Why Mobile Is Set To Transform The Approach To Marketing

business2community.com

Modern consumers are focused, clear on what they want, and most importantly, are always connected. 93% of the world’s population today owns a mobile phone. The immediacy and reach potential of mobile cannot be matched by other media, and so today, marketing requires an all around new approach that is integrated and cross-device for measurable results. Here are the ways in which mobile is set to challenge the way marketing is approached:

1. Mobile content consumption: Marketing today is largely driven by content, in the form of social media content, rich media and blog posts, and mobile has led to a huge spike in content consumption by most consumers. Today, according to an AOL-Nielsen study, over 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. Mobile enables brands to push out content that is contextualized and crafted to meet a user’s immediate needs – e.g. he/she sees an ad for cereal on his/her phone when close to the supermarket, making it much more likely to translate into a purchase.
2. Social media integration: Social media has been around and growing steadily as a marketing medium over the past few years, with over 76% of businesses using it to accomplish business objectives and build greater ROI. Social media ad spends are also up more than ever, with businesses seeing the value of integrating ads within social feeds. The rise of mobile has only served to increase marketing budgets, to include Facebook’s native mobile ads on its mobile app. Higher ROI results come through this approach.
3. The growth of emerging markets: The 3-billion strong potential market in emerging economies like India, Brazil, China, Africa and Indonesia holds new interest for marketers due to the saturation observed in the US and Europe regions. These emerging markets have the challenging premise of targeting consumers in media-dark regions where feature phone usage is much more common than smartphone usage. Cracking the code here involves enabling the seamless integration of traditional media with basic mobile features like SMS and missed calls to make the user experience simple and interactive.
4. Cross-media consumption patterns: Mary Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends Report found that 84% of mobile owners use their mobile devices while watching TV. Mobile has enabled multi-platform usage, leading to a much more integrated approach to marketing. Cross-platform marketing is now a must unless marketers want to lose screentime to one medium in favour of another.
5. Mobile app promotion: Mobile apps are a huge part of the way consumers use mobile, and brands are catching on to this trend by creating interactive apps of their own. Some brands go the extra mile by creating mobile games or apps for a particular campaign, to build better engagement and brand recall. Driving app downloads is another new objective marketers have, and the key to this is to use mobile as a medium to connect and inform consumers about your branded app.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to mobile, and the personalized nature of the medium makes it easier for marketers to target the right message to the right person at the right time. However, it remains to be seen that marketers still have a long way to go before cracking the mobile code for their marketing strategies. Mobile is here to stay though, and it will not be long before mobile will be as vital a part of campaign budgets for all brands, as other media.