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If you aren’t marketing your mobile services you are missing out on some significant traffic – and if you don’t start soon you will be rendered obsolete. That’s a bold statement, you say? Well, you’re right, it is bold. It’s also true. All you have to do is take a look at Black Friday and Cyber Monday of 2015 and you will see how true it is.

A Case for Mobile

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving where brick and mortar stores open in the wee hours of the morning and offer outrageous bargains, is considered to be the biggest shopping day of the year. This year, retailers set a Black Friday record as sales hit $2.74 billion.

Then it was Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the Monday following Black Friday and is basically the Black Friday of the internet. Online retailers offer outrageous bargains while shoppers sit on their sofas, in their pajamas, sipping their coffee and get incredible deals – without ever leaving their house. Cyber Monday sales this year broke Black Friday’s record with $3.07 billion worth of merchandise sold. Consumers were purchasing the same items that were “hot ticket” items on Black Friday.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. According to IBM, tablets and smartphones made up nearly 50 percent of the web traffic. Although many customers opted to actually place their orders on a computer, nearly 30 percent of sales came from devices other than computers.

You can’t afford not to market your mobile services!

A Decade of Mobile Growth

You may have been able to get away with ignoring it in 2005 when smartphone sales were a mere 3.8 billion sold. You may have even been able to let it go in 2010 when smartphone sales hit 18 billion. However, now, in 2015, with the year projected to close out with a whopping 51.3 billion smartphones sold, not to mention the various mobile devices that are flying off the shelves, you are digging your own grave if you aren’t marketing your mobile services.

In April 2015, Pew Research published A Week in the Life Analysis of Smartphone Users detailing what people do on their smartphones every day. They highlighted what they called “The Big Four” and had some eye-opening statistics. Over the course of the 7-day study:

• 97 percent of smartphone users surveyed used text messaging at least once (it was also the most frequently used)
  
  
• 92 percent of smartphone users engaged in voice calling
  
  
• 89 percent of smartphone users used their phone to access the internet
  
  
• 88 percent of smartphone users used their phone to check their email
  
  

Mobile technology is here to stay and it will only grow from here.

What are the Takeaways?

More and more people are using their mobile devices to access the internet. We can see the growth of smartphone use as well as iPads and other mobile devices. We can also see that these people are also using their devices to make ecommerce transactions. We clearly see that from the stats on Cyber Monday. When based on past growth, it only stands to reason that mobile device usage for purchasing will only continue to grow.

It is also evident that people’s internet habits are changing and mobile technology has a lot to do with that. They move faster, think faster, make decisions faster – and they don’t like to wait. If they can’t decipher a confusing marketing message or don’t understand the call to action they will simply click off and head to another site that is more user friendly.

What can you do to Catch Up?

If you are only now just discovering how important it is to market your mobile services there is still time to get in the game. It is important to understand that social media and mobile technology is very closely linked. Many people are accessing their social media accounts with their mobile devices and they are sharing your mobile marketing campaigns there as well. That means that you need a social media presence and link it to your mobile marketing campaigns.

Mobile technology also allows you to use geo-targeting which meets customers right where they are – literally. It allows you to send targeted messages based on the customer’s location, whether it’s the street they are on, city they are in, or state.

Finally, mobile marketing is no longer the future. It is now. It is cost effective, highly customizable, and easy to target. Plus, when you launch a mobile marketing campaign you are putting your advertising, your business directly in the hands of the people who want to see it. These are people who have signed up for your SMS messages or downloaded your app; they are people who have had some engagement with your brand and want to know more. It is up to you to give it to them.

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