Why Having a Mobile Site Should Be Just The Start
By TNS
Having a responsive or mobile
site is a great step forward but it
shouldn’t be seen as a substitute
for genuinely mobile-centric
planning.
Today, having a mobile or responsive website sits at
the top of any marketers best practice checklist. If
any more evidence were needed of the importance
of prioritising the user experience on a handset, then
the 2014 Connected Life study provides it. However,
Connected Life also shows that having a mobile
site is far from a complete solution in itself. A more
fundamental shift in brand planning is required if
marketers are to keep up with the audiences they are
targeting. The time for fully mobile-centric strategy is
arriving.
The mobile-centric world and its leaders
Mobile is taking up a greater share of the time that
people spend on connected devices – and it is doing
so in every market on earth. Of all time spent using
devices, 36 per cent of it is spent looking at a mobile.
This trend is being led by a growing number of
mobile-centric markets: countries like South Africa,
Kenya and Indonesia, where a mobile phone typically
offers the only connected experiences available to
many people; but also those like Brazil, Hong Kong
and South Korea where consumers have many
different digital devices available (PCs, laptops,
tablets, connected TVs) but still gravitate towards
using mobiles first and foremost.
The warning sign for many developed market
brands and their marketers, is that they tend to be
headquartered in the countries that are following the
mobile-centric revolution rather than leading it. The
UK, Western Europe, North America and Australia
remain PC-centric markets at heart, where consumers
have plentiful smartphone technology at hand but
the majority would still opt to use a PC, laptop or
tablet given the choice. This PC-centricity appears to
have put its stamp on marketers’ approach to mobile,
from the disproportionately tiny share of media spend
that the platform is still allocated (in the US it gets 4
per cent of total ad spend despite representing 19
per cent of media time) to a marketing approach
that often seems to view mobile simply as a means
of extending reach and frequency, rather than a real
game-changer for digital planning.
Having a mobile site is just the start
There’s a danger that driving your mobile strategy
through your website can mask an inherently
conservative approach to digital planning. Web
designers recognise the importance of delivering
optimised experiences for handsets, and even of
serving different content to those using mobiles,
but for many the mobile experience remains
fundamentally a versionalised extension of the PC
experience. When we look more closely at the digital
routines of genuinely mobile-centric consumers,
we find that this doesn’t go nearly far enough. The
digital platforms that mobile consumers use – and
the type of experiences brands therefore need to plan
for them – are fundamentally different. The biggest
difference between PC-centric and mobile-centric
people isn’t that the latter visit brand websites using
a phone; it’s that, for them, websites are only a tiny
part of the opportunity for brands.
In Indonesia, for example, browsing websites and
researching products represent only a small fraction
of the time that people spend using their phone;
there are far bigger opportunities for brands in their
use of social media and games, and their appetite
for news and video. But they can often only take
advantage of these through the purpose-built apps
that mobile-centric consumers use to access them,
(even feature-phones typically integrate social &
gaming via apps)
To continue reading, download Why having a mobile site should be just the start (pdf)