders understand the importance of mobile, two-thirds still do not know how to define their mobile user experience.

The top three most serious issues around mobile marketing were defined as bad navigation/poor “findabilty,” screen-sizing issues and form-filling problems.

Mobile traffic continues to grow, with respondents attributing 19% of their total traffic to a mobile device. Even so, many companies continue to optimize their websites for mobile marketing and experiences, as opposed to building a mobile experience from the ground up which would provide an improved experience for the customer.

While searching on your phone Something Interesting! shows up and you decide to click on it. This leads to a minuscule website requiring a combination of creative mobile gestures (press and zoom, swipe, drag, tilting the phone a different way) to help you sift through content. You zoom in, "No, that's too close." You move up, "Argh, that's too far up." After a while you have already forgotten what the Something Interesting! was and an incoming text message reclaims your attention, leaving the hard-to-navigate website in the dust.

This is where responsive design comes in.

It’s easy to create a mobile website anyone can view on just about any mobile device. There are two ways to do it—create a mobile version of your existing website or create a fully-scalable version of your website which works on all devices.

Having a responsive website is very important in this day and age as more and more people are using small devices to access the internet and view websites. Any web master will tell you that website layout greatly affects your traffic and if a person is using a small phone to access your website then you must make sure they can make use of your resources.

At this point, you may be predictionedout. But, if you can make room for one more post about what mobile marketing holds in store for 2013 (U.S. focus), I promise to make it worth your while.

Mobile has started to play a huge role in marketing over the last couple of years, and this year will be no different. In fact, I am going to be so bold as to say that this is the year that mobile finally breaks out and has that hero moment that prognosticators have been talking about for the last 10-12 years.

Before I dig into my five predictions though, it is probably worth looking at a little background data that have helped inform my thinking

Read on....