As of February of this year, mobile ad spend will account for almost $166bn of the $616bn total global ad spend. This fact alone demonstrates mobile marketing's dominance in advertising, including the use of strategies like geo-targeting and geo-conquesting by integrated marketers in order to ratchet efficacy up even higher.
With this increased ad spend comes commensurate strategic mobile marketing planning and action. According to MarketingLand there are three key components to a mobile marketing plan including location-based outreach, building and reaching the ideal audience, and the (to-date) undiscovered holy grail of mobile: a truly effective attribution model.
Location-Based Outreach (LBM)Where once upon a time placing cookies on a desktop machine was sufficient for identifying and building audiences, the growing mobile ad market and mobile commerce has ushered in the introduction of location-based targeting of mobile ads. In an effort to reach the right audience with real-time, relevant content, marketers can now use data to understand who visits locations and how often. By fully understanding the audience in this way, integrated marketers are able to strategically target consumers and look-/act-alike prospects for future advertising.
The Right AudienceBuilding and reaching the right audience for your products or services varies by platform and preferences. For instance, on social media platforms you can build a likely customer persona by selecting granular data points including demographics, behavioral qualities, job function, etc. When purchasing a broad list of lookalike customers in an area, you may choose to simply select by the types of stores they shop at, or the types of items they consume-choosing from a wide array of purchased and packaged goods.
To really reach and engage your audience, take the time to understand who they are, what they want, and when and where they can be reached. How deeply you target the audience is really up to you and how much control you want to have over the final list.
Attribution Tied to SalesThe most elusive quality of mobile is tying in-store sales to online campaigns. Currently there are too many databases and sources that cannot communicate effectively with one another to share this information. MarketingLand points out that, at present, your audience's TV cannot tell their phone or laptop that it saw an ad, and the store's/business' point-of-sale system cannot yet notify the rest of their devices of the sale. Although, MarketingLand warns, the day is most certainly coming when we will be able to clearly and easily tie them together-we just aren't there yet.
Reporting & ResultsUntil we reach that level of transparency, integrated marketers must continue to test multiple mobile advertising approaches and make intuitive leaps between advertising and action, including whether the business has been able to capture any market share from competitors. For now, the most effective tool in your arsenal is reporting- using all of the data that you capture throughout the sales and marketing processes. You can look at how online consumers react to ads, whether there was an increase in sales that coincides with advertising, the effects of different types of LBM, and much more-both before and after each mobile campaign
Last modified: July 16, 2019
