Last week, I wrote a post here on the Corporate Eye blog where I asked Is Mobile Marketing Still an Option or Now a Requirement? In that post, I talked about some predictions for mobile marketing in 2011 and beyond, and today, I’d like to take a step back and look at how mobile marketing evolved in 2010. It’s an amazing, fast-moving story.
comScore released its 2010 Mobile Year in Review report this month, and that report provided a lot of data about the mobile industry:
- 2010 was all about smartphone adoption with most markets in the United States and Europe surpassing 25-30% market penetration.
- iPhone sales lead the way in both the United States and EU5. RIM (i.e., Blackberry) was still the leading platform in 2010 though.
- Android-enabled smartphone sales were six times higher in the United States in 2010 than in 2009.
- PC-based email use declined for the first time as more people switched to accessing email via their smartphone devices.
- Social media was considered one of the fastest growing mobile phone activities. As comScore explains, “in the U.S. the number of mobile social media users grew 56% to lead all content categories, and in the UK Facebook accounts for 40% of all time spent on mobile sites.”
- Mobile advertising became a priority for many businesses, but those businesses were still in the very early testing and learning phase.
The mobile world certainly changed in 2010, and the trends started during that year will continue and evolve even more in 2011. Apps continue to explode in both development and use, and tablet devices like the iPad are changing when and how people interact with content on the go. Local marketing via mobile devices is hotter than ever, and opportunities are wide open for companies of all sizes and businesses in all industries.
2011 will be the year that we’ll start to see some real trends in mobile marketing as some of the winners in terms of marketing opportunities will undoubtedly begin to rise to the surface and some companies and brands will raise eyebrows for their innovative mobile marketing initiatives.
Will your brand be one of those that raises eyebrows in mobile marketing this year? Leave a comment and share your thoughts about mobile marketing in 2011.
Image: stock.xchng
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
