The Difficulty of Growing Mobile Advertising

Rapid growth in the telecommunications industry has created many opportunities for advertising professionals. The millions of people who use smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are a captive audience for your messages, so you must create effective mobile advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, mobile advertising is associated with a unique set of challenges. You will have to use every tool at your disposal to overcome these challenges and ensure your audience receives and responds to your messages.

One of the biggest challenges in growing your mobile advertising reach is that the US smartphone market is well on its way to being saturated. Comscore reported that more than 114 million Americans used these mobile devices in July 2012 alone. The US population was approximately 314 million people that year, so more than one-third of the country is already using smartphones. Henry Blodget of "Business Insider" estimates that the total market for smartphones is about 225 million Americans, so more than half of the potential market has already been penetrated. Once the market is completely saturated, it will be more difficult to grow your mobile advertising reach.

Despite the problems created by approaching market saturation, Ingrid Lunden of "Tech Crunch" reports that global mobile advertising revenue is expected to exceed $9 billion in 2013. Search advertising is responsible for more than half of all mobile advertising revenue, so another one of your challenges will be balancing your search advertising efforts with other types of advertising. Lunden says display ads only account for 38.7 percent of mobile advertising revenue. Many advertisers have stopped using messaging-based ads, as this type of mobile advertising only accounts for 8.5 percent of all revenues.

Google is the global leader in search, but engineers frequently change the company's algorithm to reflect changing search engine trends. This could have an effect on your mobile advertising strategy. Larry Page, one of Google's founders, also recently commented that he does not like it when companies create overly simple mobile sites when many of today's smartphones are capable of displaying full sites. He was talking about his personal mobile experience, but his comments could eventually influence Google policies and change mobile advertising best practices.

Getting mobile device users to notice and respond to your messages is also becoming more difficult. Using mobile devices is a very personal experience, so what works to attract the attention of one user may not attract the attention of another. You will have to work harder to develop mobile advertising campaigns and create advertisements that attract the attention of people in your company's target market.

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices have many advantages for users and the advertisers trying to reach them. If you want to increase awareness of your brand and influence prospective customers to take action, you must understand how to reach your mobile audience. Concentrating on mobile advertising could help you generate additional revenue and increase the effectiveness of your advertising strategy.

Nancy Anderson is the communities and article Editor for Nexxt.  Nancy has 10 years’ experience in the online job search business with Beyond.  Nancy's team produces dozens of articles every month for top internet sites.  Follow Nancy and the Beyond team on https://twitter.com/BeyondJobs.

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