by anton | Jun 30, 2017 |
Sometimes, a clear invitation to action is not always clear in traditional mass media advertising. The television viewer, for example, is often left wondering: “What exactly do they want from me?”. My advertising industry colleagues will tell me this vague, non-existent call to action type of advertising is, in fact, ‘brand building’. Other people would venture it’s art created to win awards and has little commercial merit. Things are quite different in the mobile advertising space. We’ve spoken before in these pages of the need for mobile marketers to be bold when it comes to asking for a product or service purchases from the cellular consumer. Because mobile marketing is about supporting consumer behaviour in ways that are personalised and relevant to the individual shopper in their time of need, we’re not afraid to talk about the rands and cents. After all, the pursuit of real purchasing behaviour is why we are all in business. Commerce and industry is nothing without actual buying. Forget schooling clients on ‘brand building’ and other intangible, nice-to-have aspects of traditional advertising, mobile marketers have a responsibility to advise their clients on the best and most cost-effective ways of chasing that money. Here at InTarget we’ve come up with some practical ways to encourage consumer buying: By motivating current and potential customers to check-in at your business using social media like Facebook, Yelp and other platforms; one could combine that with mobile-based coupons sent via SMS or bluetooth. This could be very visibly promoted throughout your bricks and mortar store, helping the digital and real world realms to seamlessly converge. Couponing is directly related...
by anton | Jun 27, 2017 |
Forbes Magazine says it is “difficult to overstate” the importance of mobile marketing. The obvious reason for this is the fact there are a whopping 35 million mobile users in South Africa alone, with another 900 million or so throughout the rest of the continent’s 54 recognised countries. That’s a heck of a market and its becoming more accessible. People can use their cellphones for more than just calling and texting: mobile data prices have declined from about R700 for half a gigabyte of cellular data in 2005 to just over R150 a gigabyte (on Telkom Mobile, for example) today. The wide availability of quality smartphones, new from leading retailers, is also boosting the total audience for mobile campaigns. A lesser-known reason why mobile marketing in South Africa is set for continued stellar growth is the recent limited commercial launch of a brand spanking new nationwide LTE-A wireless network. LTE-Advanced represents a major enhancement of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile communications standard. Owner Multisource has already invited a small number of clients to trial the new LTE-A network and, interestingly, for the local mobile marketing sector, its already public knowledge that Vodacom has concluded an agreement to roam on the new super-fast network. It’s great news that local mobile networks are increasing capacity through smart roaming agreements as companies like InTarget Mobile Advertising work with clients to develop ever more engaging and data-intensive campaigns. All of this is in response to facts like the fact that social media and other posts that include video and images produce 650% more engagement than text-only...
by anton | Jun 27, 2017 |
As we come to the end of June and the halfway point of what just a few months ago still felt like a new year, its natural to wonder what has been accomplished thus far. On the mobile marketing front, we are reminded that our chosen discipline is roughly comprised of two primary segments, so to speak. We have the planning phase and we have implementation. Of course, there’s also the highly-detailed reporting that mobile marketing is famous for. There’s no other area of marketing specialisation where one can drill down into the numbers quite as spectacularly as in mobile – but another time for that! So by this halfway point in the year, brand owners and their agencies should ideally have completed the planning phase involved in executing an effective mobile campaign. I say ‘ideally’ because, as we are about to find out, all is not lost if there’s been no movement whatsoever on the mobile marketing front within your organisation. Being slow off the starting blocks is not a great position to be in, but sometimes it just happens – perhaps there’s been an internal restructuring in this difficult economic climate, perhaps your RFP became a much more lengthy document that you intended. The important thing is that any position can be salvaged. There are some great advantages to only starting the planning phase of a mobile strategy halfway through the year: 1. You get to gather some fantastic market intelligence about what works and what doesn’t, all without having to spend a cent. True, your competitors might have scored big with their early riser mobile campaigns....
by anton | May 22, 2017 |
As we kick-off a brand new working week, it’s apt that we get right to the point of this brand new installment of our blog: new research by Oracle indicates that despite all the numbers showing that smartphone use is now ubiquitous amongst consumers, the data indicates that few marketers know how to capitalise on this new consumer reality. Essentially, marketers have been unable to clear away the fog of hype to be able to make the appropriate investments in mobile marketing. However, the same cannot be said of marketers who partner with mobile advertising and marketing specialists like InTarget. A specialist is always better than a generalist and we have almost two decades experience of conceptualising, building and implementing effective mobile campaigns. So what is it we actually do, you may ask, to capitalise on the continent’s growing mobile base? We serve two billion mobile ads mentioning our clients’ brands every month! InTarget’s flagship mobile marketing product, so to speak, is the ‘Please Call Me’ series of text tag ads and is responsible for the lion’s share of ads served. Related to this, InTarget is a well-known designer of mobile campaigns centered on mobile network operator (MNO) System Messaging alerts. System Messaging includes network notifications such as Please Call Me, Missed Call Alert and Sponsored Calls. We love centering campaigns around these because the consumer receives loads of them, and doesn’t view them as intrusive because they simultaneously convey useful network information. More information on our specific client services are available on this website. However, we’d like to add in closing that it is vitally important for marketers...
by anton | May 22, 2017 |
It occurred to me that so much of what mobile marketers says is directed to other marketers. Whether it’s presenting at the annual mix of industry conferences, or writing on business-related blogs, often the mobile marketer’s audience is other mobile marketers. It is with this thought in mind that today’s blog topic is aimed squarely at the mobile marketer’s raison d’être: our clients. Most clients new to mobile marketing tend to equate mobile campaigns with SMS and that’s perfectly acceptable. The text message was the original mobile marketing tactical instrument and with SMS coupon redemption rates as high as 30% to 50%, it remains a vital part of any mobile marketer’s arsenal. So clients are familiar with SMS, and no doubt it’s cousin the wildly-popular Please Call Me text tag ad, but what else do they need to know about mobile? Possibly the most important thing clients need to know about mobile is that it’s not the future, it’s already arrived! If brand managers and owners haven’t already embarked on a mobile strategy, they’re already trailing behind the competition. The mere fact that the number of people accessing the web via mobile devices overtook people accessing the web via desktop many months ago, means clients need to get serious about mobile. The world’s changing fast and you risk being responsible for your company’s demise within the next 24 months if you don’t get with mobile within the next 24 hours. The next thing clients need to know – and this one may seem obvious – is that mobile is not just about marketing on a cellphone. Other mobile devices...
