Some ideas on how to use mobile advertising wisely.
Every year is promised to be the breakthrough of mobile marketing. And every year mobile marketers eventually go on a spam spree. They are convinced that mobile advertising is some kind of the-next-big-one-and-only-thing and they are trying to convince advertisers and publishers in that as well. Advertisers and publishers just shrug their shoulders and go for TV and other media instead.
Perhaps mobile advertising is great (it is really great, actually) but you need to serve it in a right way. Maybe mobile marketers shouldn’t consider it as the best and the only method of advertising? Internet didn’t kill TV and outdoor ads in the end, it just became an essential part of any marketing campaign. So why wouldn’t you consider mobile advertising in the same way?
Mobile phone is an exciting tool for advertisers when it is used to connect all sorts of media. Maybe it should be regarded as a kind of remote control for consumers? They see an offer on the billboard, dial a number if they are interested in the offer, and get a discount coupon. Same goes for TV, radio and magazines ads. The point here is that consumers use mobile phone to choose offers they are interested in. Perhaps mobile marketers should make it clear to consumers that the service number they dial to get an offer or discount is something as common as a telephone number or a web address they see in the ads. This way consumers will consider mobile phone as something they can benefit from. Again, flooding them with tons of spam when they dial the service number might be not the best idea. But sending them an offer they saw in an advertisement might be good enough to make them trust you. It is a win-win situation for both parties because once consumers are interested, they will dial your service number, get what they want, and be loyal to you. You will open a marketing channel without being officious.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts for mobile marketers to think over. One thing for sure – being intrusive with customers may destroy reputation of this new thrilling and promising way of reaching a consumer as is mobile marketing.
Mobile Marketing. Why go interactive with your clients?
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) recently updated the definition of Mobile Marketing. According to Mike Wehrs, President and CEO of the MMA, the new definition more accurately reflects the evolved nature and current capabilities of Mobile Marketing. Here it is: Mobile Marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network. Great definition! We discussed engagement in the last post and it is a pleasure to hear that the new definition represents our principles, which we are using in creation of solutions for mobile market.
Now, following this definition, let’s talk about interactivity. Interactivity as we see it in Eyeline. There is a lot of buzz about it but why do you need it? Maybe it’s just a fancy word to milk more money from advertisers? It is easy to sink in all abstruse definitions scattered over the Internet. Reality check is needed.
Let’s put it simply – you are doing business. Business is based on communication. Being interactive, you are communicating with your customers. This is how any business is done. And mobile advertising is no different. Today when there are over 4,000,000,000 (according to UN report) mobile phones worldwide (that’s 60% of the world population), mobile advertising might be the best and effortless way to communicate with you clients.
Now let’s look at it a little more closely. As mentioned in the previous post, the first step is to engage a customer. Now when they are engaged, they are ready to listen to you. This is where interactivity kicks in. It is responsible for the next step – maintaining and developing further relationship with your clients. Now when you have their phone numbers and loyalty, you surely want to get more personal with them. However, to make your consumers respond, you need to deliver to them a valuable marketing message.
What is a valuable message? It is a relevant, targeted offer you make to your customers, based on data you’ve collected about them in their personal profile. Personal data may contain literally anything – where John lives, how old he is, what cereal he has for breakfast, what’s his hobby and favorite watch brand. How you get this info depends on your creativity. But as soon as you have it – it’s time to make a relevant offer to John. As you see, the fundamentals of business are working here in full. You know consumer needs and you make them an offer in the context of their needs. The good news are that you are now cutting back on other advertising media expenditures and you are not wasting your time reaching customers when they are already here.
Eyeline Service Delivery Platform (ESDP) comes in handy when you want to be interactive with your consumers. You may have already got personal info about customers by using CRM, polls, or services, which help to detect behavioral patterns. ESDP provides an API interface that allows you to easily transfer previously collected data. Now, when you have information about customers, you create rules, and by using these rules ESDP will automatically deliver to your consumers a marketing message based on their traffic analysis, demography, geography, preferences and what they’ve consumed before. ESDP demonstrates high performance on a low-cost hardware and it has been tested on over 60,000,000 users. Learn more about it here.
Mobile advertising without furious people and legal issues.
Mobile advertising is going from strength to strength lately. Or so they say. A recent BIGresearch study shows that consumers are not of the same opinion about it as marketing providers. 67% don’t like text ads, 60% don’t like voicemail ads, and 60% don’t like video ads. They just don’t like being constantly bombarded with shells of information they don’t need. But what’s that? Seems like Vodafone could care less, sending messages all over the place having forgotten to include unsubscribe function in their SMS. That’s why they are missing $110,000 in their pockets for being a little bit pushy. People don’t want their personal things to be used for the needs of others. They become angry. Don’t make them angry or you’ll lose money.
What else are there that marketing providers are missing? “How much money we’ll allocate for mobile marketing this year?” you are asking yourself. Now don’t look at it as one more way to advertise your products or services. Don’t use it as an alternative to TV, Internet, radio, and outdoor advertising. Be broad-minded. Look at your whole marketing campaign and use mobile technologies to unite all parts of it.
If you don’t want to be an ugly Quasimodo look-alike for your customers read on. Eyeline Call2Service is a solution for mobile advertising that provides a low-pressure way of interacting with your customers via mobile phone as well as keeping them engaged. You make them an offer and now they decide whether they want it or not. They are now controlling the situation and they are doing it for free. But you are also controlling it better than ever. Let’s have a look at how it works.
Let’s say you sell cars. You have a TV and outdoor advertising campaign going on. You place a 5% discount offer and a service phone number under it on both TV commercials and outdoor stands. Your interested customers call your number (call is free of charge) which can be automatically saved in their phonebook and get an SMS message with 5% discount which they will show to you when they decide to buy a car. There is no voice communication. They just need to dial a phone number. Oh, there is also the address of your web site in that SMS they got. So now they can explore your product in details. By the way, you can place different phone numbers on TV, stands and radio ads and see where the most of your customers are coming from, thus eliminating unnecessary expenses.
Look further. You may set that the customers will get a USSD menu instead of just SMS. There they will have several options such as the above-mentioned 5% discount coupon and a possibility to subscribe for your news and offers. They will do it voluntarily if they want. And of course there is an unsubscribe function. Now they are feeling warm and fuzzy inside. There is no reason for you not to feel warmth spreading all over your office too. You now have phone numbers and loyalty of your customers. And all these are achieved in a very delicate manner.
Now let’s sum up what you get by using Call2Service:
- Your customers are now engaged. This develops base for further interactive marketing without legal issues.
- Transparent metrics. You see from what media your customers are coming from and how many of them are responding to your ads.
- Integration with media. Mobile advertising is no more feeling lonely. It’s now an integral part of your marketing campaign.
Now you are not so cheeky with your clients and you get a couple of cool marketing tools on top of that. Stay tuned for more.
28 Million Mobile Subscribers Responded to At Least One Mobile Ad
Source: nielsen.com
“March 4, 2008- San Francisco, CA - Twenty-three percent (58 million) of all U.S. mobile subscribers say they’ve been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days, according to a new report out today from The Nielsen Company. Half (51% or 28 million) of all data users who recall seeing mobile advertising in the previous 30 days say they responded to a mobile ad in some way. Read more
Mobile Ads: Women Prefer Text to Advanced Media Formats on Thier Mobiles
According to a study by mobile media publisher MoMac and a market research firm Tickbox:
“Men and women exhibit clear differences in their preferences for mobile ad formats: Read more
First Steps of Mobile Advertisement in Russia
Source: http://cnews.ru, 03 April 2008
According to experts Russian mobile advertisement market will comprise at most 2% of the total world volume in 2008. Market analysts expect that advertisement from “big” Internet will become mobile although mobile Internet still lacks user-friendliness.
