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If you look around as you shop in a store and find people using their phones, you may not guess what one-third of them are doing. According to Experian’s “2011 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report,” 28% of consumers perform shopping activities from their mobile phones while in brick-and-mortar retail stores.
Another research study of more than 5,000 smart phone users commissioned by Google and conducted by independent research firm Ipsos, found that consumers make faster purchasing decisions when using their phones – 88% of those who look for local information on their smart phones take action within a day, while 74% of smart phone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping.
These studies establish a direct connection between the mobile consumer and their purchasing behavior and underline the importance of mobile devices in customer engagement.
Using some basic math, we can take that connection further. Consider Best Buy, whose profit in North America reached approximately $6 billion in 2011. Almost three-quarters of their revenue – a whopping $4.5 billion – was impacted by their customers’ mobile Web experience. Best Buy doesn’t publicly specify the ratio between their online versus in-store revenue, but following the math in the Experian report, over $1 billion of revenue came from folks standing in-store on their smart phones.
For business-to-consumer retailers, mobile strategies are a business imperative as they also compete with the business-to-business suppliers that manufacture the products consumers see in-store. If a smartphone-armed consumer searches for a product online, they are making a choice between the best mobile Web experiences on the suppliers’ versus the retailers’ websites, rather than the packaging or product placement.
For the people behind these websites; the marketers, marketing technologists and content management professionals, these statistics also serve to underline the mobile Web as a content delivery channel of equal status to the traditional website.
This is even before we have opened up the opportunity of proximity that many mobile devices offer – how many Best Buy suppliers are adapting their mobile experience knowing that the consumer is in store? What could retailers like Best Buy themselves do with this information?
Many industry analysts are predicting that the next wave of mobile innovation and subsequent changes in consumer behavior will be the mainstream use of smartphones for making payments. It’s widely speculated that Apple will be the catalyst for this change with the introduction of near field communications into the next generation of the iPhone.
It’s therefore no longer sufficient that the CEO’s cry “we must do something with mobile” can be adequately satisfied with a small side project, an agency and a silo of content. Mobile is now the Web, and mobile delivery must be hard baked into an organization’s Web strategy and the requirements for the systems that drive that.
Mobile Web experiences aren’t just about creating a mobile version of the corporate website. The entire experience must be optimized for the smaller screen, while emphasizing the more task-based functionalities, since the mobile visitor has different needs from their counterpart sitting comfortably in front of a PC.
The mobile visitor is probably not browsing; they are (to use the example earlier) choosing a product, or perhaps looking for directions to your office or doing some quick research as they respond to an e-mail.
This means managing and delivering content in a form that can be repurposed for consumption across multiple channels and devices. The basic fundament of Web content management – that of separating the content from its presentation – remain true as we move from managing Web pages to a device-optimized Web experience.
IT systems need to not only manage variants of content that are appropriate for device capabilities and the bandwidth available, but also assemble these components into an online experience that may be very different from the website.
Sounds scary? Well, the good news is that these are all core capabilities of an enterprise Web content management system. We just need to remember that the Web in WCM today means more than just publishing Web pages.
Equally we need to remember that mobile is not a side project that is some kind of special case – it is a first class citizen of Web and digital engagement strategies, and the systems that drive those strategies need to be up to that task.
