Five things mobile advertising can teach desktop marketers

Mobile companies understood mobile-specific strategies long before the widespread adoption of mobile devices and increased adoption of smartphones and tablets. With more than three years of experience and state of the art mobile expertise, there is a lot that can be learnt.

(1) When it comes to creatives, keep it short and catchy. 

Some brands are used to creating long scenarios as used on desktop (i.e. a 25 second video). However, what we’ve learnt from the mobile user experience is that users have short attention spans. Very short. 

The shorter and the stronger the message, the more likely a user will be engaged – and bearing in mind that our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds (in 2000) to eight seconds (2015) according to a survey conducted by Microsoft you really need to make every deci-second count! 

Smart marketers need to think more along the lines of immersive augmented app experiences, where something enhancing is given to consumers. For example, this Christmas, S4M’s in-house team created a 3D cube interactive format for mobile devices which was used as a holiday greeting for their clients, a format that is only interactive when viewed in a mobile browser.

(2) Location is the new cookie

Geo-fencing and geolocalisation are key to targeting the right individual due to the intimate and individual nature of the smartphone. They allow for a clearer understanding of user behaviour by following the entire customer journey. There’s also the benefit of being able to measure mobile investments and mobile store campaigns enable the measurement of direct ROIs. 

Read more about mobile marketing:

• Five reasons why retailers should drive mobile marketing
• Website trends for 2016
• Seven tips to increase ecommerce sales

Geolocalisation can also deliver personalised advertising scenarios and transform ads to a service. For example, presenting a store locator or helping users locate the nearest point of sale can prove an extremely helpful service. There’s no imitating users or delivering irrelevant ads when efficiently dealing with location data.

A great example of this is the Adidas mobile to store campaign. The goal of the campaign was to drive sales to Adidas brick and mortar stores, assign a value for mobile in store-conversions and prove that mobile brings incremental value to the business. It pursued this by leveraging location extensions in the search ads which meant users were directed to the store locator page and thus boost in-store traffic. 

It then pulled pertinent information from the adidas retail stores, plus relevant industry data and developed a unique way to report an applied conversion rate. The results proved that mobile ROI brought a 680 per cent incremental increase in ROI and a 20 per cent conversion rate from mobile store locator to in-store visits. For desktop marketers, location is one of the biggest considerations to start making when planning a campaign.

(3) The power of now

Users increasingly expect to get what they want in the immediate context and in their exact moment of need. There is a huge battle waging for a customer’s attention and it’s being battled out in “mobile moments” (anytime that a user pulls out their device). The power of immediacy must be harnessed and understood properly by marketers, who need to make sure their customers can get what they want in that precious mobile moment.

A great example of this is played out in how we search. Google processes an
average of over 40,000 search queries every second, or 3.5bn searches per day…or putting it into a wider context that’s a staggering 1.2tn searches per year.

A recent post from Think with Google discussed the idea of the “micro-moment” or mobile moment, the small everyday moments in life that prompt us to search the web with an intention of acting immediately.

For some examples of micro-moments, as well as the last two tips, continue onto the next page.

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