Get back to basics: New Forrester report lays out priorities for mobile marketers

In a new report released last week, Forrester found that mobile marketers are increasingly dazzled by an influx of new technology to the extent that it may be hampering their intended mobile strategies.

The 2018 Mobile and New Technology Priorities for Marketers: Why Marketers Must Keep Their Mobile Basics found that emerging technology such as chatbots, intelligent agents (IAs), artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is keeping marketers from leveraging as much as they could from mobile.

From the report:

“Mobile is still at the heart of digital transformation, a unique catalyst for business transformation and a key enabler for adjacent technologies. Marketers wrongly think they can leapfrog to emerging tech once they have checked the box on mobile apps and responsive websites.”

The report says that a hyperfocus on tech is causing marketers to “fail to deliver on foundational mobile experiences.” Forrester found that 53 percent of the surveyed marketers are still not using mobile to transform their overall customer experience.

The report also provides several recommendations, including suggesting an increased focus on customer engagement. The report says that US online ad spending will grow by $47.8 billion in 2018 and of that growth, 91 percent will come from mobile including mobile social, search and display. According to Forrester data, 53 percent of marketers aren’t using mobile advertising to transform their customer experience and of those that are, 58 percent say that their mobile services are nearly identical to their desktop services.

Among the report’s recommendations to marketers:

• Revisit your KPIs to increase mobile’s share in the marketing mix.
• Involve the full C-suite, including the CEO, in your mobile strategy.
• Invest strategically in-house, and partner with a digital experience provider.
• Extend your mobile moment strategy to connected objects, such as IoT.
• Make your mobile web more app-like
• Partner with technology counterparts to integrate automation technologies.
• Back your chatbot experiment with human intervention.

The report also looked at intermediaries such as voice assistants and recommended marketers strategize how to borrow mobile moments from them.