Mike McGuire

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Mike McGuire
Research VP
11 years at Gartner
21 years IT industry

Mike McGuire guides digital marketers on best practices for developing strategies. He specializes in how context, community, location and time — combined with a consumer’s purchase history and purchase intent — are changing the relationship between consumers and brands …Read Full Bio

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Mobile Marketing by the Numbers: Too Big to Ignore

by Mike McGuire  |  October 19, 2012  |  2 Comments

So you’re a mobile marketer and you know the mobile opportunity is big .  Really big.  But maybe you’re running into doubters or just executives who want some numbers to support the strategic bet you’re asking them to make.  You and I know mobile marketing must be an extension of your company’s overall digital marketing strategy.  What that mobile strategy needs to be depends entirely on the product or service you sell.  Mobile marketing techniques that work for the seller of coffee, or fast food, will by definition differ greatly from, say, Subaru dealers.  

But when dealing with doubters or the uninitiated, especially when we’re talking about something as challenging as mobile marketing, giving them a sense of the scale of the mobile opportunity and the velocity of the change in directly related areas — mobile advertising and m-commerce, for example — can help frame the discussion. The following links can give you some of the data points to help frame that discussion. 

Here are some numbers that should help in those situations where somebody wants a bit more quantification than your intuition that “it’s big.”   

In particular, the IAB’s report showing mobile notched a 95% growth in mobile advertising revenue between the first half of 2011 and the first half of 2012, is a pretty solid nugget for any CMO to latch onto, given the relationship between marketing and advertising.  
Now, having said all of that, and provided you with these exciting links, it’s important not to develop your own reality distortion field. (As far as I know, Steve Jobs was the only person who could really create and maintain such a thing.)  Will all strategic marketing initiatives for all products and service require a specific mobile marketing strategy? Nope.  
Developing engaging and useful mobile marketing techniques requires deft deployment of apps and offers that create, for you and your brand, a locus of convenience for each and every one of those customers and prospects out there.    So your customers might not buy Subarus from their Android-based smartphones (yet), but they are very likely checking www.subaru.com from their smartphones or media tablets.  If you are a B2B marketers, perhaps selling computer chips, time- and location-based sensitivity probably are not crucial elements of your marketing plans because the folks on your sales teams are focused on deep relationship selling.  Getting on a PC OEM’s bill-of-materials involves a long, sustained sales and marketing effort, not a deal of the day coupon or “buy-now-and-get-10%-off” SMS message.
Yet, the data points I’ve highlighted describe the scale of the opportunity, but they serve as a starting point. How you use those to frame your strategic discussions for your B2B or B2C opportunities is where the real work begins.  I suggest starting with answering the question how you can use mobile to create a locus of convenience for your prospects and existing customers, whether they’re buying coffee, Subarus or computer chips. 

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2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Policy update – October 2012   October 28, 2012 at 6:36 pm

    [...] it is Mobile marketing that is driving the real interest in mobile with some big numbers. In  Mobile Marketing by the Numbers: Too Big to Ignore.  , 6 billion: The number of mobile phone subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2011 – 2 [...]

  • 2 Policy update – Oct 2012   October 28, 2012 at 6:40 pm

    [...] it is Mobile marketing that is driving the real interest in mobile with some big numbers. In  Mobile Marketing by the Numbers: Too Big to Ignore.  , 6 billion: The number of mobile phone subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2011 - 2 [...]