Go Mobile or Die

If you don’t have a serious mobile marketing strategy by the end of this year, you might as well just post to Craigslist and call it a day.

In 2014, mobile users outnumbered laptop and desktop users. The average person now spends 51 percent or more of their Internet time on a mobile device compared with just 42 percent or less on a desktop or laptop.

Back in 2008, the average person used a laptop or desktop 91 percent of the time. The very first iPhone had only hit the market six months earlier, and iPads didn’t even exist yet.

In the digital era, 2008 was an eternity ago. It’s practically the old days of grainy black-and-white photography. No business needed a mobile marketing strategy back when flip phones were shiny and new (and expensive!), but mobile is now where your customers are.

Most businesses have some kind of mobile marketing strategy, but many haven’t thought it through. It’s just a checklist item. As Stephen Moyers at SPINX Digital Agency put it, “Those companies will likely be forgotten and become obsolete.”

That’s especially true if their customers are primarily young people.

MarketingCharts published an info graphic comparing users’ responses to mobile ads between Millennials (age 16-34) and GenXers (age 35-54). Ten percent of GenXers added a product to their wish list, while 15 percent of Millennials did. Eleven percent of GenXers saved a page, while 25 percent of Millennials did. Thirteen percent of GenXers purchased a product, while 23 percent of Millennials did.

Young people are growing up with smart phones and tablets. They don’t need to switch from a big lug of a computer on their desk to a tiny one in their pocket. They’re used to everything, and they prefer mobile more than anyone else.

Until cybernetic implants comes along, mobile devices will only grow in popularity. Some older folks can’t be bothered with all the newfangled gadgetry out there, but nobody lives forever. When retirement homes are full of GenXers, everyone in the country will have been using mobile devices for decades. We’ll have forgotten that we ever lived without them. Your sturdy old desktop may be tomorrow’s Commodore 64.

If your primary business right now is selling dumb phones to grandma—you know, the kind with the gigantic buttons that even a blind person can see—you probably don’t need much of a mobile marketing strategy.

Otherwise? Yeah. You do.

We’re already past the tipping point. If your marketing team is still just phoning it in (yes, that pun was intended), now would be a good time for a re-think.