Tag Archive for: Study

Study: Consumers prefer mobile apps to mobile websites

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After yesterdays moderation of the dmexco Night Talks in Hamburg on “Mobile – The new first screen”, a recent study grabbed my attention this morning. It makes clear that users really are more into apps rather than mobile websites. According to the findings of the global study from Compuware Corporation, a technology performance company, 85% of consumers responded that they prefer mobile apps over mobile websites.

Although the latest InMobi study gives insights how people react to mobile advertising and why apps get into the centre of attention of the mobile user, the study from Compuware states that the reason why apps become so popular these days. The respondents said that they are “more convenient, faster and easier to navigate.” Furthermore, it adds some more findings…

“Mobile applications are thought to make life easier by streamlining calendars and grocery lists (…) offering entertainment while in line and making it easy to collaborate with co-workers. Consumers now associate apps with banking, paying bills, shopping, booking hotels and travel, as well as with staying productive and connected with both home and office tasks.”

The 3Rs of the social customer also become apparent in the choice of which apps will be downloaded to their mobiles. 84% of users say app store ratings are important in their decisions to download and install a mobile app. And there are some obvious reasons how apps need to deliver in order to be be benefitial…
– Easy access to product and store information
– Help planning and navigating trips
– The ability to communicate in real time

However, the benefits seem quite clear, there are also some complaints about mobile apps. The mobile users mentioned that they had…
– 62% a crash, freeze or error.
– 47% slow launch times.
– 40% an app which just would not launch.

Still tolerance is high when the app does not work immediately. 79% said, they would retry a mobile app only once or twice if it failed to work the first time. Still, companies and brands should be aware that the competitor is not too far away with their mobile app offering.

Compuware - Consumer reaction to bad apps

“With consumers expecting greater experiences with mobile apps now more than ever, fulfilling those expectations doesn’t just happen — it takes a conscious effort throughout every stage of the design and development process to get it right. Performance is a crucial contributor to providing a dependable mobile app user experience, so performance should be considered a key driver in the design process. Mobile applications need to focus on a core utility, and they need to be fast and reliable in order to be valuable.” Stephen Pierzchala, Technology Strategist, Compuware APM Center of Excellence.

It would be interesting to get your expectation on a good mobile app or website? What is your normal reaction when mobile apps don’t deliver to your expectation?

InMobi Global Study: Mobile media consumption outpacing TV, mobile ads drive sales

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In prepapration of the first dmexco Night Talks moderation in Hamburg on “Mobile: The new first screen: reach, engage, measure, monetize”, sometimes studies fly into my mailbox which are reaching me just at the right time.

InMobi released their second wave research report on Mobile Media Consumption at Mobile World Congress. It covers some on-going overview on 14 countries on how we consume mobile content these days, and it obviously underlines the rapid growth of mobile media and the benefits of mobile advertising around the globe.

From a global perspective, mobile has reached the sweet spot in media consumption. It will generate its growth in the coming year predominantly via social media, search/download apps and search activities. In the 14 countries, humans spent from 7 hour media consumption (apart from other channels)…
1. Mobile 1,8 hours
2. PC 1,6 hours
3. TV 1,5 hours

The research piece shows that 50% of the average global mobile web users primarily use their mobiles now to go online. The average mobile web person uses 6.5 apps throughout a 30-day period.

But what does this mean for marketers?

The study states that globally, 54% of users discover mobile ads via apps, 40% on a search engine, 27% on a retailer website and 23% on a video website. It also makes clear that mobile is the touchpoint for finding new products and services. 3 out of 4 say mobile advertising has opened doors to something new. Almost every second say mobile ads have influenced them to buy mobile (46%) and almost the same amout (45%) say that mobile has mobile ads have influenced their purchase decision.

When seeing mobile ads, it is not that users don’t take any actions. It is actually the other way round. Mobile ads let users downloaded an app (80%), visit the advertiser’s website (67%), visit the store/retailer/business for additional information (52%), locate an advertiser on map (45%), or even take an immediate phone call (37%).

Mobile Media Consumption InMobi 2013

Spot On!
While I still have some marketers from media houses and brands in my ears, saying that apps and mobile ads don’t seem to be the right marketing approach, it seems they just did not find the right content approach to their users. The mobile commerce world is growing at speed of light and innovative retailers and brands should be well-prepared for it – and ideally have at least a click-to-call solution on their mobile website. It is not surprising that in these 14 countries 80% retailers say they plan to get the right approach to mobile in 2013.

How about you? Are you prepared for the mobile sales and marketing development? What experiences do you have so far with mobile ads?

PS: If you are interested in attending the dmexco discussion in Hamburg, please book your seat here.

BlogHer Study: Are woman the mobile 'Generation Now'…?

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Millennials book their flights, hotels and probably would love to buy their drinks via their mobiles. They all get information in realtime. And the rest of the world? Do they also have acces to the world’s latest buzz, deals and chatter? One of the latest studies by the media network and publisher for women BlogHer states that our dependance on mobiles is massively increasing. Women manage and engage via our mobiles in all aspects of life – not important which generation it is. And if they don’t know, how can we know…?

They released some infographic that summarizes the results of their second annual consumer electronics study from December 2012. The stats are showing that we are all the mobile generation now. The study wanted to know when women of different ages usually buy electronic gadgets, what they love most about mobiles but also if fears accompany their mobile dependence.

BlogHer Study 2012 Mobile Gen

From these findings, they define three female mobile profiles…

The Recession Millennials (18-27 years old)
Unsurprisingly, Blogher describes Millennials as mobile natives. However, money stands in their way from diving into their early adopter reputation. Main fear? Their mobiles get stolen! Still, they are 31% more likely to “use a gadget until it doesn’t work anymore.”

The Gen X Early Adopters (28-45 years old)
The power-users and consumers are coming from the Gen X age. They love their mobiles for its capabilities to “do it all.” Standing between life and career, 25% said mobiles make them being more likely to be too distracted to focus on their family.

The Boomer Bargain-Hunters (46-64 years old)

Boomers want gadgets, but not for every price. They love hunting for bargains – and can wait 12 months for technical gadgets. Mobiles are their heartbeat. Still, data privacy has become one of their concerns.

Our question would be if this is not very much stereotyped. Or do you agree with this picture of the typical woman at different ages?

Mobile is maturing. The only question is "In which way…?"

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Are we not all awaiting the “Year of Mobile”? Obviously, tablets and smartphones have made it become more sophisticated. However, most marketers still do not know how to approach this evolution from a strategic perspective. Understanding the bigger picture seems to become a leadership task. Who is using mobile tools on a daily basis? What are mobile business goals? Why do our employees need mobile and BYOD? Why is there an opportunity in using mobile to speed up business processes?

A new study by Compete describes for example who “Primary mobile users” on Twitter are. 57% are less likely to log into Twitter from their desktop than the average Twitter user. They check their updates and tweets more frequently than most other users. With 86% they are more likely to be active on Twitter several times a day than the average user. Smartphone apps are their entry point. However, 15% of the Primary mobile users” work on Twitter via their tablets predominantly.

Twitter Competer 2012

Furthermore, Mutual Mobile have created an interesting infographic which might offer some more insights, why enterprise mobility is essential for business development, where processes might get more impact through mobile, and how a company’s ROI might get the right boost with mobile.

Looking at the stats, it becomes obvious that the mobile priority increases with Chief Technology Officers (CTO), apart from dedicating greater resources to the mobile evolution when 94% of CTOs believe enterprise mobility will be important. Furthermore, 67% see mobile having more impact than the Internet did in the 1990s. Most important from an employees outlook is the fact that 65% understand more mobile support for employees as a critical priority.

Each and every business decision maker should see that mobile business leverages employees’ productivity (2X), quadruples margins and decreases customer churn by 20%. Private and business users are getting more and more engaged in mobile Internet activities. Mobile is maturing, the infographic states. Would you agree? And if so, do you have some more arguments why…?

Infographic_MutualMobile_Maturity_2013

Study: Big brands could do better on social customer service

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Some weeks ago, we have written about the importance to be fast on response time on Social Media platforms. We made clear, based on some research by Convince & Convert, that companies need to react in not more than 60 seconds on complaints, customer enquiries and questions that appear on company’s and brands’ social platforms.

Now, a recent study of some of the biggest brands in the U.S., like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Visa or Starbucks shows that providing a top standard of customer support on Twitter is not really as fantastic as it seems. Although some readings of all those good posts about these brands and their Social Media efforts might assume the companies do whatever they can in Social Business terms.

In the study, four Software Advice employees used their personal Twitter accounts to address customer service tweets to 14 consumer brands in seven industries – McDonalds, Starbucks (Fast Food), Coca Cola, Pepsi (Soft Drinks), Visa, Mastercard (Credit Cards), Wells Fargo, Bank Of America (Banking), Walmart, Home Depot (Retail), Apple*, HP (Consumer Tech), Gillette and Colgate (Personal Care).

They sent each brand’s Twitter account one tweet per weekday for four consecutive weeks, from “Urgent, to Positive/Negative, or questions about FAQ or technical issue. Then, brands were evaluated on their average response time and rate. See the results in the following infographic…

Study: Content Marketing is becoming big in B2B, focus is shifting…

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A recent study by Curata identified the main drivers of content marketing activities in B2B companies. The findings are based on Curata’s poll of 465 B2B marketing professionals in October 2012 from business owners, VPs of Marketing, CMOs, managers, marketing consultants and agencies.

The study explains that content marketing continues to become more and more important for B2B marketers. However, the drivers for content strategies are shifting towards thought leadership and market education.

The results show that 87% of responding B2B marketing professionals use content marketing for business goals targets (5% increase to 2011). Content marketing gets followed by SEO (67%) and event marketing (60%) as further leading channels in marketing strategies in 2012.

Further findings of the study show that although engaging customers (81%) has top priority for their content marketing efforts, thought leadership and educating the market are increasing in their importance for the business. More than half of B2B marketers (56%) state thought leadership as a key objective (13% increase to 2011). Also, educating the market (47%) increased by 3% to last year. Just 24% see SEO as a key objective (still a 5% increase to last year). Former top marketing tactics (print/TV/radio) went down from 32% to 26% this year.

Spot On!
Lead generation is still one of the key marketing goals for B2B marketers according to the survey. Most B2B marketers (82%) see driving sales and leads as their top marketing goal. Establishing thought leadership (42%), increasing brand awareness (40%), or increasing Web traffic (32%) follow in the next places. Content curation is also getting traction as the next step in content marketing. 57% of B2B marketers see it as an important evolution step. However, content curation is in it’s infancy when only 34% of curating content marketers have done it since six months or less. Quite scary I found that a staggering 43% of B2B marketers don’t measure the efficiency of their content marketing efforts. I found interesting that the topic brand advocates was not on the spot in terms of content marketing in this study.

36% of mobile car search convert within an hour, finds study

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It will be one of these studies that will make the car and travel industry think. Nielsen, xAd and Telmetrics just published the third part of their “mobile path to purchase” study. The research is based on findings for the travel industry, restaurants and the car industry. The study found some significant differences in the consumer behavior from the three industry sectors. Especially for the car industry the findings seem notable…

The research discovered four types of mobile car users: car researchers, car, deal hunters, ircumstantial or emergency users, gear heads. All showed different signs of behavior, demographic and income profiles. There are some significant findings.

Half of the mobile car search was done as a longer term research. However, 49% were “looking to make a purchase within the day.” Even more, 36% of this part converted “within the hour.”

By comparing the three categories, the study found some elementary difference between apps and mobile web usage. While car searchers are heading for mobile web usage (maybe because their demand is not of daily expertise with these apps), the travel search is done predominatly via apps.

The study also clarified some differences between smartphone and tablet user behavior which was especially in the automotive category of importance for the car industry:
– Tablet owners are 3x more likely to be influenced by positive reviews than smartphone owners
– Tablet users spend more time looking at reviews and doing price research than smartphone users
– 42% of smartphone users do some research while in their cars

Most car search activities were business directions (44%), pricing comparison (43%) and phone numbers to business impact (36%).

Google Study: How mobile-friendly sites help sales

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While Facebook turns more and more to search and ad exchange budgets, Google is still riding the mobile wave. In many moderations over the last two years, I could listen to their attitude towards building mobile websites, and why these are important to the business of the future. However, companies often resist to face the mobile evolution and still stick to their conventional desktop websites. Not to mention what this does to their brands when the user experience is driving into a nightmare of usability and readability.

To get more attraction for their mission, Google has now published some research data on their blog that will help them to evangelize in the mobile business world approach. The benefit for Google is obvious. The more people use mobile sites, the better the experience in mobile usage, the more people tend to approach the Google search which means more marketing budgets into their hands.

In their research of about 1,100 U.S. adult smartphone users conducted by  market research firms Sterling Research and SmithGeiger, Google gives some handsome advertising tips to make marketers better understand and evaluate the power of mobile.

The key findings can be summarized as follows…
– 67% of smartphone users state a mobile-friendly site makes them more likely to buy a company’s product or service
– 74% are more likely to return to the site with a good experience later.
– 61% made clear that when they don’t find what they’re looking for (in roughly five seconds), they’ll click away to another site.
– 50% of respondents said even if they like a business, they’ll use its site less often if it doesn’t work well on their smartphone.
– 72% see a mobile-friendly site important to them, however 96% have visited sites that aren’t.

Spot On!
The Google study advices marketers to create a fast mobile site with big buttons and text, and simplify the mobile experience in terms of keeping steps to complete tasks to a minimum. For sure, Google did not forget to promote the site with Google mobile ads with some good results: two-thirds of people who use search find a site. Their conclusion is that “having a great mobile site is no longer just about making a few more sales. It’s become a critical component of building strong brands, nurturing lasting customer relationships, and making mobile work for you”. There is not much more to add.
Still, we would be happy to hear from your mobile experience – with or without Google. Did you change your site lately and what did it do to your sales?

Interview: "Social Business = Creating a smarter workforce & a proven solution to business challenges"

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One-on-one interview with Ed Brill

Ed Brill is Director, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, at IBM. Brill is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM’s messaging, collaboration, communications, and productivity products, including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM SmartCloud Notes, IBM Sametime, Lotus Symphony, IBM Docs, and other related social business solutions. Brill’s focus is on extending and growing the success of these solutions through customer engagement, partner ecosystem development, and harnessing the breadth and depth of the IBM organization.

The Strategy Web spoke with him about the relevance and future of Social Business.

Why is Social Business not only a buzzword?

Leaders in every industry are leveraging Social Business technology to disrupt their industries and create competitive advantage. They are improving productivity and unleashing innovation by tapping into the collective intelligence inside and outside their organizations. With social, they’re creating a smarter workforce and proving that social business isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a proven solution to business challenges.

According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016. According to IBM’s CEO Study, today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years.

What does it take to make a business “social”?

Organizations have quickly learned that a Social Business is more than just having a Facebook page and a Twitter account. In a Social Business, every department in the organization has embedded social capabilities into their traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done to create business value. A Social Business utilizes social software technology to communicate with its rich ecosystem of clients, business partners and employees.

Social business is a strategic approach to shaping a business culture, highly dependent upon transparency and trust from executive leadership and corporate strategy, including business process design, risk management, leadership development, financial controls and use of business analytics. Becoming a Social Business can help an organization deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas and innovate faster, identify expertise, enable a more effective workforce and ultimately drive its bottom line.

What does it mean to change the culture of a company?

Changing an organizations culture to embrace social must start from the top. Senior leadership must buy in and promote a culture of sharing, transparency and trust. Recent studies by IBM see this shift, today’s C-Suite recognizes the potential of social. Consider this, according to IBM’s 2012 CEO Study, today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, but that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years. Similarly. IBM’s 2011 CIO Survey of 3,000 global leaders indicated that more than 55% of companies identified social networking as having a strategic significance to their company’s growth. And finally, 2011 IBM CMO Study reports that CMOs are using social platforms to communicate with their customers, 56 percent view it as a key communication channel. These senior leaders are the key to social business adoption and there’s a real shift occurring, social business is now a business imperative.

What role is the flexible workspace playing in the process?

Companies are able to build virtual teams out of expertise and leadership, regardless of their physical location or title on the organization chart. Today’s workforce expects to be able to share, post, update and communicate with colleagues, customers, and ecosystem using social tools to get real work done. Through those tools, employees who work remotely, use flexible “hot desks” in company offices, or open floorplans can leverage tools for instant e-meetings, video and audio tools, and embedded applications to process knowledge and activities faster and deliver more value to the organization.

What’s your advice for companies to become a “social business”?

Companies around the world are now focused on becoming Social Businesses, Forrester Research estimates that the market opportunity for social software is expected to increase 60% annually. But perhaps the most daunting part of becoming a social business is how to start the journey. That’s where creating a Social Business Agenda plays a vital role. In order to become successful in social business, an organization needs to create its own personalized Agenda that addresses the company’s culture, trust
between management and employees and the organization and its constituencies, engagement behind and outside of the firewall, risk management, and of course, measurement. The sponsorship for such an activity can be driven by leadership, lines of business, or other organizational catalyst roles.

Study: Largest global corporates get over 10 million mentions a month; Twitter rocks, YouTube grows massively

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Companies in the Fortune Global 100 get a total of 10,400,132 online mentions in a month. Twitter is the catalyst for them as it generates the majority of these mentions. However, YouTube is the rising star this year. This is the main findings of the third annual Burson-Marsteller Global Social Media Check-Up, which also includes new data provided by Visible Technologies.

The study states that the majority of the big corporates (87%) are using at least one of the major social platforms. The main growth can be seen at YouTube with 79% of companies now using a branded YouTube channel (57% in 2011). The average performance figures showed more than two million views and 1,669 subscribers. The development is illustrating the importance of integrating original multimedia content that can be shared on the social networks.

Twitter is still the rock-star among the popular social networks in terms of corporate usage. 82% of Fortune Global 100 companies have at least one Twitter account with an average mention of 55,970 times on the 140 character platform. The importance of Twitter ca be seen in the fact that stakeholders are following global companies closely.

Compared to 2011, the average number of followers per corporate Twitter account almost tripled to 14,709 from 5,076. On Facebook, the average number of likes per company page has increased by 275% in two years to 152,646 likes this year.

“People want to interact and connect with these major companies, and these platforms are the bridge directly to the heart of these organizations. What’s even more impressive is how much companies are engaging back with followers. Seventy-nine percent of corporate accounts attempt to engage on Twitter with retweets and @-mentions, and 70 percent of corporate Facebook pages are responding to comments on their walls and timelines.”
Burson-Marsteller, Chief Global Digital Strategist, Dallas Lawrence

Some more findings of the study…

– Fortune Global 100 companies have an average of accounts of: 10.4 Facebook pages, 10.1 Twitter accounts, 8.1 YouTube channels, 2.6 Google Plus pages and 2.0 Pinterest accounts.
– 74% of companies have a Facebook page
– 93% of corporate Facebook get weekly updates
– 48% have joined Google Plus
– 25% are on Pinterest

And whatever else you might want to know about the Top Global 100 you can find here, or within their infographic….