by anton | Mar 7, 2016 |
A recent report entitled “The Rise of Mobile Marketing Spend in Retail” found that mobile budgets are set to grow the most compared to online and bricks and mortar marketing channels. As is most often the case, the report’s authors are American. However, with the US being a relative latecomer to GSM digital cellular technology, there’s every possibility at least some of the report findings apply to the well-developed South African mobile market. Let’s take a closer look at these findings. Probably the most interesting for local mobile marketers and their retail brand clients is that almost 40 percent of US retailers plan to allocate 50 percent or more of their marketing budget to mobile in 2016. Retailing has always been a cash-focused business with little time for lofty, smoke-and-mirror approaches to marketing strategy. If it doesn’t put money in the till quickly, it’s not going to fly in this sector. The fact that mobile has an immediate positive influence on in-store and online sales through clever time-sensitive devices like discount coupons is surely the top reason brands are putting money into mobile. The widespread and indeed widely-felt global economic slowdown – especially in purchase-driven sectors like retail – means organisations are increasingly keen to implement marketing tactics that can have an immediate effect on the bottom line. Mobile marketing does this in a very slick, measurable and effective...