Meet Your Mobile Prosumer
Have you noticed how consumers and their purchase behaviors have changed over the last few years?
Today, consumers have endless access to information about products and services. With free tools available online, they can compare prices and purchase terms, check suppliers, or even create summaries of similar products. All this helps them be better prepared to make a buying decision. This concept goes back to 1980, when Alvin Toffler, a futurist, came up with the term prosumer, combining producer and consumer to describe a new kind of active consumer.
Prosumer, or a typical today’s consumer, is an active customer comparable to a professional. The new consumer no longer relies solely on traditional advertising, but looks for information on their own initiative. When making a purchase decision, they have a broad knowledge of the product and its features, the competition, as well as other consumers’ opinions. According to 71% of the respondents who participated in a research carried out by B2B Marketing portal in 2012 – the main source of this information is the Internet.
Is your business’s website ready for the latest revolution among prosumers – a shift towards mobile devices? More and more people are resorting to smartphones and tablets for their daily activities. It is predicted that by 2015 more users will be accessing the Internet on mobile devices than on desktop computers. If your strategy for gaining customers does not account for the behaviors of a today’s consumers, you will be losing them month after month.
Mobile Shopping
Consumers increasingly use mobile devices to search for information on products and, as a result, to make online purchases. This trend has been supported by a number of studies carried out by Google, among others, which show the great potential of the technological revolution for small and medium businesses.
We have been witnessing a vast expansion of the mobile network globally. Global mobile traffic increased by 81%1 over the previous year, exceeding 18 times1 the size of the entire global Internet in 2000! It is estimated that by 2015 more users will be accessing the Internet on mobile devices than on desktop computers. According to Cisco, by 2018 smartphones will have already accounted for 66%1 of global mobile traffic. As of now 77%2 of mobile searches take place with the desktop computer being available at hand.
Moreover, 77%3 of mobile users aid their shopping processes with mobile searches. Smartphone owners use their devices to look for information on businesses located in their neighborhood and then call them, check their location on the map, enter their website, or even visit the business. 24%3 of local information seekers recommend businesses and services they find this way to others, or leave their opinion on the Internet. Almost 40% of these users make a purchase – either online or in-store. These numbers show how important it is for SMBs to have an appropriate mobile website.
The profile of online purchase intenders4
A recent study by Nielsen has found that 53%4 of Millennials – the most active group of digital shoppers, plan to make a purchase online, while the great majority of them will make online research beforehand. Make sure your business will have gone mobile by then.
Sources:
1 Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013-2018, February 2014, Cisco
2 Mobile Search Moments Study, March 2013, Google
3 Our Mobile Planet: United States of America – Understanding the Mobile Consumer, May 2013, Google
4 E-Commerce: Evolution or Revolution in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods World?, August 2014, Nielsen
This post was originally published on ActiveMobi.