How is the Mobile Marketing Landscape Changing?

As an individual who’s relatively new to the everchanging world of marketing, getting to grips with software updates and trends is but one of the important parts of developing as a marketer. One key ingredient for success that I have quickly understood, is an ability to react to the way in which a specific audience consumes information. The way in which one adapts is an aspect of marketing which cannot be understated, especially with the rapid changes in technology which are present in every part of today’s society.

The use of mobile phones is a prime example. Our mobile devices have become almost an extension of ourselves and understanding how to tailor specific ads or website content to specific devices is an essential part of digital marketing today. This becomes even more obvious after the revelation of our dependence on mobile phones in a report from telecoms regulator Ofcom. The figures revealed by the report, which Ofcom has dubbed ‘a decade of digital dependency’, has revealed our reliance on technology as a society. The most prominent statistics which featured in the final report show that 78% of all adults now own a smartphone, with people checking them on average once every 12 minutes. Two in five adults look at their phone within five minutes of waking and a third check them just before falling asleep.

The figures publicise a dependency of handheld technological devices. Devices which, as a marketer, offer a plethora of opportunities to utilise particular audiences who have almost a constant connection to the internet. Here are a few examples of updates and improvements which show how mobile usage is being taken much more seriously by developers and marketers.

Tracking Time Spent on Social Media

In relation to this trend, Facebook have announced updates to help individuals better manage their time on social media. Both Facebook and Instagram are set to receive new tools in the form of an activity dashboard through which users can check how much time they’ve spent on the respective apps and can set daily reminders to be alerted when they have reached a certain time limit. The introduction of these new tools is in response to the potential harmful effects of spending too much time on social media in particular, but is not the only example of how services on mobile phones are changing.

Facebook Ad Manager Updates

With the activity update an example of a directly user-based improvement, the release of a revised version of Facebook Ad Manager is much closer to marketers. Focused primarily on providing a greater level of creative freedom in producing ads on the social media platform, the update coincides with the trend of mobile dependence. Users will now be able to build ad content directly from a mobile device: editing images and creating advertisements through the app. With creativity at the centre of the update, users can also incorporate and edit text within the ad, utilise fully customisable templates and implement various stickers and logos. Before the update, image-based content for Facebook ads had to be created outside the app and then uploaded, but now advertisements can be generated on the go.

Google’s ‘Mobile Speed Score’

Another example relates more closely to how Google rates your mobile friendly site pages. The ‘mobile speed score’ is a mark given to each landing page on a Google Ads account from a 10-point scale- with one being very slow and ten being extremely fast. The scores are based on a number of elements, including the potential conversion rate and the relationship between page speed. This new approach to evaluating page speed provides the user with a quick way to see which pages do and do not provide a fast, mobile experience, and therefore which ones require further attention.

The trend towards a mobile focused society is simply illustrated with these few examples and is a signal of how fundamental this medium is and has the potential to be in the future. Changes in both social media apps and their approach to advertising, in addition to the incorporation of mobile accessible features within Google Ads, mean that you choose to ignore mobile at your own peril. Developments in the arena of advertising have seen an increase in the personalisation of adverts, especially in search results and this can be attributed to the changes in user trends. Marketing on mobile has become the initial stepping stone on a path towards a more trustworthy relationship between consumer and supplier and with the mobile environment in a state of constant flux, keeping ahead of the game is a crucial element of success.