Why Advertisers are Embracing Mobile Marketing
Although advertisers are still trying to develop new ways to connect with mobile-hungry consumers, there are already solid mobile strategies that help build brand awareness and increase sales better than many traditional marketing methods. So, what innovations have increasing numbers of sellers jumping on the mobile marketing bandwagon? Here’s just some of what this medium has to offer:
1. Mobile Web Use Rising Rapidly
There are around 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide and that number is increasing all the time. As more and more people commit to the technology, they expect to see mobile campaigns designed specifically for their device. Consumers have little patience for content which doesn’t work properly on their smartphone or tablet, and consequently, tend to ignore brands who can’t adapt to the multimedia environment.
2. Location-Based Advertising
With this technology marketers can pinpoint consumers and provide them advertisements based on their location or specific demographic. Never before have businesses been able to provide such personalized communications with their customers. Now, consumers can instantly receive coupons based on prior purchases or inquiries, a deal for a store they just entered, or restaurant suggestions relevant to their position.
Smartphones are a remarkably personal tool, and location based advertising is able to tap into some of that and provide consumers with what they really want. With such targeted messages, businesses can enjoy a greater response rate and a higher ROI.
3. Real-Time Bidding
Traditional advertising, which targets broad groups of people over large time spans, is rather hit or miss; sellers never know if they are truly reaching their target audience. Real-time bidding solves this problem by allowing businesses to pick and choose who receives their advertisements and how much they are willing to pay. When a consumer visits a webpage where real-time bidding is used, competing businesses will instantly analyze the possibility of making a sale based on the time of day, the person’s transaction history, the subject of the website, and a host of other variables. Thus, a business has a better idea of the value of a particular ad space before placing its bid.
Although it sounds complex, the whole process happens in less than a second. Not only is this method advantageous to sellers (through price and audience optimized messages), but consumers also benefit since they no longer have to endure irrelevant impressions.
4. Interactive Media
The nature of mobile devices means your message can naturally engage consumers as they tap, swipe, tilt, and rotate your advertisement. Boring banners and content more suited to stationary computers have no place in the mobile world. As business owners utilize the functionality of smartphones and tablets through apps, games, mobile content, videos, and animations, they will find customers spend much more time interacting with their ad.
5. Mobile Private Exchange
Publishers with high volumes of visitors have the opportunity to join a private exchange group. These groups are a branch of real time bidding, but provide more insight, customization, and price controls. This setup offers much more appeal to high-traffic sites that were previously turned off by the price degradation associated with other programmable markets.
This opens up the opportunity for advertisers to place their impressions on the highest-quality, most visited sites on the web. Many of these are from small publishers, owned by “real” people who consumers know and trust. Having your ad appear in such an environment garners much more respect and interest from web users.
Mobile advertising is still progressing, but despite the learning curve, the rapid growth in this market proves businesses can’t deny the opportunities it provides. Those who embrace the technology early will have a distinct advantage over their competitors as they utilize resources that simply aren’t available in any other form of marketing.