With the IAB Think Mobile Congress taking place, Google’s Belgian offices were pretty crowded on November 27. Next to Google’s own mobile experts, a few Belgian experts on the subject were sharing trends, strategies and interesting cases. Although everybody remembers services like WAP, nobody will remember actually using them.
The introduction of the smartphone – and social media as an accelerator – have however changed the possibilities for and the mindset about mobile internet. As a result, the line between offline and online becomes very vague, and more and more consumers can interact with and buy from your business 24/7. Lacking a good mobile site will harm your business, both in terms of perception and sales opportunities.
Although consumers embrace this evolution, companies seem to be lacking behind. At the moment (only) 40% of Belgian websites have a mobile counterpart. Although our Social Media around the World Study has shown that the most desired mobile services are related to convenience, contact and entertainment; the Belgian telecom- and entertainmentsector score surprisingly bad in terms of providing mobile-friendly websites
 
For the advertising business we see the same trend: the share of mobile ad spendings does not reflect the share of time spent on mobile at all.
Knowing that about 2 out of 3 smartphone or tablet owners have a data subscription, not having a mobile strategy is like not having a future proof strategy. Although apps can be an important tool in the marketing mix, just ‘having an app’ is not a mobile strategy. Apps are very suitable for intensive use, but a lot of people will just visit your website just once or a few times. Over 50% of visitors say they felt frustrated and annoyed after visiting a non-mobile friendly website. An equal number says they would have engaged more with the company/website, if the website would have been mobile friendly.
If you‘re not yet convinced after seeing these numbers, you will probably never be. We at InSites Consulting are convinced, and have therefore enabled mobile in our research toolbox both on the technology and methodology side. Our research in the Mobile Mindset study has shown that the use of mobile offers advantages for both Surveys and Research Communities.

For Surveys, the main advantages are an increase in data quality and easy offline recruiting. The more time goes by between an experience and the reporting of this experience, the more information goes lost. For this reason, the use of mobile increases the data quality of surveys by enabling the possibility to participate in a survey right after of even during the experience. Furthermore, respondents can be recruited on the spot via a cue (poster, flyer etc..) and invited to take a survey on their mobile device. This can be very convenient for finding people who were exposed to a certain retail experience for example.
For Research Communities, our Community App increases participant engagement and it also leads to different and richer data. Because the application allows respondents to log-in to the community at any place and any time, it makes it easier for members to stay in touch with the community, and some of them spend even more time on it. Although there is no difference in the number of posts between mobile and non-mobile users, mobile users upload more multimedia. As a picture is worth more than a thousand words, this allows participants to express themselves in a better way with less efforts, resulting in more contextual and more personal data.