As the above image shows, mobile marketing can be a bit confusing.
Advertising Age (@adage) columnist Steve Rubel (@steverubel) points to a report about the apparent shift to apps in the mobile environment.
“Flurry (@FlurryMobile), an analytics firm, reported that US consumers spend on average 94 minutes a day in their apps vs. 72 minutes a day in mobile browsers.” There is a less time being spent with PCs and more time being spent with mobile. And when people are on their mobile devices, they are using apps more than mobile browsers.
But a difference of opinion is expressed on iMedia Connection (@iMediaTweet) by Eric Anderson (@unsettler), partner and VP of marketing at White Horse (@whitehorsepdx), who offers “10 Tech Trends You Can Ignore in 2012,” of which #7 is “Having a branded app for that.”
Having long been a loudmouthed proponent of prioritizing mobile sites over branded apps, I thought I might be in for another plate of crow when Flurry Analytics released a study showing that in 2011, smartphone users’ time spent on apps exceeded their time spent on the mobile web for the first time ever.
But does this trend indicate an overall preference for apps over the mobile Web? It does not. A whopping 80% of that app time was spent on gaming and the Facebook app, and the rest of the time was, sorry to say, not spent on your app. A separate study by Deloitte found that 80% of branded apps are downloaded fewer than 1000 times, which is not a piece of ROI analysis I'd enjoy presenting to a CMO. Branded mobile apps belong to a narrow but important set of use cases, based on activities your loyal customers engage in again and again.
Over on Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz), David Armano (@armano) writes in his article, “The Future Isn't About Mobile; It's About Mobility”:
In the early days of digital, the core behavior we needed to understand was that people wanted information at their fingertips and the convenience that came with digital transactions. In the social era it was all these things plus social connectivity. Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices.
Mobility is radically different from the stationary “desktop” experience. In some cases, mobility is a “lean back” experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be "lean forward" — like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the park. And in many cases, it’s “lean free” when your body is in motion, or you're standing in line scanning news headlines or photos from friends while you wait for your turn to be called.
Mobility trumps mobile... don't put mobile tactics in front of strategy.
And senior writer with GigaOM (@gigaom), Mathew Ingram (@mathewi), writes in “HuffPo, The Daily, and the flawed iPad content model”:
The dream that many publishers seemed to have was that the iPad would create a market for their individual apps, and that legions of readers would happily download and pay for them, creating a brand new stream of significant revenue. With a few exceptions, however — such as The New York Times and other publications that have strong brands or are targeted at a very specific market — that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you know when it strategically makes sense to create a mobile app and to help you think with ‘mobility’ about your brand and your content.
Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard. And use our mobile website as your link resource on the go.
