Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Just a couple of years ago, it was impractical for most small businesses to create a mobile app. Most didn’t see any real value in it. 

A lot has changed since then.

Thanks to app development software tools, many businesses are building apps. And the trend is expected to continue.
According to data collected by Biznessapps, a mobile platform for small businesses, nearly half of small businesses are expected to adopt a mobile app by 2017 or later....

Mobile applications are responsible for 80 percent of digital growth and while they take up a massive chunk of all time spent on mobile, a report from comScore suggests that app marketers will have to work harder to cut through to the consumers they want to reach.

According to the report, mobile represents two out of every three minutes spent on digital media in the U.S. If brands and marketers want to capture that huge amount of time consumers spend on mobile devices, they will have a lot to compete with....

There's more evidence to support the growing importance of mobile devices along the path to purchase.

According to Nielsen's fourth-quarter 2015 Mobile Wallet Report, 37 percent of respondents said their purchases start with mobile shopping more than one-quarter to half of the time.

The report compares mobile use from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the same period the year before. It found that shoppers are using mobile devices, particularly smartphones, to assist with in-store sales more frequently than for online shopping.

Roughly 72 percent are researching an item or checking prices on a smartphone before buying. Store locators are popular with 60 percent of smartphone users, and 55 percent are using mobile coupons.

Reviews are popular with slightly more than half of all mobile device users and 44 percent of smartphone users use digital lists while shopping....

Dive Brief:

•  Kitewheel took stock of more than one billion brand and customer interactions on its platform, which revealed that marketers are in fact taking advantage of omnichannel campaigns.
• Social media led the way in interactions at 48%, while mobile apps were the fastest growing channel for interactions, and email (23%) is up 270% year-over-year.
• Even though social media accounted for the most interactions, the research also found that 70% of marketers are still using the channel for broadcast messaging rather than more tailored and targeted campaigns....

Is mobile a big deal? You bet it is. And to prove our point, we’ve collected 40 of the most important facts about mobile that every business person should know.Ready to check ’em out? Here goes:

Today’s mobile phone is more powerful than the PCs that sent two astronauts to the moon in 1969. Source:  http://quarterly.insigniam.com/innovation/by-the-numbers

The first commercial cellular network was launched by NTT in Japan in 1979. Source: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2009/11/celebrating-30-years-of-mobile-phones-thank-you-ntt-of-japan.html

The first multi national cellular network was the Nordic Mobile Telephony in 1981. It even supported roaming. Source:  http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/review/2006_03/files/3_fifty_years.pdf ...

In 2015, mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic at 90 percent of major media outlets, including 88 percent of the largest U.S. newspapers, according to Pew’s 2016 State of the News Media report. Just a year earlier, only 65 percent of respondents had reported mobile traffic that exceeded desktop views.

The biggest year-over-year change came in the newspaper sector. In 2014, only 28 of 50 newspapers included in the survey brought in more traffic via mobile than desktop. In 2015, that number jumped to 44 of 50.

41.6 million – That’s how many U.S. consumers are expected be mobile-only internet users by 2020, according to a recent eMarketer report. Currently, about 31.1 million U.S. internet users (or 11.7 percent) access the internet strictly via mobile devices, while another 215 million people use both mobile devices and desktops/laptops to surf the web.

The number of people who access the internet exclusively via desktops/laptops is expected to drop from 18.8 million this year to 10.0 million in 2020. Meanwhile, the total number of Americans connected to the internet is projected to keep rising over the next five years, reaching an estimated 279.3 million by the end of the decade....

The latest example of this deals with mobile coupons. It turns out that consumers who lean on mobile coupons for food shopping – and that’s a lot of people – often change brands for the sake of variety, according to a new study.

The majority of consumers don’t use mobile coupons, but a third (33%) do. And that’s where the behavioral change potential resides.

Nearly half (44%) of mobile coupon users like to change brands often for the sake of variety and novelty, according to the study conducted by GfK. The survey comprised a look at 6,500 products in about 600 categories....

For online shopping, smartphones continue on a tear while tablets fade.

Smartphones now account for 60% of all mobile transactions in the U.S., compared to 52% just a year ago.

However, while the actual purchase may occur on a smartphone or desktop, it doesn’t necessarily mean all of the shopping activity occurred on that device, according to a new study.

More than a third (37%) of desktop transactions occurred after shoppers visited the same retailer’s website on at least one other device before purchasing, according to the State of Mobile Commerce study by Criteo....