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 | 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...
by Marius du Plessis | Jul 18, 2016 |
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...
by Marius du Plessis | Jul 8, 2016 |
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...
