Mobile ROI?

While mobile marketing is recognized as an integral component of digital marketing strategies in 2010, uncertainty looms over its return on investment according to a recent survey by R2integrated (R2i), a leading Internet marketing and technology company.

Twenty two percent of survey respondents said that mobile marketing is “very important” to their overall marketing strategy for 2010; 26 percent said “important”; and 28 percent said “somewhat important.” Only 8 percent said “not important.” The majority of respondents, 41 percent, said their main reason for executing a mobile marketing campaign was “company awareness,” followed by “lead generation,” 33 percent.

Quantifying the return on investment was considered the most critical area of improvement for planned mobile marketing campaigns among respondents at 43 percent. Forty nine percent said an increase in customers would measure a successful campaign.

“It appears that 2010 will be a year of experimentation and education on mobile marketing as marketers struggle to come to terms with its practicality and ROI,” said Matt Goddard, co-founder and CEO, R2i. “This shouldn’t suggest that marketers ought to table their mobile marketing plans, but that they should pay considerable attention to how they can connect the dots back to driving revenue.”

The biggest impediments to executing a mobile marketing campaign were “not knowing how to develop the business case,” 32 percent, and “not enough analytics to measure the ROI,” 30 percent. Sixty three percent of respondents said they’d only allocate up to 15 percent of their budgets on mobile marketing.

More than half (52 percent) of respondents said that their mobile marketing campaign would focus on mobile Web site development channel, while 40 percent said they would focus on mobile application development. When asked to rate the importance of mobile platforms, 59 percent of respondents said the iPhone and 40 percent said the BlackBerry were “very important”; only seven percent thought that Android was a “very important” platform.

“I think because the technology is still working to fully prove itself, most marketers are playing it safe by focusing on the mobile browsing experience, where they can leverage existing Web assets, rather than on mobile marketing where the ROI proposition is still being evaluated,” said Goddard. “The iPhone still reflects the largest base for marketers to sell into even though the Android may be the platform du jour in terms of hype.”