Mobile Marketing Trends Well folks, we’ve reached the halfway point of 2016. It’s the beginning of June and the perfect place to take a breather. I know, I know – as entrepreneurs, taking a breather isn’t really our thing. Maybe it’s better to say it’s a perfect place to regroup! Part of this regrouping should be a reflection on the happenings of the previous months. After all, we’ve now had two fiscal quarters to review: what was predicted correctly? What wasn’t it? By the way, if you want to see our thoughts six months ago, check out our Mobile marketing trend predictions from January! More importantly, the thrust of this point will be to focus on what’s hot right now – and what’s going to be hot in a few months. But we’re going to narrow it down even further and take a look at specific sectors of the tech world: Marketing. Marketing may be different from the Mad Men era, but it’s still insanely important to the success of any tech enterprise venture. Just like the pre-internet Capitalist age, marketing is how you let people know about you and your product. It’s how you build a brand, it’s how you get people to try new products you may offer, and it’s how you build a user base. And we all know what more users mean: higher potential revenue! Take a look at some of our other marketing advice and thoughts here. But before you do that, take a moment to read the remainder of this post. We’re about to offer a distilled version of what the top tech marketing gurus out there are saying – gurus Seth Godin, Marc Guberti, Neil Patel, Thomas Husson even the legendary, near-nostradamus predictions of Forbes Magazine. Mobile Marketing Trend #1: Mobile First We’re back to mobile first people! We can’t seem to avoid this topic of late – for good reason. It’s easily the hottest thing going on right now. Yes, Virtual Reality is also a big trend but at the end of the day, VR is still a year or two away from mass commercial availability. It’s a good time to get your foot in the door, but Mobile First is where it’s at today. More importantly, Mobile First provides a good set of tools telling you how best to market an app online. As Husson and his colleagues at Forrester report, the upcoming year will possibly be the most crucial year yet for customers who need users. Even still, only 18% of user-oriented businesses used a Mobile First approach in 2015. While that number is expected to increase to almost a quarter in the upcoming year, it’s still not enough. Customers are increasingly expecting a service that satisfies their needs instantly, wherever they are. 2016 will only make this trend more marked. If you are a business that survives of user satisfaction, your entire business needs to have a mobile-first orientation. Contact us to learn how to get your business there. Think about this: by the end of this year, nearly half of the entire world’s population will own a mobile device. Not too long after that, mobile devices are likely to be in the hands of nearly every person in the world. The number of products has even a 46% global market penetration can be counted on two hands! More importantly, Mobile First is how you market an app, without actually marketing it directly. The approach creates apps and websites that are mobile-friendly. Which means search engine friendly. Yep – a mobile first product markets itself just by its emphasis. In other words, any app marketing strategy needs to be foundationally based on a mobile first approach. Don’t wait until it’s too late. In fact, this is so important there’s literally no getting away from it – every marketing trend we’re seeing is at least tangentially related to Mobile first. Mobile Marketing Trend #2: Ads Advertisements aren’t by any stretch of the imagination a new trend. But there are some new evolutions in marketing that we felt were relevant: • The mobile first push will make it even easier to offer personalized ads. The Age of the Internet is the Age of Targeted Marketing. As more people become mobile, more data will be available to study. Which of course will lead to ads customized to the person. • All of our favorite ad-free websites and apps are reaching the point where monetization is necessary. Since ad pages and banners are the simplest way to monetize, it’s only natural to expect to see ads on previously ad-free sites Take Instagram, which just recently added ads to their platform – and we don’t expect them to be the last. • Video ads are a growing trend. These are basically traditional TV commercials that generate when a website or app is accessed. They are effective and, more importantly, people are used to commercials. It’s always sound marketing to offer non-intrusive ads. The Death of Mobile Optimization? Yes, that’s a bit of a grandiose and slightly misleading title. And it’s not really a trend – Or at least, not yet. Mobile optimization of websites won’t go away, really. But there are some analysts out there who are pointing to the fact that a dedicated app is more effective for a – yep you guessed it – Mobile-First generation. What we are seeing are companies moving away from websites for desktop perusal, to dedicated mobile apps. But there’s an important counter note to consider: as websites built using a mobile-first approach grow in number, the distinction between an app and a mobile website will basically disappear. What we’re likely looking at is the beginning of a new tech interface approach – an amalgamation of website and apps. This new beast will have one thing in mind: allowing users to satisfy their needs whenever and wherever they desire. The important takeaway here is that mobile marketing strategies will only grow in importance. Do you want to learn more about mobile marketing strategies for your small business? Give our expert market analysts a call at 408.805.0495 or send us an email for a free consultation!