Where Are You At with Mobile?

This year, holiday shoppers are three times more likely to use their mobile devices to purchase gifts online than they were last year, according to data from IBM. Nearly 10% of survey respondents said they're using their smartphones or tablet PCs for holiday shopping, up from 3.2% in 2010. That adoption curve that is far steeper than the e-commerce ramp-up for PCs in the 90s, showing that people are comfortable with shopping on smaller, more portable devices.

On the technical side, there are two main challenges to serving mobile users: to host mobile-friendly content on a web platform so it presents properly on any mobile device or platform, and to set up your back-end servers so they can serve up the new pages quickly, and won’t keep mobile customers waiting 10 seconds or more while pages load.

Successfully executing on a mobile strategy will also require some shifts in how marketing teams work together. How will you integrate mobile content development into existing marketing processes? And, what's your organization's vision for using a new mobile channel to engage with customers? Effective execution means sorting out both technical and marketing challenges, or risk alienating customers by delivering a less-than-optimal experience on their mobile platform of choice.

What’s the big deal about mobile? The facts show that the way people interact with web content is changing, and quickly, on the new devices. People are doing tasks typical of ohw they use Internet-connected PCs, such as doing web searches and evaluating new products. But they're also exhibiting new behaviors: purchasing "virtual goods", playing multiplayer games in real time, and accessing location-based services and applications. The way users interact with marketing campaigns, ads and promotions is also changing, when flash sales and digital coupons can now be used to influence buying behaviors based on a customer's physical location.

Already, young consumers access the web from mobile devices more often than from traditional PCs, with older users expected to follow suit in just a few years. Research by Morgan Stanley analysts predicts the majority of U.S. web users will connect through mobile devices by 2015. And adoption of smartphones is still on the rise: Coda Research Consultancy estimates that by 2012, 40% of mobile phones will be smartphones.

That doesn’t give marketers much time to optimize their web sites for mobile users.
Marketing Asset Management (MAM) solutions are designed to help marketers get mobile content up quickly, as an integrated part of web and collateral development processes. MAMs enables teams to reuse content between web and mobile sites without doubling the workload, using predesigned templates that have best practices for mobile browsing built in. For instance, technical staff can set parameters for photo and image sizes, so marketers can simply drag and drop images onto their new mobile web pages without worrying that the file size will choke performance.

That means your team will have more time to sort out the complexities around mobile development. For instance, how are your cusotmers using the mobile web?

The answers are different for different device types. Tablet users are more likely to watch videos and shop. Smartphone users tend to show three types of behavior.
-    Checkers habitually view real-time information such as news headlines, weather reports, stock quotes, and sports scores.
-    Connectors use social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter, are likely to share their physical location with their friends and play games such as Words with Friends.
-    Road warriors confirm or rebook travel arrangements, use search and navigation applications, and complete product purchases on the go.

Global, social, and tablets
Savvy marketers ignore mobile at their peril. The trends are clear, global, and picking up momentum every day. For instance, there are huge implications for networking companies who’ll need to support a 40x growth in mobile traffic in the next five years, according to this Techcrunch article. This Kleiner Perkins presentation shows research into growth trends for mobile devices worldwide and future opportunities for convergence of social media, online service delivery, and vitrual goods. Google offers a wealth of information about how, where, and when people are using their mobile devices on its Mobile Ads blog. Read about core principles of mobile advertising in a post by Google’s head of mobile, Karim Temsamani. In it, Temsamani estimates a billion people will be connected to the web through mobile devices by the end of 2011. And there’s nothing you can do to keep them from visiting your site on their new smartphone.

So here’s the big question: Is your site ready?