Mobile marketing is exploding as consumers increasingly use their smart phones and mobile devices to travel, shop and spend. Current trends in mobile usage provide compelling reasons for the travel trade to create their own easy-to-use and interactive mobile website platforms.
To assist our travel trade subscribers in creating their own mobile website, Tourism Tattler will be launching an easy to use mobile website application to be launched this October.
Mobile Usage Trends
Countries like China, India and Brazil have seen a massive surge in mobile phone usage and with more than 30% increase in annual subscriptions, mobile browsing is set to become the standard.
The Hospitality industry, which only recently had to adopt new rules of customer engagement by embracing online marketing techniques, is now once more compelled to change its marketing tactics – as most of its potential customers are browsing on-the-go. With travel shoppers gravitating towards mobile browsing, marketers have no other option but to rethink their strategies.
With mobile phones and mobile browsing rates getting cheaper by the hour, the number of mobile internet subscribers has exceeded traditional internet users. Can this mobile web community be ignored anymore? And the numbers do point to a higher number of mobile compatible websites in the hospitality segment as compared to any other segment.
Mobile Internet
With mobile phones gradually overtaking the land line users across the globe, it was natural that the mobile phone was being groomed for a multi-utility functionality in the future. The first phase of the transformation of mobile phones witnessed an amazing capability to handle multi-media files – which was great news for the hospitality segment. At present, most of the advanced cell phones (Smart phones) can perform all the major tasks that our PCs or Laptops can do.
Location Based Service (LBS)
Travelers are always on the move and the one apparatus that keeps them connected to the world is their mobile phone, and with addition of browsing capability, mobile phones are no longer restricted to voice and text communication – it has become a hub of information, research, inquiry, commerce and other location-based services, with just a couple of touches. Starting from hotel reservations to Car booking, purchasing event tickets to booking a restaurant table – everything is bundled inside the various apps on your mobile phone. Some of the top hotel chains who were the earliest proponents of M-commerce have reported a 70% – 90% surge in their traffic.
Click-To-Call
According to Google, consumers would rather call a business than log-on to their website when they are researching a product on their mobile device. This makes sense to anyone that has tried to navigate a complicated website on a tiny mobile screen. It is often much easier to call. Click-to-call functionality is much easier to use for consumers.
Through the balance of 2013 these trends will continue to develop: Optimized mobile e-mail; more click-to-call opportunities; the continuing development of augmented reality; rapid blending of local, social and mobile marketing; and, the rapid growth of mobile advertising. It is tough to keep up, but forward-thinking marketers will stay on top of these mobile trends to flourish in the future.
Info Graphic
The following graphic by Teddy Hunt provides a compelling reason to create your own Mobile Website as soon as possible.
