We asked Lorna Lee, the social media voice for discoverireland.ie, to guest blog for us this week. Lorna attended last week’s mobile marketing conference from the Digital Marketing Institute and gives a great roundup of the key highlights for her. So over to Lorna.
A top-notch conference with excellent speakers, little waffle and lots of actionable takeaways – make more like this! If you were too busy with your popcorn to take notes and can’t be trawling through 165MB of presentations, here’s some of the points that interested me most.
3 Mobile Stats
- 12.4% of web traffic in Ireland is now from mobile devices, with 87.8% still from desktop devices.
- 55% of people say that a poor mobile website experience will hurt their opinion of the brand and 79% will then turn to a competitor website.
- 77% of Irish people engage in TV+/ simultaneous device usage/ dual screening.
3 Clever Case Studies
- Use of promoted tweets: Twitter told us that, according to Hailo, it has been the most effective of all their advertising platforms. Their clever strategy was to make promoted tweets really relevant and timely by using them during commuting times on rainy days and days with public transport delays: “Wet? Stuck for a dart? Grab a Hailo cab home + link to itunes to download the app”.
- Use of gamification: a real live virtual Pacman game was created by the City of Portland, where you had to tour around the city chomping virtual circles (they weren’t actually painted on the ground, they just showed up on a map of the city you had on your smartphone and as you reached the exact GPS location of the circle, the game would recognise this, your character would chomp the circle and you would get another point on the board).
- Real time reactivity to trending topics: Oreo took advantage of the massive conversation surge around the power outage during the Superbowl pushing a simple digital ad on social media: “You can still dunk in the dark”, which actually got more response than their TV ad during the Superbowl.
3 Must-haves for Mobile Sites (ok, 4!):
- Quick loading
- Prioritised content, with reduced fields and clicks
- Clicks-to-call and links to directions
- No-pinching-required buttons and checkboxes
3 Generic Uses for Apps (if it’s not going to serve this purpose, don’t build it):
- Boredom
- Specific micro-task (e.g. booking a holiday)
- Local information i.e. I’m lost and I need directions or a phone number.
3 Big Rules for Apps:
- Speed: apps are used “in between real life”(on transport and on the toilet mainly!), so window of time is short. 40-60 seconds = normal use time.
- Less is more: best apps in the world can only do one thing.
- Gorgeous matters: the iPhone is a thing of beauty and that’s what its users expect.
About Lorna Lee @lornamlee:
I have the agreeable job of spending my days thinking up holiday ideas, as the social media voice for discoverireland.ie. It’s a faultless fit for me as I’m a discoverer by nature – before joining the digital marketing team in Fáilte Ireland, I lived and worked in France, London and Portugal and travelled all over the world. Now I’m making it my business to find out all the best things to see and do in Ireland and tell the country about them ☺ My favourite holidays in Ireland so far have been getting away from it all on the beautifully rugged Valentia Island, treating myself at the fabulous Cliff House in Ardmore in Co. Waterford and losing the feeling in my extremities on a surf board in Clare and Sligo.
