Smartphone user profile

The South African smartphone user is in the age group of 18 to 34, well-educated and employed full time with an average annual income of R40,000. Most of these are first time smartphone users and have owned their device for less than a year.

The usage and role of smartphones

Considered an important accessory, smartphone users carry them everywhere. While BlackBerry was considered to have the highest market share, Nokia followed. Smartphones are mostly used at home, at work and while on the move. The phone is used to access the internet for information, emailing and also as a pastime device. Most smartphone users also listened to music, watched TV or accessed the internet on another device while using the smartphone.

Internet usage

Almost every smartphone user used their device to access the web several times a day, with short sessions on the mobile and longer usage via the personal computer.  Half of these users foresee using their mobile to browse the internet in future while the others expected the current status to continue.

Search usage

Google is the most used search engine and forms a major part of the browsing activity. Approximately 10% use local search, while over 90% expect to take further action based on information, with 36% going on to make a purchase.

Video viewing and social networking

Smartphone users enjoy watching videos on their phones and YouTube tops the list for video viewing with Facebook following close behind.  Facebook is the social networking site visited the most via smartphones on a daily basis and more than 35% of respondents post personal updates regularly.

Mobile advertising

South Africa smartphone users are responsive to mobile advertising and almost 15% users have redeemed their mobile coupons in a store. More than 80% are conscious about mobile advertising via search engines and 70% took action based on a mobile ad.

Mobile commerce

Smartphone users in SA use their phones to compare prices and products before shopping and base their decisions on what they find. One fourth of users also use their smartphones while shopping to shop directly through their device. Although there are fears of security issues with mobile shopping and the preference is for personal computers, the trend for using their mobiles as a digital wallet is on the rise.

The above trends have led to businesses rethinking their mobile marketing campaign so that they can leverage the “always and everywhere” mobile device to drive sales and keep their customers engaged. How would these trends impact your mobile marketing strategy? Please share in the comments.

The mobile phone has also been a major influence on social media because of its interactivity and web connectivity. Here are five major social media trends to keep track of.

Social mobile

The smart phone, with its high speed internet connectivity has changed lives globally, revolutionising the way we interact. It allows users to carry their social media profiles in their hands wherever they go. Many businesses have an app to engage users who connect with them. Since major social media networks are now embedded at the menu level in these smartphones, texting could well become obsolete in a few years.

Social search

No one can argue about the secrecy and complexity behind Google’s search algorithms. But what everyone knows is the importance placed by Google search on social sharing data. This is also integrated into Google Analytics and now, with the introduction of Google Plus and its +1 button, things are only going to get hotter. The more people vote for content and share it socially, the better it will rank in the search engines. Social search is here to stay as it indicates human assessment, and therefore, worthy of trust. Social networks are given more importance in the search results and this is endorsed by the frequency at which YouTube videos, Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles appear in the search results.

Location based social media marketing

Location based social media marketing is perhaps one of the best things to happen for local businesses. With the popularity of sites like Foursquare and Google Places, users find it easy to check in and find special deals in the area they live in, using their smartphone.

Social ecommerce

E-commerce is not new and most businesses have an online presence, with some percentage of their sales generated online. But over the last few years, users have acquired the facility to use apps to take their stores to their favorite social media network without leaving the site to shop for their favorite brands. This has become possible because businesses can now create a Facebook page that integrates e-commerce.

Social gaming

The park or field is not the only place where people play games. It is possible to enjoy your favorite games via social media networks with rich multimedia. These games are interesting and easy to use. Gaming companies that are smart enough to develop games that grab the attention of the users are emerging as billion dollar companies.

The power of social media is slowly removing all geographical barriers eliminating restrictions related to the place, time and logistics. Do you notice any other significant social media trends? Please share in the comments section.

More than 1000 smartphone users were surveyed about their social network usage and asked which social media sites they accessed on their phone and which they accessed via their computer. 95% voted Facebook first as the site most accessed on their smartphone and personal computer, with Twitter and MySpace taking second and third positions.

Another study titled “South African Social Media Landscape 2011” by World Wide Worx, one of South Africa’s technology research companies showed the following:

• MXit is SA’s most popular social network with 10 million users
• Twitter has 1.1 million
• Facebook has 3.2 million
• LinkedIn has 1.1 million

Although many surveys have shown the BlackBerry Messenger as a popular platform in SA, it did not feature conspicuously in either study. A possible reason for this could be that BlackBerry is not seen as a social network service. In any case, Facebook was on top with Twitter second. Both MXit and Facebook have the maximum number of users while Twitter usage has grown significantly during 2011, showing a 20 times growth in a year. In the second half of 2011, BlackBerry Messenger was the fastest growing network.

Twitter and Facebook are the most leveraged social media sites by celebrities to engage their fans and followers. Even though not everyone on Twitter is active, most stand in the sidelines and watch, follow or use it to convey news.

MXit has more than ten million active users, with over seventy percent of the users eighteen years and above. Facebook has 4.2 million users, but, of these, only 3.2 actually visited the website in 2011. This is probably because the shine of a new network wore off, with most teenagers preferring to use BlackBerry Messenger over Facebook. Here is a look at the user profile of SA from Facebook (according to World Wide Worx):

• 2 million males and 2.2 million females
• 1.15 million university graduates
• 68,000 still in university
• Users are in the 23-36 year old age group
• 1.9m users in Johannesburg
• 900,000 users in Cape Town

LinkedIn, with 1.1 million users in South Africa saw over 80% of its growth during 2010 and 2011 of which ten percent are business owners.

The trend shows that younger users tend to be more active on social networks. However, as interaction with social networks becomes the norm and as MXit, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger statistics show, there will be a healthy mix of all age groups accessing these sites to interact with each other.

Naturally, marketers are also taking advantage of the global reach of social media by engaging their users in creative ways. This is economical both for the marketer as well as the social media user since it is significantly cheaper than traditional means of communication.  Social media also makes it easy to receive and share information in real time, encouraging comments, shares and likes, making it easy for the marketer to track the success of any promotional campaign.

Unlike traditional marketing channels like television, radio and print which only promote one way interaction between a business and its clients and prospects, social media allows two-way communication. In traditional media, the business conveys a message that it wants its market to hear. But in social media, customers can react in real time to what they hear or see.

With the evolution of social media, clients and prospects can now express themselves to the business through blog comments, send them email and react on their social media profile walls. Businesses can take advantage of this opportunity to connect with their target market.

Connecting with social media marketing

Besides two way interaction, social media also allows lateral communication, since customers can also connect with each other.  Peer communication takes the interaction to a new level that businesses can use to gain new customers and fans by encouraging customers to become their marketing evangelists. Triggering a viral marketing message can start a wave of word of mouth advertising that spreads the business’ message across multiple networks, taking it to audiences the business would not even have dreamed of reaching.

Conventional word of mouth propaganda involves A telling B about something she liked. B tries it and tells C, who in turn relates her experience to D, and so on. While social media takes a similar route, the reach is gigantic because A “tweets” her “like” to a thousand followers.  A few of her followers will, in turn, tweet to their own followers, taking the message to thousands of people in a matter of seconds. On its own, a business would take far longer to reach so many prospective customers. That is the power of social media in attracting new clients. When people see a recommendation from someone they trust, they are more willing to try the product or service.

There is truth in the statement that social media marketing is marketing on steroids. Even though word of mouth advertising is not new, before social media came on the scene, it was not scalable. At most, the news spread to some friends and some friends-of-friends, family members and colleagues. Compared to social media, this was certainly limited. Social media, with its multiple channels allows people to convey and share their news much faster to more people.

The secret behind word of mouth promotion

Word of mouth marketing is highly effective because it focuses around relationship marketing.  The people in an individual’s network trust each other and go by their recommendations. Thanks to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and more, any content shared can travel rapidly. When a business leverages this power, it can have its products and services endorsed across multiple networks, and in a short span of time. People share information because they can and because they have the means readily available to them.

Traditional media can be expensive and it is often difficult to monitor and measure results. Social media’s ability to amplify a message across many networks automatically results in savings, enabling the business maximise its return on investment and also minimise its cost of customer acquisition.

Once you have decided to invest in mobile marketing, the first step is to determine what you need to do. A mobile strategy takes more than creating an app. Here are a few tips:

Study your competitors

Obviously you do not want your competitors to be a step ahead of you. Look at your competitors’ mobile initiatives as that is your first threat. Going by the current trend, mobile-savvy customers will prefer brick and mortar stores that can keep them engaged through mobile marketing. You have to be innovative to make sure you meet customer expectations. If you don’t, your competitor probably will.

Consider your budget

Mobile strategies can tend to cost more and are more complex than one-time website initiatives. However, the good news is if you do it right, the return on investment will be more than worth it. Team up with a consultant who can help you strategise and successfully implement an initiative that suits your business’ specific needs.

Restructure your business

Create an organisation structure that facilitates mobile marketing. Your operations division should be able to collaborate with the mobile team to come up with a multi-channel plan that permeates the entire business. This visibility will enable you reach your mobile marketing goals.

Keep everyone in the loop

This is a critical part of your mobile marketing strategy. The best way to let everyone in your business know about your mobile marketing plan is by offering incentives to promote it. One example is a mobile app that lets users shop easily via their mobile. This facility must be promoted via all marketing channels at all levels.

Make it multi-platform friendly

Since different mobile devices have different access patterns, build your services to match them. Your business decisions should be made based on your servers and not the mobile device, since it will allow you the flexibility to make future changes rather than rewrite the entire app.

Develop a forward thinking strategy with your entire business in mind. Once your campaign is up and running, install analytics to monitor your results so that the necessary adjustments can be made, making mobile marketing a tried and trusted part of your marketing mix.

To ensure that these benefits are derived as expected, here are some tips to launch a successful mobile marketing campaign:

Identifying your target audience

As with any kind of marketing or promotion campaign, determine who your target customer is based on the demographics of different carriers. This will help focus the ad to the appropriate group. First, identify who your prospective customers are, then explore the best ways to connect with them.

Leverage click to call ads

One of the biggest benefits of mobile marketing is the availability of the device with the customer at all times. To make them take action, use click to call ads that will take prospects to your website or your social networking profiles, like Twitter and Facebook. Click to call ads produce instant results and almost all mobile ad networks let you allocate a daily budget for a specified amount of time.

Simplicity works best

Bear in mind the mobile screen’s size and plan the ad accordingly. The ad should neither be full of text nor loaded with graphics. Avoid using any kind of web form since it can be very annoying to try and complete it.  Limit yourself to asking for the minimum information required to qualify. The ad must be designed in such a way that it can be easily viewed across different devices and load quickly even when the data networks are busy.

Choose ad placement wisely

There is a variety of options you can use to reach the mobile customer. This includes apps, games, the mobile web or a text message. Depending on your brand’s goal, place the ads in the most appropriate channel since customers do not like a stream of ads interrupting what they are doing.

Finally, the mobile marketing campaign must be launched at the right time, when the recipient is likeliest to respond.  Unlike other media where the audience can respond any time, with a mobile campaign, one could be viewing the ad anywhere and at any time. Make it easy to respond with a single click where information can be sent to their phone to allow them to respond as soon as it is convenient for them.

After the above tips are implemented, track your mobile ad campaign metrics for performance so that the necessary changes can be made to improve the effectiveness of the campaign. It is worthwhile experimenting with different mobile networks to find out which one is the best for your mobile marketing campaign.

What if the traffic is so heavy that your website becomes excruciatingly slow, or worse still, crashes?  Visitors are impatient and expect websites to load quickly so that they can finish their business and move on.  Your site’s speed has a direct impact on your return on investment as it affects bounce rates, your conversion rates, revenue and user experience.

To make sure your visitors stay on your site and respond to your calls to action, here are seven ways to tweak your website and make it deliver its best performance this Christmas.

Avoid HTTP request overload

Probably the number one performance deterrent, HTTP request overload can be resolved by combining multiple script files, style sheets and CSS files into a single file. Next, gather your site graphics, templates, themes and navigation into one image file.  Using CSS, be selective about displaying images where relevant. Pare down the number of images or bundle the necessary ones into an e-catalog on your site. Keep your site design as simple as you can to prevent it from slowing down.

HTML markup

This should be efficient. Statistics show that user bandwidth is not always the cause for slow site loading time. Often the html markup is the problem that affects the browser’s behavior. By managing the html properly, this can be avoided. Load scripts intelligently, or the user’s browser will freeze.

Take advantage of browser cache and local storage

Make use of local storage especially if your browser supports HTML5. This lets you store more on the client without weighing down every request.

Don’t use third party widgets

As far as possible avoid third party widgets.  Utilise async implementation to avoid affecting site performance. Some widgets can slow down the entire website, driving the user away.

Handle byte overload

This can be tackled by editing the content, optimizing images, minimizing JavaScript and CSS, pagination, Ajax, and using cookie-free domains.  Cookie-less domains.

Use a Global Network

Geography is important.  Use a cloud provider to tackle your content so that users can pull content from a server closest to them to save time.

Measure each of your website tweaks and optimise performance. Eventually, it is performance that will keep a prospect your side during the holidays.

It would be safe to assume that mobile SEO is essential to optimise the website for mobile search, keeping in view usability, relevance to search and marketing. Mobile SEO differs from regular SEO and here are some reasons why:

• For regular websites, SEO focuses on keyword rich content to show the search engine that the pages are relevant to the search. On mobile web pages, it can be tough to stick to the ideal 250-words rule related to content due to the size of the screen and reluctance of the mobile user to scroll.
• Mobile websites obviously have different criteria since the user-experience is very different here.  If one has to follow the regular SEO best practices for site-optimization, implementation will not be easy. Mobile SEO has to be brief and to the point.
• Mobile search is different from desktop search because mobile users do not always use keywords. Thanks to options like Google Goggles, Gesture Search, and Voice Search, a user no longer has to pull up the Google search screen to enter a search phrase. Viewed from the mobile context, this means a significant change in the way user needs are perceived.  The same keyword could mean different things to different users. This calls for mobile keyword research in addition to the regular keyword research.
• To provide a better user experience, mobile search uses different ranking algorithms such as location.
• With mobile phones, there are different levels of brand-user engagement. Whether it is search results or ad positions, businesses must compete for first position on the mobile. In the limited space offered by the mobile screen, brands must find their place and stay visible to keep their click through rates healthy.
• Although a user’s engagement with the mobile screen is much higher than with a desktop, the likelihood of scrolling is much less on the mobile screen.

SEO campaigns must factor in mobile click through rates and search volume, since most users use their mobile phones to browse and search. Understanding and action on the differences between mobile SEO and regular SEO is critical in order to rank in mobile search results.

Here are some statistics from mobiThinking on mobile phone users

• Many mobile web users are mobile-only, i.e. they do not, or very rarely also use a desktop, laptop or tablet to access the web, according to On Device Research.
• In many developing nations, the majority of mobile web users are mobile-only, highest include Egypt at 70% and India at 59%.
• In developed nations, in the US particularly, many mobile-only web users are older people, and many come from lower income households
• In Africa, the 85% of the mobile-only web users access the web with a feature phone.
• In Africa the top mobile activities for mobile-only users are: downloading games (55%); downloading music (54%); social networking (52%); search (48%); email (46%).
• Many mobile-only web users do not have a bank account, in India this is 57% of the mobile-only.

There is also research to prove that over 40% businesses use mobile marketing currently, and this includes mobile email, mobile web sites and mobile apps. As the number of mobile users continues to grow IBM, in its state of marketing 2011 report reported that another 20% of businesses plan to adopt mobile within the year.  This brings us to the question of whether businesses are using the right mobile strategy to engage their consumers with their brands.

Enter mobile barcodes

Mobile barcodes have the ability to stimulate conventional, as well as digital communication channels by inspiring users to engage on the go. Not only are barcodes interactive, but also measurable, enabling tracking and monitoring for effectiveness, so that businesses can calculate their return on investment from the campaign.

The best thing about mobile barcodes is they are easy to use and can be highly focused on the user while providing a call to action. The user will need a camera phone to scan the mobile barcode, and get directions to the nearest store where they can grab their coupon and use it in a number of ways. The biggest advantage is the opportunity for engaging the user instantly with the brand, leveraging their impulsiveness and converting it into action.

comScore reports that “14 million mobile phone users in America scanned QR or barcodes on their phones in June this year, mostly from newspapers or magazines, and on product packaging both at home and in store.” Although this makes it look as though mobile barcodes are the answer to a mobile marketer’s prayers, they are a new marketing tool and naturally, there are challenges.

For a marketer who plans to use mobile barcodes it is important to consider some best practices before actually designing and implementing the campaign. Here are some basic questions to ask.

• The purpose of your mobile barcode – increase sales, boosts customer engagement, educate the market?
• Is the barcode properly positioned for the consumer to find it easily?
• What is in it for the consumer? Giveaways, discount coupons?
• Does the code lead to the correct link and show the appropriate content?
• Is the content optimized for different mobile screens?
• Is it easy to scan with various devices?
• Is there a call to action?
• Does the code tell the user how to scan?
• Has the barcode been thoroughly tested?
• Is there a solid analytics system in place to measure and monitor the campaign?
• After grabbing the user’s attention, is the marketer clear about the next step?

The answers to these questions will help design a successful mobile barcode campaign that will bring in the expected results.

Marketing campaigns through iPads and other tablet devices are focused on creating a memorable user experience. Interestingly, there is no standard set of rules for this marketing method yet, and since the technology happens to be open-ended, a marketer is only limited by her imagination.

An example is Realtor Coldwell Banker’s iPad app which was promoted with a new Google ad format termed the “branded video” featuring a clickable video ad.  This ad was first released as a banner, and users could click to see more. Interaction rates were over 7%, compared with the standard 0.01% click-through rate for banners.

Many businesses are either already invested in a mobile marketing campaign or have plans to, considering the rapid increase in the use of smart phones and how people access content and services on the move.  comScore reported, in late October 2011, that smartphones and tablets drive nearly 5% of digital traffic in EU5 and a 45% increase in  mobile banking app usage in the U.S. Q4 2010

Mobile marketing is a unique way to engage and connect with consumers, as it can entertain or offer useful services. Here are some of the top campaigns using iPads and other tablet devices:

• The dual screen ad from Heineken: Heineken, the global brand, realising that people access their mobiles while watching TV, promoted a mobile game called the StarPlayer, around the Champions League. Fans could interact in real time. Around ten minutes before the game, users could unlock this game and answer a bunch of predictive questions related to the game. This was highly successful, as the app got fans engaged with the brand and their favorite football team simultaneously.
• Another example is Wal-Mart, the retailer giant, which is gearing up to connect with millions of customers before the holiday season using the mobile platform.   They will be releasing new mobile apps integrating coupons and voice recognition in the browsing and shopping experience. The iPad and iPhone apps allow online shopping as well as finding out the availability of the product. After ordering via these apps can be shipped or personally collected from the store. Besides mobile coupon access, the new iPhone app shows a shopping list that integrates voice recognition.
• Automobile giant Toyota is using rich animated media banner ads on Yahoo Fantasy Football iPad, iPhone and Android apps to engage its users with its brand.   This interesting campaign has animated banner ads that access Yahoo content feeds and the ad links to the Toyota site.

The growth of smartphones and tablets devices are driving social media campaigns, and Social TV is expected to offer tremendous opportunities for both brands and mobile marketers. On top of the list of beneficiaries are event-based programs like live shows and sports where the level of engagement is highest. Tablets are especially one up on smartphones because of their size, allowing the user a better visual experience. Mobile marketers are naturally quite keen to take advantage of this rapidly growing market by giving the users what they want.