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...
by anton | Nov 10, 2015 |
Most of us understand mobile marketing to mean, simply, marketing conducted on a mobile device. If we wanted to delve a little deeper, we could look at how marketing professor Andreas Kaplan defines mobile marketing. According to him, mobile marketing is as “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device”. The key here is ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘constantly-connected’. One cannot run an effective mobile marketing campaign when consumers are experiencing patchy connectivity, or deliberately limiting their mobile voice and data connectivity because they find it expensive. Connectivity needs to be fast and always-on for mobile consumers to be able to interact with USSD menus, respond quickly to coupons, and more. This brings me to Wi-Fi connectivity and the mobile consumer. In South Africa, many of us have come to view Wi-Fi as a secondary type of mobile connection option that’s used mostly when it’s offered for free at restaurants, conferences and a few other limited public places. In many places in the rest of the world, Wi-Fi is in fact the consumer’s first choice of mobile connection. This is why, for example, Wi-Fi-enabled tablets are more popular in the US than the 3G and Wi-Fi-enabled tablets South African consumers have to buy. Today, there’s a renewed push for greater roll-out of Wi-Fi hotspots in South Africa and it’s being led by the Wi-Fi Forum of SA. In particular, the Forum is trying to get South Africans to buy into the concept of the ‘heterogenous network’ which is simply a nationwide mobile network using small cell networks such as Wi-Fi overlaid with 3G, LTE, etc. So various types of mobile connectivity will complement and switch between each other and deliver a seamless...
by anton | Oct 30, 2015 |
We’ve looked at quite a bit of mobile marketing theory over the past several weeks. Perhaps today, as we close off another mobile month, is a good time to rewind somewhat and to revisit the entral premise – and promise! – of mobile marketing. As the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) succinctly puts it: “Mobile is the closest you can get to your customers”. The simple reason this is so is because every moment is mobile in the world today. The cellular phone is so central to our daily lives that the MMA states that “consumers check their mobile device 150 to 200 times per day”. Imagine switching on the television 200 times a day or opening the post box even just 20 times a day – that’d be serious OCD behaviour! Mobile consumers aren’t obsessive compulsive, they’re just interacting in a sensible way with a device that we depend on for socialising, transacting and more. Mobile isn’t just a boon for consumers because it enables them to conduct their daily lives more efficiently, it boosts brands. The MMA’s research indicates that 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience. Through mobile, brands have the ability to be present at the exact moment a consumer is seeking a solution. Nothing could be more basic – and powerful – than brands being where the consumers...
