Smart businesses know that understanding your audience is key to your overall success. It doesn’t matter if you’re business-to-consumer or business-to-business focused – your audience, and their interaction with you, is what defines how well you meet your goals.
Which is why this new report from Exact Target is key reading for any business, small or large.
Taking a look at the way different mobile phone users interact with different digital channels like Facebook, Twitter and email, etc, the report shows a definite split between smartphone users and non-smartphone users.
And for any business wondering where to allocate their marketing spend when it comes to social media, it’s a split they need to take into account.
Mobile Excess Needs Mobile Access
According to the survey, smartphone users are far more active digitally than non-smartphone users across the major platforms. For example:
- 45% of smartphone users check email constantly throughout the day, compared to 28% of non-smartphone users.
- 23% of smartphone users check Facebook constantly throughout the day, compared to 12% of non-smartphone users.
- 32% of smartphone users check Facebook at least once per day, compared to 28% of non-smartphone users.
- 5% of smartphone users check Twitter daily, compared to only 2% of non-smartphone users.
In pretty much every example, it’s almost double the amount of interaction by smartphone users than that of non-smartphone users. Which is understandable, given the superior browser functions of the latest smartphones.
It’s also a great pointer as to how you approach your online marketing strategies.
Are You Thinking Smart?
Do you know the breakdown of your current customer base and how they use their mobile phones? Do you know if they’re smartphone enabled or not? If not, now’s the time to find out.
Use your database – you do have one, right? – to contact your customers and advise them you’re updating your records to make their shopping experience with you the best it can be (because you will be). To do so, you just need to know if they use a smartphone or a standard cell phone.
If you don’t have a database, then use your analytics information (you are using analytics, right?). See how many visitors to your main site or other online outposts are via mobile browser, and then see which platform they’re running on.
If the majority of people that are invested in you – existing or potential – are smartphone enabled, then you need to start making some decisions.
- Do you make your site more interactive for smartphone audiences or easier to browse for non-smartphone users?
- Do you build a mobile app that can be used to build your knowledge of your customer base (and be used as a further lead generation tool)?
- Do you become less active on Twitter and concentrate more on Facebook for potential customers?
- Do you build a mobile-enhanced micro-site that allows you to make quick offers and use push SMS marketing to promote?
- Do you refocus on email marketing, knowing that your (potential) audience checks that more often than social networks?
These are just some of the basic questions you need to start asking. There are more, but these depend on industry, demographics, manpower and investment ability. amongst others.
The key point is, most businesses are looking at social media as the next big thing for their marketing pushes. But that should only be part of a much bigger overview – and the real gold could be just sitting there, waiting on you to hear its ringtone…
