Smartphone vs. Smart-marketing

How many times a day do you check your phone? Is it so many that it's almost impossible to keep track? If that's the case, you are not alone; there are 91.4 million smartphones in the U.S. Experts predict that the average time spent on mobile per day is 2 hours and 21 minutes, resulting in mobile web dominating desktop use by the end of the year.

As I am looking at the image above stating that the average user engages with their smartphones about 200 times a day, the question that comes to mind is do we still need laptops and tablets? Everything we need is in our phone now! 

It seems to be that mobile devices will soon take over desktop. Can we as marketers take a break? This means that we will need to once again rethink how to target customers effectively on a 2' by 3.5' inch screen. How are we going to grab people's attention in such little space? Plus remember we only have 9 seconds to make a connection. 

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, these mobile devices are no longer just phones, they are an extension of ourselves. Consumers find any possible way to skip ads and not being interrupted by marketers while checking the weather or playing Candy Crush. Sunil Gupta, in his article for the Harvard Business Review, discusses an interesting approach to mobile advertising. 

He claims that the best way for marketers to communicate through mobile will be apps and not ads. According to several studies, consumers don't perceive them as advertising because they value their functionality and do not find them intrusive. As of 2013, Gupta observed that users spend on average 82% of their mobile minutes with apps and only 18% with web browsers. The average person downloads 40 apps and regularly uses only 15. The most effective strategy to engage consumers through mobile is to create apps that add value to consumers' lives and enhance long-term engagement with their brands. 

As a consumer myself, I find it a lot easier to engage with a brand through an app rather than on a web browser. If for whatever reason a company's website is not optimized for mobile, they have lost me as a customer as soon as I open the page on my iPhone.

Content is King, but remember that Distribution is Queen. What and How always go together. You can have the best product or service out there, but if the customer needs to zoom in 3 times on their iPhone screen to click on a link, your content will never reach them. 

Organic vs. Non-organic

Nope! I am not referring to Whole Foods and their products; better yet, to SEO & SEM. 

As a marketing student myself, I had to learn the tediousness that goes into search optimization and marketing. Very technical stuff, but simply put, SEO (search engine optimization) is ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by the search engines and that, once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural search results. SEM (search engine marketing) means using search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) to reach your customers directly. 

Here is an image that shows what I am talking about: 

The links identified at the top of the page have a little badge icon that says "Ad". Those marketers really got smart now; remember when those links had a yellow background signaling loud and clear that was an advertised link? I tell you as a consumer, the little badge did fool me at first.  

To improve your SEO & SEM it all goes back to my first post on how it is important to build great content for your buyers.  It is ineffective to try to reach buyers with broad, general search terms; the goal here is to drive consumers directly to the actual content they are looking for. 

Everything always has to do with your audience; what are they looking for? what are they thinking? what do they need? how do they want to find what they are looking for? As a consumer do you trust someone who paid to show up at the top of the list or do you trust the ones who conducted extensive research and work to make sure you would land on the exact content you were looking for?