Australians using their mobiles for email and search: new report

The mobile industry group of AIMIA released findings from its 'Australian mobile phone lifestyle index 2012 (AMPLI)' at a conference in Sydney today. 

Excluding voice and SMS, sending and receiving emails is the next most highly ranked use of the mobile phone followed by visiting websites, and/or browsing or searching the Internet and to get information. 

How many emails do you receive per day that aren't optimised for mobile? How many are data hungry and you would rather send them to the trash then use your allowance for heavy graphics?

How searchable is your site on mobile? Can people find your offices on Google maps? What are the call to actions for sales conversion on your stripped back mobile sites?

I would imagine that most marketers aren't testing their offers on mobile, let alone across operating systems and devices.  Try and search for information on your m. site and see where the gaps are. What's annoying you? What other the main things you need to know when you're mobile and what can you leave out for the full site? Remember that most customers won't be switching between an email and a mobile app for quick information so your mobile site matters. 

Other key findings for me included:

• Increase in the percentage of respondents with more than 1GB of data (from 11% to 39% over the four years)
• Approximately 40% of respondents use their mobile phone to compare prices online and to look at product or service reviews before making a purchase decision
• 60% of respondents reported that they used some form of social networking (SN) sites or applications on their mobile phones. Facebook was found to be the most popular SN site or application (59%), with Twitter being a distant second (26%)
• Respondents were asked what type of applications they have used on their mobile phones in the last 6 months. The most popular types of applications used by respondents were “Maps and navigation” (74%), Games (74%), News and weather (73%) and social networking (71%).
• Almost 40% of respondents reported that they owned a tablet, which represented a substantial increase from last year.

A full copy of the report is available here. 

 

 

 

 

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Using big data to engage customers as individuals

Customer insight has always been valuable but now, social technologies make it possible for companies to engage in realtime with individual customers. 

Traditional market data shows how a customer interacts with your organisation-loyalty card data, POS scan data, demographic info. 

Social technologies now make it possible to add how customers engage with the rest of the world through Facebook likes, blog comments and Youtube 'most played' lists. 

As companies in a customer's ecosystem improve their social muscle, their expectation of how customer service should work will increase. To say 'we're not Zappos' or 'we're not equipped for 24/7 social support" is not going to matter to a customer. 

The IBM 2011 Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, shows that organizations are still focused primarily on understanding markets, not individual customers.

More than 80 percent of CMOs rely on market research and competitive benchmarking to make strategic decisions. While these traditional sources of information are still valuable, they offer little insight into individual customers. In contrast, blogs, consumer reviews and other unstructured online sources can reveal customer sentiment at a personal level, in context. However, relatively few CMOs are exploiting these new sources: only 26 percent track blogs, only 42 percent track third-party reviews and only 48 percent track consumer reviews. 

The gap between technology and adoption will always exist. However, continuing to treat 'social' as a subset of marketing and not understanding the magnitude of the changes required will cause many strong companies to run aground as agile competitors emerge and set new standards of customer servicing and product development. 

 

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Customers won't pay for content today that was 'free' yesterday

News companies need to make sure that the product consumers are paying for looks and acts different to the one they previously consumed for free.

If customers aren't confident that what is on the other side of the paywall is quality, you won't get a click let alone a credit card number. 

The content needs to be repackaged and presented in a way that    the change required for the customer and makes them feel (real or perceived) that what's behind the paywall is better. Let them have a look around. Give them the assurance that the quality is good and you have what they want. Then get them to enter their credit card details. Not for one year or even one month subscription, but just to sign up to your site and get an account.  

The issue is not that customers don't want to pay for content. 

The issue is that they don't want to pay for the 'free' content. 

Make it look and act nothing like the 'free' content and they'll pay for it. 

Look at Apple iTunes. Apple confront the point of pain early in the sign up process and make the expectation very clear with the customer that you must pay for content. Consumers can't register an Apple ID without entering a credit card number or iTunes voucher. No payment method, no Apple ID. However, you can get an ID without actually making any monetary payment- Apple just want the credit card upfront so they can transact from day one. 

Remember that the content products (music, videos and books) are not new and has been available previously, but in a different format.

It feels new. The payment part is out of the way and forgotten and who knows what a song is meant to cost? Apple has told us in a palatable way.  

The focus for media companies now needs to be getting payment information off their audiences with simple product offerings that look and feel nothing like their existing ones.  

Repackaging products and getting a payment system in lowers the paywall and speeds up audience acquisition time. 

Strip back news offerings to the bare bones and move customers on to trackable customer ID's attached to a form of payment method. Sell them products and services they want and they will willingly provide a credit card number- even if it's not for news in the first instance. Initial payments may be small, even following the Paypal method of a five cent 'verification charge', but getting the payment system running then allows sites to transact products and services to the news audience.

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Australian online ad revenue passes print, gains on TV.

Online ad revenue passed newspaper advertising $1.63bn to $1.5bn in the six months to June and was just behind TV's $1.65bn.

Search and directories was the fastest-growing sector, up 30%, making up 52% of the market and $1.6bn, while general display was up 15% with 27% of market share ($843m)and classifieds up 11% representing 20% of the total market, with $643m.

In mobile general display made up 60.3%, and search the other 39.7%, with 67% of ads delivered on smartphones, and 33% on tablets.

This edition of the report is the first to include estimates of Google and Facebook’s ad revenue shares, along with the data taken from industry.

The information was released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau today, quoting the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia's half-yearly report. An executive summary of the member's only report is available below. 

IAB_Online_Advertising_Expenditure_Report_-June_20-Exe_Summary.pdf Download this file

 

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Samsung and Android continue US mobile dominance

With Apple's prowess in marketing it's easy forget what a critical role the carrier plays in manufacturer and platform market dominance. 

Google touts 'choice' as its big advantage over Apple with more carriers, manufacturers and handsets. 

Recent survey data from comScore shows that Samsung is still the leading OEM brand in the US market with 25.6% of US mobile subscribers, followed by LG and then Apple. 

Google Android is the number one smartphone platform with over the half the market share (Apple has just over one third). 

 

Top Mobile OEMs 3 Month Avg. Ending Jul. 2012 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Apr. 2012 Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers (Smartphone & Non-Smartphone) Ages 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of Mobile Subscribers
	Apr-12	Jul-12	Point Change
Total Mobile Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Samsung	25.9%	25.6%	-0.3
LG	19.2%	18.4%	-0.8
Apple	14.4%	16.3%	1.9
Motorola	12.5%	11.2%	-1.3
HTC	6.0%	6.4%	0.4

Smartphone Platform Market Share

More than 114 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in July, up 7 percent versus April. Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 52.2 percent market share (up 1.4 percentage points), while Apple’s share increased 2 percentage points to 33.4 percent. RIM ranked third with 9.5 percent share, followed by Microsoft (3.6 percent) and Symbian (0.8 percent).

Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Month Avg. Ending Jul. 2012 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Apr. 2012 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
	Apr-12	Jul-12	Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Google	50.8%	52.2%	1.4
Apple	31.4%	33.4%	2.0
RIM	11.6%	9.5%	-2.1
Microsoft	4.0%	3.6%	-0.4
Symbian	1.3%	0.8%	-0.5

 

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