Digital Lifescapes

When a buyer visits a company's website, will their visit result in a good user experience -- regardless of the device they're using at the time? More often than not, that experience is within a smaller screen on a mobile device -- such as a smartphone or media tablet. Savvy marketers are already starting to influence the adoption of mobile-first design strategies for their online properties.  Making it easier to buy something via a mobile device is a forward-thinking competitive advantage, because this activity will become more mainstream over time. eBusiness teams are working on rebuilding their legacy desktop site experiences to be responsive across all web-enabled touch-points, but it's a huge undertaking and few organizations have the budget or risk appetite to redesign all of their web assets in one fell swoop. Many teams start with the easy places on their website -- such as the home page, the category pages, the campaign landing pages -- after all, these pages...

As the wealth of information and content available online continues to grow at a rapid pace, the environment becomes increasingly difficult for people to navigate. Also, the challenge for online content providers is to ensure their best information assets are being found by their target buyers. Savvy marketers are already utilizing the mobile channel to reach their key target stakeholders online. Why now? Smartphones and media tablets are already mainstream devices that are increasingly being used for the search and discovery of online information -- often just-in-time to make purchase decisions. Juniper Research has revealed that by 2018, the total advertising spend on mobile search and discovery will reach $16.8 billion -- that's up from an estimated $6.4 billion in 2013. According to Juniper's latest global market assessment, while mobile web search will continue to account for the majority share of advertising spend, ads in local search applications will be the faste...