By Jeff Zwelling, CEO of Convertro
In 1994, somebody wanted a pepperoni pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese. And instead of walking to his or her neighborhood shop, that hungry person ordered from Pizza Hut's website, marking one of the first e-commerce purchases ever.
Since then, e-commerce has evolved far, far beyond pizza pies. Just about everyone makes e-commerce purchases without giving it a second thought; it's hardly a novelty the way it was in 1994. Now, more consumers are making purchases from their mobile devices. M-commerce sales hit $4.7 billion in Q3 of 2013 and are showing no signs of slowing down, so retailers and marketers need to keep up.
The problem
Knowing how to effectively use mobile can be daunting for marketers. Mobile is still a relatively new advertising platform, and many marketers get caught up in statistics about how half of customers are "always addressable" via mobile devices, so they inundate those channels with advertisements around the clock. It's an understandable reaction. Targeting the channels customers use most should, in theory, result in more brand exposure and consumer interactions. But in practice, it doesn't always work that way.
Instead of just buying mobile ads and hoping they do the trick, marketers need to use real, data-driven insights to ensure the success of their mobile campaigns. Just as advertisers meticulously assess which TV channels and print publications are best suited to their messaging and goals, they need to do the same with mobile. Ignoring such information in favor of blanket targeting of all mobile devices is inefficient and ultimately wasteful for marketers and their budgets. "Mobile" is not a channel; it's a medium onto which all channels, such as display, search and video, are slowly but surely moving.
The solution
Marketers should use data to understand which mobile channels will be most effective for their brands. Multi-touch attribution and optimization technology monitors a customer throughout his entire sales journey, providing marketers with the granular insights they need to determine the wisest use of advertising spend. To go back to the previous example, a marketer using attribution could know, for example, if Laura saw a brand's ad on TV, then did research on her cell phone and finally made a purchase on her computer. With that data, he could come up with the perfect mixture of channels and devices to target, ensuring that customers like Laura not only see but also act upon the brand's ads.
More than anything, attribution shows that mobile marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach. One company might see that the bulk of its customers are making purchases on tablets, while another might find that good ol' TV advertising is yielding the best results. Those two companies would, hopefully, make drastically different mobile spending decisions. Without monitoring a brand's campaigns, a marketer would never have access to insights like those and would likely continue to churn out ineffective ads.
Mobile is the new kid on the block, and there's no denying that it's as exciting as it is popular. With that trend comes changes in customers' media consumption and purchasing habits; retailers and marketers can't ignore those shifts if they want to stay relevant. That said, there's a happy medium between assuming that mobile-everything is the way to go and staying stuck on old-fashioned methods. Before going all-in on mobile channels, marketers should take a step back and see how their customers are actually spending their time and, more importantly, their money. Only then will the conversions and sales figures be worthy of the ad spend.
No comments:
Post a Comment