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Have you been wondering if mobile marketing is worth your efforts? Consider this quote:

“In the last 12 months, customers around the world ordered more than $1 billion worth of products from Amazon using a mobile device.”

This was said by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and it shows just how powerful mobile marketing has become. If your company is not making the most out of it, you are missing out on that potential income.

Why is mobile marketing so important? Think about the way people use their mobile devices. A mobile phone, smart or not, is constantly with the individual. If they receive a text, they likely stop what they are doing to check it. If they have a few moments of downtime, they likely use the phone to go online and check their email or their favorite social media site.

By getting your message to that mobile device, you are keeping your brand, quite literally, in your customer’s back pocket. This is why mobile marketing is becoming one of the driving forces in the marketing world. When done correctly, mobile marketing reaches a consumer in a highly intimate way, reaching them on their most personal device.

Mobile media is here to stay, and it is growing at a tremendous rate. Is your business making the most out of this? If you are not following the latest mobile marketing trends, you may be left in the dust. Here’s what you need to know about the latest trends and changes in the mobile marketing world.

The statistics surrounding mobile marketing are quite staggering, and they point to a clear need for more emphasis on mobile marketing efforts going forward. Those who have found success marketing online are going to need to adjust if they are going to continue to succeed.

Understanding Mobile Marketing Statistics

There are currently around 4 billion people with mobile phones across the world. Of those, 1.08 billion are smartphones. This means that 27 percent of cell phone users have a phone that can connect to the Internet. On top of that, 3.05 billion of these phones are SMS enabled. These are huge numbers.

But the statistics indicate even more than just a huge global market. Consider this: people spend 2.7 hours a day socializing on their mobile devices. This is twice the amount of time that people will spend eating over the course of a day. A full 91 percent of mobile use is to socialize, compared to 79 percent for desktops. People are spending a lot of tiem on their mobile devices, which means that this is a powerful tool to the marketer who knows how to use it right.

What is interesting about the statistics relating to mobile use is that people are spending more and more time on their devices. From July 2011 to July 2012, a Nielsen study into mobile growth showed that the time spent on mobile devices and apps grew by a whopping 120 percent. From 2011 to 2012, web traffic from mobile devices grew by 84 percent.

The makers of Microsoft Tag, Microsoft’s attempt at making a mobile device, indicate that they expect mobile devices to overtake computers by 2014. While this remains to be seen, in 2013 use seems fairly even, with computers just a little bit more popular as some people are taking longer to make the switch. Thus, this estimate is probably not all that far-fetched.

Now when it comes to shopping and consumer behavior, the statistics are even more promising. People are using their mobile devices to shop, even if they don’t make the purchase online. A full 24 percent of Americans who own a tablet use it to shop at least two times a month, with 20 percent reporting using it once a week, and a full 12 percent shopping daily on their mobile device.

Some U.S. based marketers are less interested in mobile optimization because computer-based sales are still strong. In the U.S. in 2012, only 7.96 percent of web traffic was mobile traffic. Yet, in Africa the number is almost double at 14.85 percent, and it’s even higher in Asia at 17.84 percent. These may seem like small percents, but it represents an increase of 192.5 percent over the 2010 numbers.

So what does this mean? It means that marketers who are interested in reaching a global audience need to embrace mobile optimization. The world is going mobile, perhaps faster than the U.S., and smart marketers will make the most of this by taking their websites nad products to the mobile market.

It’s easy to get caught up in numbers and to allow them to put you into a statistics-induced haze, so what’s the bottom line? All of these numbers indicate that mobile devices are growing in popularity, and consumers are using them to make buying decisions. As a result, effective marketing is going to embrace the mobile device, so marketers need to stand up and take notice.