Advertising dollars are flowing toward mobile, reemphasizing the smartphone’s role in the future of digital marketing.
According to RKG’s digital marketing report for Q3 2014, paid search ad spending on Google increased 27 percent from the previous year, and on Bing, it increased 24 percent. Mobile devices and product ads are driving these shifts.
Smartphones and tablets accounted for 38 percent of paid search traffic, up from last year’s 30 percent. In turn, advertisers are spending about 26 percent more on smartphone ads.
The future of mobile businessSmartphones are also stealing click share away from PCs. Organic traffic from smartphones rose to 38 percent, up from 27 percent in 2013.
The report found digital marketers’ spending jumped 73 percent on Google and Bing product ads across all digital channels.
On the social media front, Facebook still drives the most traffic, but its command seems to be waning. Facebook generated 53 percent of all traffic from social media sites in Q3, while it accounted for 60 percent of traffic less than a year ago. Meanwhile, Twitter and Pinterest both gained ground.
Despite the clear emergence of mobile as the future of digital marketing, digital marketers often fail to develop effective mobile strategies, as the Content Standard previously reported. Marketers recognize their importance, but they also realize that conventional digital marketing strategies can’t be translated directly to mobile. The challenge is integrating these conventional strategies with custom-built mobile marketing strategies.
Even the most successful digital marketing strategists don’t necessarily get it right all the time, but they are able to quickly discard ideas that don’t work in favor of strategies that do. Take Boostability—which topseos.com ranked in the top 10 of SEO agencies—and its growth: it became a $22 million company in four years. In an interview with The Business Journals, CEO Travis Thorpe explains that success came when he nimbly adjusted his product to meet client needs.
“Once we started listening to our customers and responding quickly to what they wanted, we began to grow quickly,” Thorpe says.
The sooner marketers adapt to the rise of mobile in their midst, the better positioned they will be to reap the rewards.