For a long time now, I’ve been discussing the ways businesses can advertise efficiently on the internet–namely SEO. As a marketer, I can’t help but notice how the mobile channel is exponentially growing, and how slowly the business world is adapting to this. My goal in this post is to help you understand the value of mobile marketing, and how you might capitalize on its growth.

Recently, I saw two Google Account Managers (Anjali Vaidya and Bon Mercado) make a presentation about this topic. Though both were clearly selling Adwords, they presented some very compelling data:

  • Mobile search queries grew by 400% from January 2010 to January 2011 (faster than desktop search growth)
  • Mobile search volume stays constant hour-to-hour, day-to-day, unlike desktop searches
  • 1 in 3 mobile searches are locally-focused
  • After looking up a local business on their smartphone, 61% of searchers called the business and 59% went to their website
  • Tablet users spend 50% more than PC desktop users
  • In the next 18 months, 15-30% of website traffic will come from mobile users

Most businesses are bad at SEO. They are even worse at landing page optimization/conversion. With this in mind, it is not surprising that mobile landing pages are generally glitchy, frustrating and poorly designed (where they exist at all). Fortunately, for Outrank’s local business clients, ranking on the front page means your mobile customers are only a touch of the finger away from calling you.

Another area of mobile advertising that cannot be ignored is the app market. Businesses are investing heavily in games and utility applications that keep the attention of mobile users for long periods of valuable time. Some companies and individuals are banking solely from selling standalone apps that profit from an up-front downloading fee or from advertising. An interesting presentation from The Nielsen Company’s Jonathan Carson, CEO, Telecom, made last month at the AppNation conference highlighted some good data profiling app downloaders:

  • 36% of U.S. mobile consumers now have smartphones
  • App downloaders with Apple iOS and Android OS smartphones have more applications on their mobile phones than those with other kinds of smartphones, with an average of 48 apps on iPhones and 35 apps on Android phones. (By comparison, app downloaders with Blackberry RIM smartphones only had an average of 15 apps on their phones.)
  • They also use their apps more often: 68 percent of app downloaders with iPhones and 60 percent of those with Android phones reported using their mobile apps multiple times a day compared to 45 percent of app downloaders with Blackberry/RIM phones.