Welcome to our Blog!
Everything about Mobile Advertising!
Video looks rosy in SA
Recent media coverage suggests that things are not that rosy in our neck of the woods. Challenges there may be, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the many advantages of living in South Africa. So many things work well with the homegrown mobile industry being an excellent example of something world class that we get to enjoy every day. News that the telecoms watchdog in Ireland has received so many consumer complaints that a formal review of the sector is being planned had me thinking about how fortunate are as local cellular users. Apparently, the quality of mobile phone handsets being sold in Ireland is less than satisfactory in many instances. In addition, a country many times smaller than South Africa suffers from patchy cellular coverage that results in dropped calls, weak signals and slow data speeds. Of course, things are not always as clear-cut as they seem. A major reason Irish cellular users are suffering from slow data speeds, apparently, is in fact related to something positive. It’s because video streaming is becoming so huge in developed mobile markets. We’ve mentioned the growing importance of video in mobile marketing several times in this blog. It’s clear that we’ve been on the right track because what happens in overseas mobile markets is sure to make an appearance locally very soon. It’s gone the other way, as well, with prepaid being the best example of a local trend that originated here first. It’s great news that local mobile networks are constantly increasing capacity as companies like InTarget Mobile Advertising work with clients to develop ever more engaging and data-intensive campaigns....
Mobile Marketing Is Superhuman
Those of us who were watching TV in the 1980s probably remember sci-fi shows about bionic humans with all sorts of awesome appendages. From microchips underneath the skin to titanium limbs, the human of the future was indeed a sight to behold. You might say that time has already come! Except, future ideas of arms made of precious metals have been replaced by the current reality of hands holding rose gold cellphones. The mobile phone really has become a superhuman bodily extension that enables us to overreach the limitations of our earthly bodies. So what exactly on the mobile phone enables us to do so much more today than yesterday? One could argue it was initially the phone’s early voice capabilities, followed by email and web functionality that suddenly enabled us to work from anywhere, make travel arrangements on the fly and all the while access Internet banking in a flash to make sure we could pay for our new connected lifestyles! However, mobile browsers are becoming seriously old school as apps built by mobile specialists like InTarget and its partners become the new superhuman, standout feature of the cellphone. A recent survey by eMarketer found that in 2017 most connected adults in developed economies will use mobile apps on their cellphones for at least 2 hours per day. That’s a healthy 10 plus percent increase over last year. Interestingly, what’s also true is that while mobile app usage is increasing, and that’s good news for mobile marketers, the number of apps people tend to use is declining. For anyone who has ever opened a shiny new Android or...
Consumers Still Transacting On Desktop, But Sms Gets Them Interested
Many regular blog readers will know that a couple of years ago, Google updated its search algorithms to account for the growing number of people accessing the web from their mobile devices. Essentially, mobile-friendly websites now receive higher rankings that those sites not optimised for the small screen. Investments in mobile make sense, that’s for sure. However, what’s interesting and what’s emerging now – according to recent research – is that we shouldn’t assume mobile users make purchases in the same way they surf the web. Huh? Research documented on US platform Smart Insights indicates that consumers are still making their purchases, for the most part, from computers and not via their smartphones. The numbers seem to suggest that users are happy to use their mobile phones to browse and do basic purchasing research, but many of us are still reverting to our desktops and laptops to seal the deal. So it seems that while users do indeed access the web via Chrome, Safari and other mobile browsers, it is not with the express intent to buy anything. Now, that’s not as scary as it seems for us mobile marketers. This is because this same research referred to above also found that “if you want to capture a mobile market, messaging is still going to be the best way to reach [it] because most people open their text messages…” As we have said before, the beauty of messaging is that messages can be personalised, automated and sent at prescheduled times to literally millions of smartphone and feature phone users. However, the challenge is in composing short SMS or MMS...
Mobile & The Future Of Location-based Games
“Pokemon GO gave us a glimpse of the future.” That’s according to the GM for Innovation at leading US mobile firm, Verve. For mobile marketers, the message is that the way Pokemon GO exploded onto the global stage, literally overnight, taught us about mobile users’ willingness to try transacting in the real world based on events in the gaming world. Last year was about coming to grips with the early learnings for marketers inherent in augmented-reality experiences. More knowledge will continue to emerge following the Pokemon GO ‘case study’ of 2016. There is clear consumer interest here and the focus must now be on inventing ways where the industry can leverage what Verve calls “game ad-units”. We need to figure out how virtual gaming experiences that matter to consumers who encounter them in stores and on their screens, can be monetised to the advantage of brands and their agencies. Mobile marketing is ideally-positioned to take advantage of this new phenomenon of the merging of virtual experiences with real-world transactions. This is because we’ve already spent the last few years getting to grips with enabling technologies such as geofencing and the rise of beacons. If we’re talking about the real world, let’s look at a real-world gaming / mobile marketing example. Imagine buying a soft drink when in proximity to a display and a drink brand could prompt the purchasing consumer’s device by rewarding them with a power-up in a game they already play. That’s a tiny taste, or sip, of the potential highly-effective marriage of mobile marketing and gaming. Let’s see how it all unfolds during...
App Personalisation Boosts Mobile Engagement
In this blog, we’ve often written about what could be called the ‘core’ of mobile marketing: personalisation. Mobile marketing both enables greater personalisation of consumer-focused messages, and it is also key to a successful mobile campaign. It is interesting to note, then, an article this week in business bible, Forbes. It says that after analysing millions of mobile interactions, one marketing firm found that “personalised content inside push notifications boosts engagement four times.” This alludes to something mobile marketers are discovering to their great excitement and that is the modern app is smarter than its ancestors. After several years of evolving and fine-tuning, it is now able to effectively personalise content down to the individual user rather than the broad segments that used to form the foundation of marketing theory. With all of the above in mind, here are the top three predictions from Forbes for why 2017 will be the year of the smart app – they make for interesting reading: 1. Smart Apps Will Showcase Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics will enable apps to anticipate and react to a user’s desires before they’re even expressed. 2. Smart Apps Will Make Chatbots Ubiquitous: In 2017, more brands will be able to serve consumers using conversational interfaces across the app. 3. Smart Apps Will Usher In Mass Adoption Of Automation: Mass blasting your users with generic content is a tired tactic. Instead, forward-thinking marketers are beginning to look at automation in a new light. The final word today belongs to Forbes: “With (personalised) intelligence, mobile-savvy brands can communicate more effectively with...
Three Tips For Better Lead Conversations
The fact that we are clearly, and very deeply, in the mobile era can seen from a casual observation of the people around us – and ourselves! It’s not just that so many people have their mobile phones right in their hands and the rest have them within arm’s length, it’s that it is acceptable. In decades past, one was frowned upon for not paying adequate attention to the person directly in front of your eyes. Now, that person has become secondary. We seem to respond faster and interact more with people behind our cellphone screens. While the overall societal implications of all of this may be up for debate, what’s not debatable is the wonderfully positive contribution mobile technology has made to marketing. Mobile might be bad for conversation but for conversion, it’s a fantastically strong tool! We’ve said before in this blog that mobile marketers should not be afraid to directly ask mobile consumers for their business. While television might be renowned for ‘brand building’ where there’s no clear call to action but the viewer is left with a warm and fuzzy positive impression of the advertised brand, in mobile things are a little more competitive. Mobile marketers simply do need to get down to business and prioritise converting eyes on screens to rands and cents transactions. Let’s look at three mobile marketing tips for acquiring outstanding leads that are very likely to result in cash conversions. Firstly, don’t treat all mobile users as if they are at the same point in their purchasing lifecycle. As always, mobile marketing is about personalisation and you need to take...
Intarget On Top With Widest Mobile Reach
Many blog readers will be familiar with the fact that InTarget is entrusted with the achievement of the mobile marketing objectives of some of Africa’s most valuable brands. Whether venerable finance houses, large footprint retailers, critical fuel companies or state-of-the-art start ups, InTarget regularly gets the call to design bespoke mobile campaigns that deliver on overarching strategic objectives. Some readers, however, might not be entirely clear on why exactly InTarget is most often selected as the preferred mobile marketing partner of leading organisations across two continents. We’re one of the Top 25 African & Middle Eastern Mobile Ad Networks because we have the unique ability to offer short codes in over 41 African markets and commercial SMS delivery capability to over 200 countries globally. In essence, InTarget can take your great mobile campaign idea and turn it into a commercial reality faster than anyone else. In addition to providing ever-popular SMS short code plug-and-play solutions, InTarget is also the preferred partner for multinationals looking for fast, reliable and affordable VAS aggregation services across Africa. For example, we can offer brands a single USSD integration that taps into the awesome potential of tens of millions of potential customers across nine leading African mobile territories. Our solid relationships with dozens of mobile operators have been cemented over 15 years and this radically reduces the amount of time it takes to get your message to consumers. InTarget is today a trusted provider of mobile marketing and advertising solutions with a 33-country African and Middle East footprint and we look forward to providing your brand with unparalleled mobile flexibility and speed of...
Mobile’s Already The Next Big Thing
The shiny new year of 2017 has kicked off and judging by the flurry of predictions streaming in, it’s going to be a grand one for mobile! We were just getting to grips with the exciting news that mobile overtook desktop for the first time globally in 2016. That is to say, for the first time in the history of the human race (not to sound overly dramatic), there were more consumers globally accessing purchasing-enabling browsers from mobile devices like handsets and tablets. That really speaks to a workforce and a society on the move and our industry is perfectly-positioned to tap into the move to mobile. Our own Mobile Marketing Association confirmed in April last year that mobile has also “outstripped growth in desktop adoption and is now driving internet access in South Africa”. This was according to the MMA SA’s Mobile Report for 2016. We eagerly await the 2017 installment of what InTarget Mobile Advertising is hoping will become a regular feature on the local mobile marketing calendar. Smartphones will continue to be the dominant access device in South Africa and the world and that’s great news for marketers as we can really let our creativity test the limits of cellular functionality. Just this month, respected ad rag Advertising Age is using phrases like “mobile marketing’s awesome potential” when referring to likely trends in 2017. They’re backing up their glowing and possibly new-found respect for mobile with stats like this: research firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that mobile-ad spend will exceed $40 billion. Because we’ve just come to the tail-end of another December / January holiday season, this time...
Video-watching Consumers Stay On Mobile Sites Longer
A new working year has commenced. Along with the new year comes the usual and necessary review of the year that was, and predictions of the coming year. When it comes to taking stock of 2016, we have to mention that the stand-out biggest thing for mobile marketing was the news that the tipping point had finally been reached. Or, desktop’s superiority was finally breached! For the first time ever, the number of human beings accessing the worldwide web via mobile devices exceeded the number of clearly late adopters accessing the Internet via desktop computers. With a fixed / mobile development that significant, it’s almost appropriate to simply disregard whatever else happened in mobile’s 2016. So speaking of earth-shattering developments, what’s the biggest thing mobile marketers and brand owners can expect in 2017? Here at InTarget, we’re big into video and believe in the potential video formats have for mobile marketing. This is especially true when it comes to boosting brands’ goodwill amongst consumers. Everyone loves sharing a warm and fuzzy moving picture with a brand name tastefully tagged to it. US Marketers agree that videos bring the highest ROI and in that market, well over 70 percent of all traffic is already video. We believe that South Africa will reach a video tipping point in 2016 that will see the lion’s share of mobile traffic going video in 2017. Not only are social platforms like Facebook helping to grow the adoption of video by optimising feeds to improve the viewing experience, one must remember that Google owns YouTube. The implications of this are obvious: having more videos improves...
More Love From Chatbots In 2017
Sometimes, Intarget and our clients are so eager to hear about what’s likely to be new on the mobile marketing stage for the next 12 months, we forget to analyse what went down during the current year. So many mobile marketing predictions are made annually, it’s difficult to determine which ones came true and which ones remained proverbial “pie in the sky”. For me, one mobile marketing prediction for 2016 that kept coming up was related to the ability, as Mark Zuckerberg says, “to be able to message a business in the same way you message a friend”. That’s quite an interesting concept and “conversational commerce” as it is increasingly being called is a brand new opportunity for mobile marketers and one that they grasped with both hands in 2016. Chatbot technology has already been integrated into Facebook Messenger and it is InTarget’s belief that it will spell big news for mobile marketers and their brand clients over this coming year. If you didn’t already know, chatbots are designed to replicate human interaction using algorithms and are very similar to digital assistants like Apple’s Siri. The idea is that the consumer is able to interact with a chatbot just as they would a contact centre. Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows the chatbot to change the subject, suggest related topics, and even demonstrate humour and emotion to the customer. The relevance for mobile marketers, of course, comes in because the numbers tell us that this interaction is more than likely to be taking place on a mobile handset. Leading South African insurance firms, financial institutions, airlines and others realised the potential...
Lean Smes Always Ahead Of The Curve
Small business is the engine of the South African economy with over 60 percent of jobs being generated by SMEs. Recognising the power of small, medium and micro-enterprises to make progress towards the country’s developmental goals, government fairly recently established a small business ministry for the first time, while SMEs are receiving more attention in successive State of the Nation Addresses. It’s not just government, but business, too, seems to be customising products, services and tools towards the needs of SMEs. Today, any would-be business owner with limited funds and a great idea can register a co.zadomain and build a website in 15 minutes for just R80. Banks are offering ridiculously cheap SME accounts for the equivalent of a cup of coffee. Mobile marketing tools also represent a highly-affordable way for start-ups to get their businesses going in a flash – for little cash. Bearing all of this in mind, let’s take a look at some expected mobile marketing trends for 2017 that are particularly relevant for small business. These days, it is not enough to just be “mobile friendly”. Because the number of consumers accessing the web via mobile devices now outweighs desktop users, your SME definitely needs to be visible via mobile search in 2017. Simply confirming that your SME’s website is “mobile responsive” (automatically adjusts to the device being viewed on) will immediately help your rankings with Google, ensuring you don’t lose potential customers by not appearing in Search results. SMEs should identify key mobile word searches relevant to their industry. It is imperative to figure out what potential customers are typing into their mobile searches,...
Mobile Marketers Have Golden Opportunity To Give Consumers What They Want
Live chat is becoming the new next big thing in customer service. And, judging by some recent informal polling conducted over dinner, South African consumers seem to love it. It’s easy to see why if one considers how we like to communicate these days. Text is king. Few of us relish dialing into a call centre for reasons as simple as the fact that most local consumers do from our cellphones and mobile calls to customer care centres still aren’t toll free. Aside from how we communicate in 2016, let’s also look at when we communicate. The explosive recent growth in free Wi-Fi hotspots means many South Africans are doing their admin in coffee shops and other semi-public areas. This, of course, means few of us are comfortable dialing a contact centre and having a very public and loud spat with whatever large corporation is annoying us that week. Even if hundreds of thousands of us do still work in traditional office environments with desk phones, the ever-popular open plan design again means text-based communication with call centre agents is preferred for privacy reasons. How utterly convenient to be able to engage in written customer communication while one’s furious keyboard typing is mistaken for work by impressed colleagues. When it has become so obvious what connected people prefer, it’s disappointing to read that over 70% of online retailers do not care enough about their customers to properly address their communication preferences, according to OpenMarket research after polling a selection of online retail operations. The eye-opening research revealed that 64% of consumers prefer texting vs a voice call for customer...
The Right Brand Experience At The Right Time
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,...
Start Small In The Quest For Personalisation
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...
Mobile Should Close The Product Offering Loop
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...
Mobile Ads Need To Be Viewable & Not Overly Intrusive
Two pieces of news that made their appearance on the web this week caught my eye. The first item is fantastic news (and contains a dash of obvious common sense) for those mobile marketers and their clients who might have been worried by all the recent talk of the burgeoning ad blocker industry. Apparently, a whopping 83 percent of people using ad blockers only want to avoid overly intrusive adverts that take control of their browsers away from them. I think that’s a pretty obvious observation and brings us firmly back into the realm of reality when it comes to blocking software. We all know that consumers use advertising to inform their purchasing decisions. Why then would they opt to block all ads? They know they would make some pretty lousy buying decisions if they did that. So, this new survey by popular ad blocker, Adblock Plus, confirms that the vast majority of consumers are only looking to block intrusive overly “obnoxious” ads. The article I read suggests a way forward for marketers faced with increasing numbers of blockers. That way forward is how InTarget has been designing mobile campaigns since its inception. Campaigns must inform, not annoy. The must be personal, not irrelevant. Ads must speak to, not speak at. It’s as simple as that – almost! The second mobile marketing item that caught my attention was the news that advertisers are wasting about R14 billion a year on non-viewable ads. A report from ad verification company, Meetrics, says publishers are upping the speed at which ads are re-loaded or auto-refreshed to raise inventory levels and revenue. The...
Mobile Coupons Set For Further Growth In Tough Times
During a recent skim through some international mobile marketing news headlines, I noticed a press announcement from the parent company of America’s second-biggest pharmacy chain, Walgreens. Apparently, in-store and online chemist customers now have the ability to redeem mobile coupons. I thought surely this has to be some small tweak to the current mobile marketing offering of this massive 370 000 employee business as they cannot be that far behind in the game? I had recently played around with the mobile coupon offering of one of South Africa’s major retailers and I recalled, looking at the Walgreens press release, how impressed I had been. We really have some outstanding retail organisations in this country that simply get mobile marketing, and mobile coupons in particular. Of course, a major reason why South African retailers understand the power of a potential 55 million population accessing mobile discounts is because they have great mobile marketing advice from specialist advisors like InTarget. Shoprite Checkers, for example, launched Eezicoupons mobile coupons as far back as four years ago, in the process becoming the first SA retailer to enable consumers to get instant shopping discounts on their cellphones. InTarget’s experience is that a huge number of consumers admit that they actively search for mobile coupon rewards on their phones before making purchase decisions. That’s significant. In conclusion, coupons are not the sexiest of mobile marketing tools but they have come a long way from mom cutting up pages of the things over the kitchen table. Their appeal to consumers will only increase as our sluggish economy keeps shedding jobs. They definitely are worth taking another...
New Industry Talent For Intarget Mobile Advertising
Seasoned mobile industry veteran Grace Mlimo has joined the InTarget team as Vice President: Mobile Solutions. Former Vodacom and MTN executive Grace joins one of South Africa’s foremost wireless application service providers (WASPs) at an exciting juncture in its decade and a half history. The provider of mobile marketing and advertising solutions recently completed a rebranding exercise to better position it as the mobile aggregator of choice to African corporates and their marketing and advertising agencies. Grace’s most recent tenure was as Regional Business Development executive for Clickatell, also a leading WASP. “South Africa’s mobile marketing industry has burst its banks and it’s no secret that today’s growth is coming from other African markets. I’m thrilled to be able to help InTarget explore opportunities as a fully-diversified mobile advertising solutions provider with an expansionist culture,” says Grace. As VP: Mobile Solutions, Grace’s role covers all VAS-related business. “Grace comes with a fantastic telco pedigree, having achieved significant success at the continent’s biggest mobile network operators and at the biggest SMS aggregator in the world. She is welcomed as a key team member,” said Herman Cremer, InTarget South Africa CEO. As one of South Africa’s most established WASPs with a 15-year pedigree, InTarget provides mobile advertising, aggregation, premium SMS, mobile billing and bulk SMS services across the African continent. It has an enviable record of commercialising mobile advertising platforms in 32 African and Middle East...
Client Service Delivery Boost For Intarget Mobile Advertising
The appointment of Nomathemba Mokoena as Group Vice President: Mobile Advertising at InTarget is a huge coup for the mobile marketing leader and a tremendous boost for seamless client service delivery. This is the first time InTarget has appointed a group-wide executive to integrate all advertising work across the organisation, in consultation with InTarget’s country managers and the different business unit heads. Thembi was previously Group Media Strategist at RamsayMedia, a subsidiary of Caxton Group. A self-confessed media lover, she claims to have ‘a never-ending crush on the industry’. “My passion is to ensure that the messages we communicate to our audiences are crisp and clear the first time. InTarget is the perfect vehicle to help me design the very best mobile campaigns for valued clients,” she says. InTarget is a wireless application service provider (WASP) with a 15 year pedigree. The provider of mobile marketing and advertising solutions last year completed a rebranding exercise to better position it as the mobile aggregator of choice to African corporates and their marketing and advertising agencies. As VP: Mobile Advertising, Thembi will report directly to the Group CEO. “As VP of Mobile Advertising for a mobile advertising company, Thembi’s role cannot be overstated. We welcome her as a key team member,” said Herman Cremer, InTarget South Africa CEO. As one of South Africa’s most established WASPs with a 15-year pedigree, InTarget provides mobile advertising, aggregation, premium SMS, mobile billing and bulk SMS services across the African continent. It has an enviable record of commercialising mobile advertising platforms in 32 African and Middle East...
Immediate Action Ability A Boon For Marketers
Immediate gratification has to be one of the most outstanding features of the world we live in today. In centuries – or even decades – past practically every call to action was by necessity followed by a significant amount of preparation. Imagine the act of making what is today a simple cup of coffee in 1780. The decision to drink coffee was not followed by the flip of a switch and the consumption of the beverage within a minute or two. It was followed by the making of a fire to boil the water needed in the preparation of coffee, and plenty of steps after that. You had to really be convinced in 1816 that you wanted coffee. Today, you might say that consumer consumption is a lot more frivolous. Not only have technological advances made access to desired goods and services so much easier, leading to much more rapid consumption after the decision is made, other recent modern developments such as consumer protection legislation have virtually eliminated the purchase risk for consumers. So the point of another lengthy introduction on this blog is that modern mobile marketers really don’t know how fortunate they are to be interacting with consumers in 2016 that have the means to make immediate consumption decisions, followed by very rapid consumption of what’s been purchased. However, to take full advantage of the immediate action by consumers that is now possible thanks to mobile and other technology, marketers need to keep a few things top of mind. The first is what marketing textbooks, business gurus and your own common sense has been telling you all...
Mobile Marketing To The Captive Customer
You’d think that In-App marketing would attract more attention from mobile marketers. I mean, it really does tick all the boxes. You have a captive customer that you know a lot about based on plenty of hard facts and statistics collected during one or several browsing sessions and you have the ability to deliver them the marketing holy grail of instant gratification with very little action required on their part. Unfortunately, as with many campaigns out there in the world of traditional marketing and advertising, the lion’s share of budgets continues to be devoted to winning new customers. There is very little attention given to up-selling existing customers and one can only surmise that loyalty-based tactical campaigns don’t deliver as many accolades as a powerful piece of brand-building television work. Let’s take a step back and outline exactly what we mean by in-app purchases. With in-app marketing, brands can create personalised messages that focus on the specific and unique needs of customers at the best time of contact. Essentially, in-app marketing delivers personalised product or service-related content and messaging directly to a consumer’s device within a particular mobile marketing application that the consumer is currently interacting with. Marketers can leverage the vast amounts of insight already collected on the customer to deliver targeted offers and then closely monitor customer interactions to gain insights and feedback for future communication. In conclusion, the power of this form of mobile marketing lies in the ability to offer the right product, at the right time, to the right consumer and all of this is based on the best predictor of...
Who is Mary Meeker?
Some readers of this blog would have seen the series of fairly new Telkom television adverts. It basically shows a bunch of young people being amazed by the lack of technological savvy displayed by some older people when it comes to online awareness. The kids all laugh when an old guy asks “don’t you go to the mall anymore?”. The implication is that your future customers are all shopping online. The company’s use of the medium of television is ironic, of course, but that fact clearly escaped their marketing department. The Telkom ads are pretty good, I must say. They’re rare entertaining gems in a very predictable TV ad world. However, one wonders whether the conclusion is a bit overdone – are all the kids really not going to the mall anymore? Of course they are. A visit to any mall around South Africa will reveal an assortment of top-end hoodies and entry-level cellphones en masse. What’s interesting is that in many cases what got the kids to the mall with its brick and mortar retailers is mobile marketing – proving, once again, that traditional marketing and mobile marketing really do complement each other very nicely. Brands should worry less about the split between traditional and mobile and focus instead of their overall bottom lines. What got me thinking about all of this was an article this week about a very clued-up someone called Mary Meeker from a certain venture capital fund called Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. She had conducted an ‘exhaustive study’ on Internet trends and presented the findings at a conference in Silicon Valley – findings...
Micro-moments and QR codes feature in Forbes
Forbes Magazine, that illustrious periodical known to make appearances in boardrooms and rap songs, just this week wrote about mobile marketing. It presented some excellent advice to consider when embarking on a mobile marketing campaign. Let’s take a look at two key points highlighted by the magazine. The first mentioned a fairly new phrase recently coined by Google: ‘micro-moments’. Forbes says we’re seeing users turn to their mobile devices for quick, in-the-moment advice, help or information. Essentially, instead of sitting down to research a topic or issue in depth, they’re more likely to take immediate action, and to expect instantaneous answers. Google terms these rapid, mobile-driven queries ‘micro-moments’. Users want an accurate, bite-sized piece of information in that moment. No graphs, chart or other data-heavy overkill information. It’s great that Google has come up with a special turn of phrase for this phenomenon. However, here at InTarget it’s just called keeping it simple. Secondly, Forbes mentioned the importance of using QR codes to streamline the user experience. QR (or Quick Response) codes are a type of barcode that can be read by smartphone users who have downloaded a QR code reader. We believe QR codes are still a neglected – although growing – element of mobile marketing today. Forbes confirmed that they really do help provide relevant info as quickly and seamlessly as possible to mobile users. One of the most popular uses of QR codes among consumers is for comparison-shopping. This is when a smartphone is used to scan an item’s QR code to compare prices. Having a QR code for product comparisons means being present for those...