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We all know the power of search. Google is one of the world’s most powerful companies, and is mostly a search engine. What’s growing in power, however, is the local search. People are learning how to find the things around them with greater ease. They are exploring their communities and finding the hidden gems that are no longer hidden. And the mobile device is what is making it all possible. See some of the facts below:
Written by Augme CMO David Apple
“Incorporating Mobile Advertising effectively to create the perfect Mobile Marketing Plan”
Mobile marketing and mobile advertising are often used interchangeably but they are not the same. Clarifying the definitions and using them appropriately is the difference between delivering impressions or building brand loyalty and increasing per-customer ROI. Mobile marketing is the practice of promoting or selling goods or services via a mobile device. Mobile advertising should be a tactic of a well-planned mobile marketing strategy. Mobile marketing enables marketers to engage with their consumers and measure that engagement at a granular level that isn’t possible with traditional media.
A demographic is no longer women, ages 18-49. With mobile, it is a woman, age 27 with 2 kids, and household income of 100K+ who buys brand “X” 3 times per week and lives in suburb “Y”. Marketers know this because the consumer is actively engaging with the brand on a regular basis via her mobile device. Marketers are maximizing the conversation with each individual consumer by creating strategies to maximize per-customer ROI. With marketers able to track engagement at such a detailed level via mobile web-enabled devices, why is mobile ad spending grouped with a traditional ad budget just to be spent? The most effective marketing strategy includes an effective mobile strategy that incorporates mobile advertising. This will become even more important as mobile usage increases in general.
Strategy Beyond the “Click”
The headline in a mobile banner display attempts to provoke a “click”. It is often the end of the line for customer acquisition and engagement strategy. Instead, if the banner ad delivers the user to a mobile web experience, providing brand-specific content and instant gratification, a lot will happen.
For example, a dental hygiene brand launched a new product last year. Originally the plan pointed mobile banners to a traditional website. Users who click a mobile banner that lands on a non-mobile website are not likely engage, therefore wasting the ad spend. This showed that there was no strategy beyond the click.
Fortunately, the mobile production plan included a budget to create a mobile website (features included Geo Location Tools, Coupon, Product Info, Social Connect, and Drive-to-Retail incentives) for all web-enabled mobile devices (7,500+ smartphones and feature phones). 8 unique QR codes and 8 unique SMS keywords were created. The codes and keywords were incorporated into all traditional media insertions. The mobile banners pointed to the mobile site instead of a traditional website.
The mobile marketing budget accounted for only.008% of the total campaign budget for the new product launch. Overall, mobile response directly added over 61,000 new consumer data records to the brand’s database in 35 days, a new record for the brand and the company as a whole. More importantly, the 61,000 data records indicated through which placement they entered, device type used, gender, age, income level, marital status, parental status, geographic location, web behavior, purchase intent, and “opt-in for more info” responses.
Is this the perfect mobile marketing plan? Maybe. Mobile advertising played a significant part in the mobile marketing campaign because advertising was a significant component within the overall plan. The .008% of budgetary commitment to mobile made up over 90% of the detailed learnings of the program. Traditional media like Out-of-Home (OOH) and Print only quantify circulation and traffic numbers. Traditional digital display returns good granular data, but perhaps users sitting in front of their PCs were not in the mindset of oral hygiene because the click-through rates were very low.
The conclusion is not that mobile replaces traditional media, but rather makes traditional media better. Mobile marketing, including mobile advertising, deserve their own billing and place on the budget sheet.
Last Monday evening Augme had the opportunity to sponsor a Mobile Monday event, “The State Of Mobile Barcodes”, held at Goodwin Proctor in the NY Times Building. Despite the rain, there was a great turnout. There were at least 150 there. Taylor Burton was on the panel representing Augme and did a great job in communicating our message of utilizing a mulitmodal approach to campaigns to attain the best possible user experience. Here are just a few pictures from the event. It was a great time!
We posted just a couple weeks ago on some of the potential pitfalls of creating a mobile application for your brand or company…but some big companies (namely McDonald’s this week) have still been rolling out new apps. The new McDonald’s app will notify you of locations near you, as well as nutritional information. As we asked in our last post, will consumers really want to open an app just to find a McDonald’s, versus just opening their map application or even browser?
We recently came across another article detailing some of the more technical problems with apps, especially for the Android platform. One of the great things touted about Android is how it’s an open platform. Developers can basically do whatever they want with it and have total freedom in creating specifications.
What this means, however, is that not all phones are capable of running all applications. If you have an older Android phone for instance, you may not have the graphics capabilities to run a fancy new game or music app. If developers want to truly reach all of their consumers who have Android devices, they’ll need to be constantly re-tooling the applications. That means even more time and money. Every new software update (as Android will be releasing sometime in the next few months) means application updates as well.
Is that something you want to be pouring money into? Especially considering the statistics we gave you in the previous post?
Chime in!
As the mobile world continues to grow at astounding rates, the data we can accumulate and study gets more detailed. Because of that, our marketing efforts can be more finely tuned to what our consumers are doing on their devices.
A recent study shows that over 1/3 of smartphone users are active on their devices before they even get out of bed in the morning. And 1/5 of users are active at night before turning the light out. So how can marketers take advantage of these statistics?
One of the biggest advantages is simply timing your campaigns. With mobile campaigns, think about how delighted someone might be to receive a coupon to their local coffee shop right as they wake up? Maybe it’s a bar code with either $1, $2 or $3 off their purchase, so they’re even more intrigued to make that stop.
At night, you could send reminders like “Remember, tomorrow is the last day to take advantage of (insert deal here)”. Timing is truly everything. Do you want to be sending messages to your consumers while they’re busy at work? Potentially not allowed to access their phones? Or do you want to be reaching them when they are most active on their devices?
If you are new business, maybe you can send an interactive map with your locations. Maybe it’s a scavenger hunt that they need to find clues for when they’re running errands at night. With the advancement of mobile technology, we can’t even imagine some of the possibilities at this point.
If this research is true, the implications could fundamentally change your marketing efforts. Maybe your timing has been wrong all along. Not reaching your customers? Maybe it really is simply because your campaigns are getting muddled with everything else they see during the day. The most personal and meaningful engagements online are happening in the evenings and early morning. 8-5 may be when YOU are at work, but it is not when people are paying attention the most to your brilliant marketing.
What do you think? Are you more active on your device in the morning or at night? Or during the day? What can mobile marketing do to better stand out in the crowd? Let us know below!
We recently came across an interesting statistic about the number of people accessing maps on their mobile devices. The number is right around 48 million, and growing steadily. In comparison, the number of people accessing maps on personal computers is around 94 million, and steadily declining. The gap is getting smaller and smaller, and this creates huge opportunities for companies to jump into the mobile world and be ahead of the curve.
If you’ve ever used Google Maps, for instance, you know that companies show up as pin-points when you do searches for various categories. When you click on one of these points you can often see a photo, contact information, a website and even recent reviews. These are all huge opportunities for marketers/advertisers/PR people alike.
Marketers have already begun utilizing many of the native features of the mapping and geo-targeting for “push” notifications based on immediate location. This gives offers and coupons to nearby retailers. Additionally, they are taking mapping from macro to micro, utilizing in-store wifi enhancements to push deals and discount content per aisle, or per time of day. Powerful stuff!
Augme is on the leading edge of location based technology and image recogniton services. This means your brands and retailers are capitalizing on mobile engagement tools, like bar code scanning, and image recognition augmented by location-based and targeted mapping technologies to effectively create tracking and behavioral information of the consumer.
Think about how often you use maps during vacations, or even simply in places you’re not familiar with. These present even greater opportunities for local business to reach out to create new customer customers and drive loyalty. Augme continues to test and deploy best practices and execution plans as new capabilities are presenting themselves by the hour in hopes of remaining pro-active instead of reactive.
There is no end in sight, but the realization of a world of:
is just a short ways a way. The weaknesses are easy to spot and will be fixed quickly.
Being mobile ready is not a tactic it is a necessity.
Many companies these days are excited about creating an application for mobile devices. You even see websites themselves have apps that are simply RSS feeds of new content. Smartphones and tablets are all about these applications, so why wouldn’t your business want to be ahead of curve and create an app? Right?
First, let’s take a look at just a few facts, and then decide what to do.
Those numbers are a bit sobering. Think about it, why would consumers take the time to download an app for your company when they could just use their built-in Internet browser and get whatever they are looking for that way? Having an application to download and update requires an extra step in the process for the consumer – something that will likely keep them away. You might create some buzz for a little while, but it has virtually no staying power.
There is also the fact that whenever a new device or operating system is introduced, you have to completely rework the app. It is also often the case that when operating systems are updated, your application must be updated. Think about the number of times in the last 4 years a new device has been introduced that needed an application to be created for it. The iPhone, Android devices, BlackBerry, iPads, Android Tablets, Windows 7 Phone…and it will only continue to grow and change as technology changes. The benefits will likely never outweigh the money poured into engineering the product and constantly updating it.
Are you sure you still want an application?
Source: Marketing Leadership Roundtable
On Monday we blogged about mobile payments and how they will change commerce as we know it. Today, we found an informative graphic that outlines and analyzes a bit more of the data behind it. Take a look and let us know what you think! Do you agree with the projections?
The health care industry is well known for being overloaded with paper. Whenever you visit, you are filling out multiple forms for multiple things. The disadvantages of this are well known: environmentally un-friendly, easy to lose, hard to organize, etc. There really were no alternatives to even consider, though. This was the only way to truly keep track of what was going on with patients.
Until now.
Tablets are going to (and have already started, in fact) revolutionize the health care industry. Patient records will be accessible from the “cloud”. No more lost records. No more floors and floors of file cabinets. Waste will be dramatically cut. Imagine the ease of a doctor being able to walk into a patient’s room and pull up all their x-rays, previous visits, scheduled tests and operations, etc.
Many medical schools are now even giving students tablets upon starting classes. You can use apps to help with anatomy lessons, medical terminology and the litany of prescription drugs that are out there. They can give communication between different doctors an ease not experienced before in this industry.
And it’s not just doctors and nurses who will benefit. In Canada, some hospitals are giving patients tablets as well. It is an easy way to put more information into the hands of the people they are treating. You can pull up a gallery of the team working on you to see their faces and credentials. You can see a calendar of what is scheduled for you. Pull up dictionaries of medical terms so you can educate yourself on what is happening. See 3-D pictures of what is going on inside your body. They even have Skype so you can stay in touch with loved ones.
The day will soon come (probably sooner than you think) that you’ll no longer be in a waiting room with a pad and paper, but with a tablet.
How have you seen mobile technology at work in the health care industry? Share with us here or let us know on Facebook and Twitter!
