I find it hard to believe that there’s any doubt surrounding the need to invest in mobile marketing. But that seems to be the case.
A new Forrester Consulting study, commissioned by Aquent, indicates that mobile marketing budgets will either increase slightly or remain flat for 4 out of 5 companies in 2013. The biggest challenge, by far, involves measurement: 42% of the companies surveyed said they’re hard-pressed to measure the ROI of their mobile campaigns. In addition, 68% said they’re unlikely to get a green light to hire more mobile marketing expertise until they “prove that mobile marketing has a positive ROI.”
Measurement and analytics are an across-the-board challenge for B2B marketing organizations. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, interest is waning in social media analytics, presumably because they’re failing to deliver on their promises to track and quantify ROI.
What’s the counter-argument? That’s simple. According to Google, mobile Internet usage will eclipse the desktop by next year:
This isn’t just an issue for B2C marketers: According to our own 2012 DGR Content Preferences Survey, which was taken last March, 37% of the respondents were already viewing business-related marketing content on their smartphones, and another 30% were using tablets. We’re pretty confident those numbers will climb when we conduct our 2013 survey this spring.
I understand and sympathize with the need to establish mobile marketing ROI. But I also understand that your customers aren’t going to wait patiently while you get this sorted out. They’re voting for mobile content with their eyeballs and their dollars; if you don’t get ahead of this trend, your competitors will be more than happy to take up the slack.
