by anton | Sep 29, 2016 |
When last did you buy something the way your parents used to? We’re talking of course, ‘the traditional way’ of buying goods and services. In case you’ve forgotten, this usually entails having some idea of what goods and services you already want and then conducting an old fashioned cash or credit card transaction within a bricks and mortar retail store. If you didn’t exactly know what goods you wanted, you used the traditional four-walled shopping environment to make that final decision after some time browsing. Today, many people do still shop this way, but I’d hazard a guess that this type of shopping is mostly done for pleasure and the people involved make an outing out of it. For routine or semi-routine purchases, a third of people now use only their mobile to make a purchasing decision, according to recent research from location based marketing company xAd. The challenge for the mobile marketer, of course, is to enable consumers to easily go that extra step from purchasing decision to actual transactional behaviour using their mobile devices. So why exactly has mobiles’ role in purchasing decisions becoming more prominent? It’s clear that today’s consumer not only wants choice when it comes to product attributes like colour, size and so on, they want access to additional choices that simply weren’t available to your parents, or even you, just a few years ago. We now want choice to extend to when we make purchasing decisions, and where. With more choice than ever in terms of price, location and personalisation, consumers are now best placed to buy at a time that suits them,...
by anton | Sep 29, 2016 |
The topic of today’s blog is maximising the mobile marketing moment. When I originally thought about today’s topic, I wondered about the word ‘moment’. It really does seem that our mobile ‘moments’ are not moments at all, but one never-ending, seamless mobile story. Apparently, in the UK mobile is considered an indispensable part of consumers’ lives because the average person there spends almost three hours per day consuming mobile media. Three hours? That almost doesn’t sound like very many mobile hours for the average South African consumer who perhaps relies much more on their cellphone to make purchasing decisions than their developed world counterparts because of a lack of penetration of ‘traditional’ web connections here. However, no matter what the country, the consumer’s love affair with mobile continues unabated: research suggests four in ten consumers would rather forget their anniversary than lose their mobile phone. Whether it’s checking our news feeds, researching a product or service, or searching for DIY explanatory videos on YouTube, consulting our mobile devices has become second nature, regardless of where we are located. A rapid rise in mobile subscriptions that is expected to reach three-fifths of the world’s population by the end of the decade means there are exciting opportunities for brands to reach consumers at any time and in any location. And they will be able to do this through an almost unlimited number of touch points. The above notwithstanding, perhaps what the South African mobile marketing community needs to focus on here is not so much stretching out that mobile marketing moment but ensuring that it is a better quality, more in-depth...
by anton | Aug 23, 2016 |
While much innovation typically springs from the corporate sector, business people are naturally conservative. This cautious approach comes from the basic business need to make scarce resources work as efficiently as possible to deliver the best results. That’s the essence of capitalism. It’s natural then for the mobile marketer, who is a business person after all, to want to revert to mobile tactics that work. There’s nothing wrong with this approach besides the obvious downside of never exploring beyond the old reliable mobile channels of SMS and Please Call Me text tags. These are wonderful tactical tools, but as we have seen from the launch last year of InTarget’s USSD-based mobile research survey product, for example, there is so much more brands could be doing with the mobile marketing technology that’s available from world-leading specialist firms like InTarget right here in South Africa. With the above in mind, did you know that brands can create rich mobile experiences for their customers based on location and proximity? InTarget is able to bring location-powered mobile marketing to consumers using micro-location Bluetooth technology as well as macro-location geofencing. Our location and proximity mobile engagement platform can be tweaked to build rich, intelligent and compelling mobile experiences and campaigns to cellular users in the right place and at the right time. For example, a location-based mobile marketing campaign developed by InTarget could mean a conference organiser might provide attendees with a greeting when they land at the airport, the details of the closest driver to escort them to their hotel, and check-in information as they approach the venue’s concierge. Once settled in their...
by anton | Aug 12, 2016 |
It is becoming something of a corporate cliche to quote Gartner when making a point. However, what always seems like the businessperson’s favourite research house really does produce some quality research. This is equally so in the world of mobile marketing. For instance, a recent statistic from Gartner revealed that in 2016, 89% of marketers expect to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience delivered by their brand, product and service. What that’s really saying is forget corporate history, throw away brand pedigree and all the nice-to-have activities that have polished your brand over the years, what really matters is the here and now of customer service. I believe that the post-recession years have meant consumers are counting every cent and brands are only as good as the last time they impressed the consumer during a direct interaction. And it appears Gartner’s research agrees with this view. What this means for the mobile marketers is that direct, personal and upfront is where’s it’s at. Consumers are no longer impressed by a 100 foot billboard in the distance. The days of blasting out uniform advertising to consumers are finished. Today’s mobile users want personalised marketing and companies need to respect this by building relationships with their customers. Fortunately, mobile marketing technology offered by knowledgeable specialists like InTarget allow us to connect with individual mobile users in new cost-effective and powerful ways. Central to all of this is the collection of the data that makes personalisation possible. Brands simply have to collect data if they are to propose more relevant offers to individual consumers. Today’s blog is not the...
by anton | Jul 28, 2016 |
Sometimes, we’re so focused on the amazing tools of our trade that we forget mobile marketing is about moving products and services. When you’re dealing with such powerful mobile platforms as InTarget’s ‘Please Call Me’ text tags which literally tens of millions of people interact with each day, then it’s easy to be underwhelmed by what you’re trying to push. I had this thought recently while watching an advert for pizza. The marketer had put together a fantastic selection of options on its mobile and web platforms where customers could essentially build their own meal. People had come up with some amazing combinations. It all looked so high-tech until you realise it still means some guy on a fossil-fuel-eating motorbike has to bring it to you. If you really think about it, it’s a strange product mix because you’re buying the delivery service as well which hasn’t changed for decades. Perhaps our role as mobile marketers to is attempt to get our clients – and their clients – to implement mobile right across the product offering and not just within the core product. In the example above, what was missing was a mobile extension that completed the circle. For customers wanting to collect the order they built on their handset’s mobile browser, perhaps a location-based mobile service tells the retail restaurant the client is waiting in their car? McDonald’s had a different issue recently, compared to not closing the loop with mobile. It built a microsite that was central to a “Create Your Taste” promotion. This online burger customisation tool led to a barrage of offensive results. While word...
