by anton | Nov 27, 2015 |
The American sales tradition of Black Friday, scheduled annually for the fourth Friday in November, seems to have at last infiltrated our shores to a very good degree. Coupled with the traditional discount fest of Black Friday is Cyber Monday which was created to persuade consumers to shop online. Black Friday is said to be the biggest shopping day of the year and the start of the Christmas shopping season in America. While it’s traditionally been something of an event that South African shoppers could only drool at, retail commentators like Price Check say Black Friday is well established in South Africa and on its third year of real and substantial discounts. So, how should mobile marketers be taking advantage of millions of local consumers primed and ready to spend today and on Monday? Firstly, it is important to partner with a credible mobile marketing firm like InTarget who will be able to advise brands where they should be investing their mobile impressions for best effect. Mobile ads should not only have been placed in advance for today to reach optimal sales numbers, a strong strategy should have been planned for the whole extended sales weekend. Secondly, don’t think of Black Friday as a relic of the Main Street shopping world with hundreds of people queuing outside doors while you focus your mobile marketing spend on Black Friday’s younger cousin, Cyber Monday. While mobile data does indicate that Black Friday outpaces Cyber Monday, the entire ‘long weekend’ should be focused on as South Africa gets to grips with this relatively new phenomenon. Finally, once again, it’s important to link...
by anton | Nov 23, 2015 |
InTarget continues to partner with some of South Africa and the Continent’s leading brands when it comes to exploiting the awesome mobile marketing opportunities offered by the ‘Please Call Me’ service. Most readers will know that InTarget’s established relationships mean it is able to commercialise this service highly-valued by literally tens of millions of prepaid cellular users. This is achieved by adding text tags onto the end of ‘Please Call Me’ messages for a specified time. Just as in SMS-based mobile advertising, there’s a certain art in composing or structuring text tags that get one’s message across in the most effective way. Here are a few tips that brand managers should bear in mind: 1. Don’t devalue the brand by reducing words to ‘SMS speak’ in an effort to save space. Using SMS abbreviations might be fine in casual conversation but consumers expect the brands they interact with to uphold a certain standard. 2. Because space is limited, don’t mix messages and ensure there is one clearly understandable call to action that’s also just a click away. 3. Know your audience by understanding that the products and services most suited to ‘Please Call Me’ text tags are usually low value recurring items that are also subscription or debit-order...
by anton | Nov 19, 2015 |
While conventional wisdom has it that Africa is a continent of feature phone users, TechCentral reported a few months ago that in 2019, only 27% of cellphones sold in Africa will be feature phones. The vast majority will be smartphones with 155 million units being shipped next year alone. According to research by International Data Corporation (IDC), feature phone sales are declining by 20 percent every year. Statistics like these are relevant to mobile marketing because industry commentators often use them to signal the death knell of such ‘basic’ mobile marketing campaign tools as SMS and USSD. This is erroneous, however. Simply because USSD and SMS are the mobile marketing bearers feature phone users most often interact with – due to the limitations of their handsets – this doesn’t mean that smartphone users don’t also use text messaging and menu-driven USSD. Whatever figures are quoted for declining feature phone shipments in the coming years, USSD and SMS have in fact become growing mobile marketing bearers in their own right that are independent of handset categories. Anecdotal evidence bears this out. Just because a smartphone user has downloaded an over-the-top (OTT) messaging app such as WhatsApp, doesn’t mean they don’t regularly send and receive SMSs to and from people and organisatons they don’t wish to add to their OTT app. Thanks to the growing popularity of the most successful USSD application ever – Please Call Me – this technology will continue to prove one of the most effective and measurable ways for brands to reach mobile users, in 2019 and...
by anton | Nov 16, 2015 |
Mobile’s rise since GSM technology first made its appearance in South Africa during our transition to democracy has been well-documented as it continues to achieve major milestones. The first major milestone was when the country achieved 100 percent mobile penetration and a second major milestone event was when the number of people accessing the web on mobile devices eclipsed those accessing it via desktop computers. In January 2015, there were a staggering 79.1 million mobile subscriptions in South Africa, according to the Global Web Index report by international agency, We Are Social. This means mobile subscriptions as a percentage of the total population was sitting at a whopping 146% almost one year ago. There’s reason to expect the figure is now well over 150%. What this means for mobile marketers, and I don’t think this has as yet been fully-appreciated by brands, is that mobile offers even greater value than we thought as mobile campaigns are potentially impacting each consumer one and a half times over. That’s because each consumer has 1.5 cellular phone subscriptions. So mobile marketing really does offer the best bang per buck and it’s even more efficient when campaigns are designed in collaboration with expert advisors such as InTarget. Let’s summarise. Mobile is growing, other avenues are declining. Mobile also offers the most efficient way to market a product or service. Finally, the fact that specialist mobile marketing agencies exist to provide valuable guidance means no brand has to go it...
by anton | Nov 13, 2015 |
Over the course of our blogs, we’ve looked at a number of compelling reasons for brands to take the mobile marketing plunge and partner with a trusted advisor like InTarget. Readers would’ve by now been presented with perhaps a few dozen reasons to implement a mobile campaign – and probably forgotten most of them! Let’s summarise the pros of mobile marketing in just one, easy-to-remember definition: mobile marketing provides time-sensitive and location-specific, personalised information to the consumer. The advantages to the marketer aside, such as measurability and impressive ROI, that’s it in a nutshell. Let’s take a quick look at each positive in turn. TIME-SENSITIVE A large part of why mobile marketing campaigns deliver such impressive ROI is because they can move stock by informing consumers of special offers, discounts and promotions relevant at a specific time. The time-sensitive nature of campaigns motivate consumers to act or risk losing out. LOCATION-SPECIFIC Related to the above, campaigns can also be location-specific which is a great advantage to retailers and others who don’t have a national presence and would waste resources by placing ads in traditional media that go far beyond their own reach. The location-specific nature of mobile marketing means a real relationship can be built with consumers in a certain localised area. PERSONALISED INFORMATION Perhaps the most important advantage that mobile marketing has over any practically any other kind of marketing is that it is a provider of very personalised information that resonates with the mobile phone user. This is definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of marketing, but a bespoke solution that intimately responds to the unique needs of individual...
