We know that consumers prefer mobile experiences, but if you’re a marketer, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed a campaign on your phone or tablet that has not been designed for mobile. It seems many marketers are still considering mobile as an afterthought, despite the opportunities it presents, and will continue to present as mobile penetration explodes.

There are some great examples of companies using mobile to create fantastic campaigns and consumer experiences: Commonwealth Bank and its Kaching mobile app and net banking platform immediately spring to mind. But for many marketers, mobile is a lower priority than other aspects of the digital marketing mix, such as social media optimisation or display advertising.

Findings from a recent study by the CMO Council into digital marketing trends across Asia Pacific in 2012 support this theory. The report identified the top three challenges for Australian marketers executing digital campaigns as:

• Budget limitations,
• resourcing, and
• and determining the best technology to use.

The report also found that only 31% of Australian marketers are allocating digital marketing funds to mobile applications and messaging, and even less (14%) are pursuing mobile advertising.

The benefits that mobile marketing brings to both consumers and marketers are undeniable, and the business opportunity is immense, mobile therefore must be among the top priorities for marketers.

Mobile optimised marketing activity provides consumers with rich, contextual experiences and better connections to the people, brands and information that are important to them. As marketers, we can more effectively create, customise, analyse and optimise content and experiences for consumers that generate better results for our company and/or clients.

The CMO research also found that Australia invests more in digital marketing than any other country across the Asia-Pacific region. While mobile represents a small part of this now, Cisco reports that mobile web traffic grew by 40% in Australia during 2012, and is expected to grow 13-fold globally by 2017. This demonstrates there is real business value in mobile as well as immense marketing potential. So whether you’re a seasoned digital marketing pro, or just getting started, here are three quick tips for getting into mobile marketing:

1. Find out how mobile your community already is

As marketers we crave data because the more you know about your customers, the better decisions you can make when going to market. You can find out how people are consuming your content, including the types of devices they’re using, by looking within the traffic data available through your web analytics solution. Based on this you’ll be able to gain insights about how mobile your community is, which will help demonstrate why a mobile strategy is important to your business – especially as mobile traffic continues to grow exponentially.

2. Build once with responsive web design

With budget limitations being the biggest challenge for marketers, it’s important to build the highest quality/impact mobile content as cost effectively as possible. However, the explosion of mobile devices poses a real challenge for marketers to deliver content across a range of different screen sizes. The answer to this problem is responsive design.

Responsive design enables you to build web content in a way that automatically adjusts to fit any device (including desktop), without compromising the content or the consumer experience. This means you only have to build once, rather than creating lots of separate content for specific devices.

3. Get more out of mobile (and digital) with analytics

When it comes to determining the best technology to use for your digital and mobile campaigns, how you analyse is equally as important as how you build. Mobile is able to give you a wealth of data, such as location, core metrics such as revenue per customer, user path and drop off, which acts as real-time feedback that can be used to optimise the content and consumer experience. So when you’re deciding what technologies you’re going to use in your mobile campaign, always factor in the key metrics that demonstrate success and find an analytics solution that will deliver the data.

As consumer preference for mobile experiences continues to grow, there’s no question that over the next few years mobile is going to continue to be a critical method of communicating with your customers. I’m interested to know though, are you going to take advantage of the opportunity in mobile, or will it stay an afterthought?