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Retailers to invest more into mobile marketing strategies

A recent data analysis has found that retailers, brands and restaurants will be spending more on smartphone ads.

Digital savings experience, RetailMeNot Inc, has recently released its report on a recent study it conducted, titled “The Rise of Mobile Marketing Spend in Retail,” in which it stated that restaurants, retailers and brands will be investing more of their advertising budgets in the smartphone channel.

The study looked into the responses of over 200 retail marketing execs with authority over ad budgets.

The most notable point from this study was that among all the participants in the survey, 87 percent said that they had the intention to make a larger investment into mobile marketing this year. This was the case across all the different retail categories. It was noted that the marketers were shifting the way the budgets would be spent, sending more toward mobile ads and other smartphone based opportunities, while withdrawing funds from certain other more traditional channels.

This trend toward mobile marketing occurs as consumers engage less often with print newspapers, catalogs and TV.

Retail Investment - Mobile MarketingAccording to RetailMeNot CMO, Marissa Tarleton, “We’ve seen increased interest from our retail partners working to better understand how mobile marketing channels like RetailMeNot can help them drive brand awareness, traffic online and in-store, and ultimately sales.”

She also pointed out that retail marketing leaders have been looking to make larger investments into digital media by way of mobile advertising. Attribution capabilities are assisting in allowing those marketers to gain a more thorough understanding of the overall positive impact of what they spend in this area.

Tarleton underscored the fact that the outcome of this survey only further supports the feedback that RetailMeNot has already been receiving from its retail partners. Such feedback includes the opinion that many traditional marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to move as quickly as is necessary toward a new mobile marketing direction while still being able to take the necessary time to go over the metrics and understand what is or is not paying off in terms of the impact their investments are actually having. It looks as though the challenges of this transition are highly commonplace.

Will you soon be making mobile payments through Facebook Messenger?

The mobile app is reportedly adding a number of surprising features including “secret chats” among others.

Following changes made to the Facebook Messenger app including giving it its own virtual assistant, rumor has it that this popular messaging application will soon also have mobile payments among other options that appeal to its users.

Many media outlets are speculating that smartphone based payments and “secret chats” will be on their way.

Privacy is among the latest hot topics when it comes to mobile technology, so the ability to bring an added level of encryption that would make it possible to hold secret chats would potentially also help to keep mobile payments secure, in theory. The idea is not necessarily an off the wall one. If a large enough investment is being made into keeping chats secure then it might makes sense for Facebook to apply this type of mobile security to other features, as well. As mobile wallets are blossoming everywhere nowadays, this addition to the social media platform could be a logical next step.

Despite the fact that mobile payments and secret chats have been mentioned regularly, details are not immediately available.

Facebook - Mobile PaymentsThere have been many speculations as to what would be involved in the new features that have been suggested for the Facebook Messenger app. For example, using separate password protection for specific chats could make an interesting difference to the security level available for certain discussions between users.

The main thought with regards to the smartphone payments aspect is that the messenger app would make it possible to send money to family and friends who are also users. This could suggest that the social network is seeking to compete with other digital payments platforms such as Android Pay, Apple Pay and even PayPal.

The feature that was identified in a leak that has been spread by several media sources indicated that the app could be used for mobile payments in store. This could mean that Facebook is seeking to reach far out and beyond communicating with people the users already know. At the time of the writing of this article, the company had yet to confirm or deny any of these claims.