With a huge chunk of the world’s population now spending inordinate amounts of time on their mobiles, using it to socialise, shop, play games, watch videos, listen to music, clearly this heralds the time of mobile marketing to come to the fore and mobile phone is the new media.
Mobile marketing has become a key tool for marketers and it’s going to stay that way for quite some time to come. Marketers are set to embrace this trend and put it to good use. In fact, over the next 12 months, one in two marketers in UK is expected to spend 25% of their budget on mobile marketing.
So, what are the current and future trends in mobile marketing? Let’s take a quick look at the mobile marketing future.
Convenient content
In this day and age of short attention spans, where consumer loyalty is fickle, the last thing a marketer should do is spam a valuable consumer with offers or information that holds absolutely no interest for them. Consumers don’t hate ads, they hate bad ads: 75% prefer ads that are targeted and relevant to their interests, 66% are happy to receive ads if they’re user friendly.
Olha Velhus, GMS Chief Marketing Officer sees content as a real challenge for every marketer nowadays: “Content should not just be informative but create an emotional bond with the customer.”
She also believes that video content is a mandatory tool, as according to latest market research, 65% of consumers find mobile video ads valuable and useful.
Enter convenient content. Targeted towards customers’ specific interests and purchasing patterns and habits, it has the power to engage customers and drive them to action.
Multichannel
Single channel is out, multichannel is in. 90% of consumers start a task on one device and finish it on another. When the customer journey can start or end at any time, on any channel or mobile device, it’s critical for brands to provide a seamless experience across them all. Marketers need to align messaging, campaign goals, and design across channels, devices and online/offline activities.
Illya Misyura, Head of Services Development & Management Division at GMS, visualised the multichannel trend in good time, and together with GMS developers team, created multichannel GMS Business Communications Suite that broadcasts messages using a combination of three primary channels: Push notifications, OTT messengers and SMS.
Location-based targeting
Location-based targeting takes convenient content to the next personalised level: it is a way to bridge the gap between physical and digital worlds, providing contextually relevant content based on a user’s geolocation. 70% brand decisions are made in the store. Done successfully, location-based targeting improves response rates by up to 5%.
Engaging customers
Customers hanker after enjoyable experiences, which make them feel part of the brand community; where they perceive extra value beyond the product, not just online but also in-store. Creating the right environment to offer them this experience, by, for example, transforming part of the store into a restful area for tired shoppers to rejuvenate goes a long way to keeping them engaged, transform part of the physical store into workshop space for yoga, provide a gaming room for teenagers to keep them entertained and occupied.
Entertainment and gaming
Mobile gaming has faced a meteoric rise. 66% play games every day, the majority of them more than 5 times a day for an average of 25 minutes in total, usually between 8-11pm. So it is time for brands to start to adopt mobile game platform as part of their marketing tools to provide solutions to their marketing needs.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
It is said that a digital shift takes place every 15 years. The next big shift is expected to be Augmented and Virtual Reality, forecast to become a huge trend by 2020 (72% marketers in UK are planning to include AR or VR in their 2018 marketing strategy already). X-Realities as advertising can elicit strong emotional reactions as these are visceral “experiences”.
Trends come and go, and it is vital to keep up with changing trends. Our experts travel the world over, attending key conferences, interacting with industry stalwarts to stay on the ball, catch the wave of trends at the right point, create new services that incorporate the new trends, so that you can fully benefit from the newest trends, particularly in the field of mobile marketing.
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