by anton | Jan 10, 2017 |
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...
by anton | Dec 27, 2016 |
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...
by anton | Nov 21, 2016 |
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...
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 | Aug 12, 2016 |
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...
