With the close of 2011, marketers and businesses of every size are looking back over the year to learn from the leaps and bounds that mobile has taken over the year to help to design their strategies for 2012, because there is one lesson that could not be ignored: mobile has arrived.
The industry may have forecasted more rapid brand adoption than what was achieved, but this doesn’t mean that mobile didn’t make it, because it certainly has. And now, due to a number of important reasons, it is about to explode. These reasons include the following trends:
• Almost half (44 percent) of every mobile phone used in the United States is a smartphone.
• Adults use mobile to read news more often than they use print.
• Brands worldwide are issuing formal requests for proposals (RFPs) calling for Mobile Agencies of Record (MAOR).
• Brands around the world are altering the way that they function in order to provide multi-channel campaigns with full mobile integration.
• Social media is a central part of the mobile scene.
Studies of mobile retail sales between April and December 2011 have shown that traffic and spending is also rising significantly.
In April, the retail dollars share online that belongs to mobile devices in the U.S. doubled from 1.87 percent to December’s 3.74 percent. The holiday shopping season saw a large jump in the number of consumers who used their mobile devices to interact with retailers and make decisions or purchases. Though the percentage of actual sales through mobile devices represented only 3 percent, the interaction itself was tremendous, and it may have built new habits among the device users to set the stage for further rapid growth throughout 2012.
There are, therefore, some enormous marketing trends predicted for next year. These include:
• M-commerce exploding to the point that it becomes mainstream.
• The rapid growth of mobile sites and a slowing in the growth of apps
• The creation and use of inbound (content) mobile marketing
