There are some really great slides and info here… highly recommended:
Business Insider – Here’s An Excellent Presentation About The Rise Of Mobile And The Massive Implications: “Revered Apple analyst Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis is giving a presentation May 29 at the BookExpo America convention in New York.
It’s on the rise of mobile and what it means for the industry.”
Make sure to check out the part on ecosystem growth.
Not totally on-board with everything here (by 2020 we won’t be tapping things to enable NFC connections nor will companies be texting us when we already have their app installed on our device or wearable), but this is an thought-provoking overview of just how much the web and coming improvements in consumer technology and IT infrastructure (more agile databases in the cloud etc) will change marketing itself in the next decade:
The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing | McKinsey & Company: “What’s next? Deploying tools that rapidly assemble databases of every customer contact with a brand, companies will need to push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of consumer decision journeys. With longitudinal pictures of customers’ touches and their outcomes, companies can model total costs per action, find the most effective decision-journey patterns, and spot points of leakage. As more contacts become digitized—and they will—the data will gradually get easier to create.”
Mobile is the linchpin of the user experience in 2015-2025, but we can’t forget wearables, such as Google Glass, and how much those will impact marketing as well.
Hot on the heels of Samsung’s new flagship phone being released with “eye scroll tracking” as a feature comes this interesting piece from TechCrunch on what we might be in store for when marketers can stare back at mobile users…
The Implications of the Interface That Watches You – TechCrunch: “It’s no secret that companies and advertisers have been looking for a way to boost the ROI of mobile ads, Google included. Gathering facial feedback data could act like a cheat code to help marketing get to the next level – provided it isn’t wielded like a heavy, blunt club. The possibility for abuse is tremendous here: imagine ads that periodically migrate to occupy the places where you find the choicest content in an app, or autoplaying video ads that wait until you’re paying close attention before launching into a sales barrage.”
Plunk is a nifty and easy-to-use utility that allows you to upload a mobile screen image of a site you might be testing or designing, share it with others and get a report 48 hours later of where people touched their screen.
It’s totally for mobile sites and I think it’s an ingenious idea given the analytics you get:
Plunk – An easy way to test clicks on a mobile phone…
“Here are 5 ways Plunk will help:
1. User intuition. See where touch screen testers want to click on your page.
2. Improve functionality. Visually review where users are expecting to find that new button.
3. Retain interaction and engagement. Test where mobile users are getting lost due to either navigation or design and keep their attention locked.
4. Mobile conversion. Feedback for creating a great design will encourage more mobile activity.
5. Bob for those apples. Stuck deciding between new mobile designs? Send them out and dive into your results to find the best one!time and money. Plunk lets you test your mobile users’ clicks to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”
You can share the image to get results to your own social networking followers or to an email beta list etc.
Very cool and handy, especially for performance marketers using mobile (as you should be).
I’m still not sold on the concept of a “smartwatch” that replicates some of the functions of a mobile device such as the iPhone. Granted, I haven’t worn a watch in a decade but I do carry a mobile phone with me most anywhere.
Apple’s watch will run iOS and arrive later this year, say sources – The Verge: “That’s perfectly in line with what we’ve heard about the watch project, which we’re told is being led by Ive himself with some 100 engineers under him. Interestingly, we’re also told that Apple’s chosen to rework the full iOS to run on the watch instead of building up the iPod nano’s proprietary touch operating system — although the previous nano was already watch-sized and seemed like a great starting point for a wrist-sized device, Apple’s betting on iOS across product lines.”
Whatever the final form and function of the mythical iWatch might be, I’m still betting heavily on Google’s wearable platform called Glass. To me, the ability to get a heads up display of relevant contextual information as well as quickly capture images or video from your point of view with a simple voice command points to a bright future for Glass.
Smart piece that highlights some of the reasons we love the new Google Maps app on iOS and why it spells out the future of the (mobile) web…
Why Google Just Made iPhone King: Ads | Wired Business | Wired.com: “Google’s willingness to ship iOS apps could look smarter as time goes on. The company trounces Apple when it comes to all things cloud, not just maps and e-mail; its social network, search engine, and highly optimized data centers could give its iOS apps an even bigger edge in the coming years.”
Discovery means you’ll be able to “map” what your friends are liking, sharing and discovering themselves in an effortless and responsible manner. As we continue to kick the tires on the social web, we’re excited to see where this next discovery phase takes us.
Square Gift Cards from Square on Vimeo.
We make no secret of our love for Square and the ability to democratize transactions to the point of making our on-the-go clients very very happy. We even gave them out as stocking stuffers to clients.
We couldn’t be more excited about Square’s new gift card functionality that will surely make a few of the great folks we work with happy as well (especially during the holiday season):
Square Introduces Gift Cards: The Slow Death Of Physical Credit Cards And Cash Continues | TechCrunch: “Today, payment service Square has introduced a new way to send gift cards, through its Square Wallet app. You can now go through all of the businesses that use Square to process payments, pick the right one for your friend or family member, and then purchase them a gift card of in amount of your choosing.”
It can only be a matter of time before Square gets acquired by Apple (I think). It’s an obvious partnership and makes sense given how disruptive Square is becoming to local payment industries.
We’ve been experimenting with Keen’s API-as-analytics platform (simply drop some code into your existing code) on a few of the apps we’re building for clients and have been mightily impressed so far…
Keen IO – Analytics APIs: “So many of the devices we use everyday are internet connected and could certainly benefit from great user analytics. And we want to be a part of it all. But, in the short-term, we’re spending our time on where we think we can make the biggest impact – mobile. We’ve got SDKs for iOS, Android, JavaScript, and Ruby ready for you today. Python and Windows Mobile are in the queue and coming soon.”
If you’re doing anything with iOS or Android (we haven’t ventured in Windows Mobile development), we can’t recommend poking around Keen enough. It’s not for everyone and doesn’t offer all the options of a custom solution, but definitely does the job if you need to tackle larger windmills in your app development.
The short answer is yes, but the long answer is more complicated depending on your audience and where/how you need to be discovered…
iOS Devices Have Been Dominating Mobile Web Traffic For The Past 6 Months [Report] | Cult of Mac: “Android technically sells more smartphones than Apple, but iOS devices continue to dominate mobile web traffic. Chitika Insights has been tracking web traffic on the top mobile platforms, and iOS commands 67% of usage and Android only 33%.”
We generally start clients with iOS and web apps but don’t shy away from Android if the market is there.
Email marketing is an essential part of what we call Discovery Marketing. Retention is the new acquisition, after all.
We love to use resources like MailChimp or ConstantContact to help our clients find the best relationships with their customers or users. Often, we get questions about HTML emails and pretty graphics as a part of those campaigns.
We like to caution people to remember the mobile component and how much customers are using devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android devices to perform tasks like checking on email during the day, during a sports event or in the evenings.
In many ways, the iPhone and competing devices have re-opened the possibilities for email that programs like Outlook slowly smothered.
And here’s some more positive news about email usage on the iPhone that bolster our point…
“Email marketing campaigns have been a classic marketing technique since the rise of the Internet. Traditionally, people would use their computer to open up an email client like Outlook or Hotmail and sift through the contents of their inbox. Now, more people are accessing and opening emails via mobile devices than ever before. In fact, a recent email experiment in which one billion “opens” of emails were examined shows that the iPhone accounts for most email opens, more so than Gmail, Hotmail, and Windows Live combined.
So, yes… use email marketing.
But keep in mind those of us that routinely use iPhones etc as our preliminary email processing machines for real effectiveness in your campaigns!
