Tag: mobile marketing strategy

As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.

Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.

This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.

This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.

Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.

According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”

The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.

In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.

The largest smartphone manufacturer in the world won’t be spending as much marketing over that channel.

It has recently been revealed that Samsung Electronics, the biggest smartphone maker on the globe, has decided that it won’t be spending as much money on mobile marketing throughout 2014.

This decision has come as a surprise to some as mobile devices are a primary focus of the company.

The reason that was given for cutting back on the mobile marketing budget at Samsung, this year, is that the company plans to reduce that spending in a way that directly reflects its revenues. This, following a massive amount of spending during the fourth quarter during its tremendous promotional campaigns throughout the hot holiday shopping season.

That said, this doesn’t meant that Samsung will be ceasing its mobile marketing, only cutting is budget.

There are other advertising and promotional opportunities that are specifically being leveraged at the moment and that are cutting into the overall budget of the company. For that reason, some changes needed to be made this year to carry them through based on the revenues that are expected throughout that time.

For instance, according to Kim Hyunjoon, the senior vice president at Samsung, the company plans to “actively leverage global sports events such as the Sochi (Winter) Olympics” as well as their channels through retail. However, at the same time, they are working to “try to raise the efficiency of our marketing spend and lower our overall mobile marketing budget to revenue this year compared with last year.”

Kim Hyunjoon made this announcement to analysts as Samsung was releasing its earnings figures. Last year, the company had run a number of exceptionally large campaigns, particularly in the last part of the year. This came as a part of a number of different strategies and often coincided with the launches of a series of new types of mobile devices and gadgets that the company has to offer.

The company does intend to continue with a mobile marketing strategy this year and will maintain its reflection of the earnings it plans to bring in through 2014.