In 2011 mobile search grew by a whopping 400 %. In 2012 it grew further, up to an incredible 25% of all Google Ad clicks. This is the type of growth that analysts in the early days of mobile advertising could scarcely dream of. Just four years ago next to nobody could have predicted how fast the market would expand but here we are in 2013 with mobile (and tablet) internet use figures surpassing desktop computers for the first time. And with better conversion rates, better use of google local and a near-permanent social presence mobile truly looks like the future of on-line marketing.
Of course mobile phones and tablets raise all sorts of technical challenges, both in terms of screen size, OS ecosystem and in terms of interface which is why it’s particularly hard to optimize campaigns for this ‘rising star’ of online marketing. This is why, to make the best use of the growth of mobile you need to use omni-channel marketing.
Omni-channel marketing is a concentrated solution for a big problem, especially when it comes to larger brands. Fragmented marketing tends to emphasize a single aspect of marketing or at the very most an entire area. You can get a marketing firm to promote your company in print or devise a viral campaign while an SEO company nets you inbound marketing traffic. You may hire a company to handle all your inbound or all your outbound but results may vary amongst the different companies and costs will rise almost as a given.
What Omni-channel marketing endeavours to do is to centralise all your marketing efforts, much like multi-channel marketing before it but integrating even the less profitable but nonetheless necessary aspects of a marketing drive. By having all your marketing in one place it is significantly easier to adjust spending on successful and less successful aspects of marketing. Omni channel also offers you the security that all the platforms targeted will receive equal or similar attention.
Omni-channel is therefore perfect for mobile marketing with its fragmentation problem. Unifying factors like certain high demand social media, Facebook, Twitter and the like can easily be integrated, just like mailing campaigns whereas all the issues arising from platform differences (like iOS’ notorious dislike of anything Flash related can be handled so that the experience for the user is uniform across OS and platform alike and drives conversions from mobile platforms even higher.
Omni-channel marketing is a perfect tool for monetizing the growing mobile market and is a remarkably good overall approach to marketing for big companies with an impressive ROI.