Mobile has been growing at a rapid clip for a while, but in 2015 its growth reached a tipping point: mobile spend is growing at three times the rate of desktop display, 65% of emails are opened on mobile devices, and mobile accounted for 100% of Facebook's revenue growth.
Today, mobile is the throughline for communication between consumers and businesses—whether through mobile search, social media, email, or phone calls.
Considering this mobile opportunity, it's an exciting time to be a digital marketer.
Mobile marketing has come a long way, but there's still progress to be made in technology, analytics, and strategy. Most notably, it's time for a paradigm shift: to think of mobile as the home for omnichannel marketing.
Here are my predictions for how that will take shape, and how winning marketers will seize the mobile opportunity in 2016.
1. Forget about multichannel marketing
We've all heard about "multichannel marketing," but it falls short in an increasingly mobile world. Multichannel marketers—those who create discrete, transactional experiences for the Web, email, search, and so forth—will get trampled by those who take an omnichannel approach, which involves looking through the eyes of the customer and creating a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels.
Mobile users don't want to be bombarded by branded content everywhere they look; they expect personalized experiences that take into account who they are and what they're trying to achieve. Effective marketers will therefore transcend the multichannel model and will instead orchestrate interactions across every online and offline touchpoint, all of which build on and are influenced by one another.
2. Put conversations at the center of your omnichannel strategy
If your 2016 strategy doesn't include phone conversations, there's no way you're truly taking an omnichannel approach. In a recent consumer survey, we found that people across all age groups prefer phone calls for their most important conversations—both in their personal lives and with businesses. BIA/Kelsey predicts that annual calls to businesses via mobile phones will reach 162 billion in 2019.
Being an omnichannel marketer means orchestrating an integrated, consistent customer experience. Most marketers are focused on driving mobile traffic and online form-fills, but they're overlooking phone calls as part of the customer journey. People who call your business are typically valuable prospects you don't want to ignore, and those conversations can tell you a great deal about your paid search performance.
Track conversions via inbound calls, capture data related to those conversations, and streamline the steps a customer takes to call you.
3. Make mobile data science your priority
In 2016, the CMO role will expand beyond that of data-driven marketer to that of data scientist—particularly in the case of mobile. Mobile marketing spend reached critical mass in 2015, accounting for more than half of digital ad budgets. Now that mobile is no longer a sandbox for experimentation, it's crucial that you use data to optimize your mobile spending and improve the customer experience across all channels.