Tag: mobile marketing study

Geolocation technology is rapidly increasing in its importance when it comes to sending ads to consumers.

Though location based marketing has been an area where marketers have been pecking away over the last couple of years, trend reports are starting to indicate that this use of geolocation technology is ready for the mainstream and that consumers are going to start seeing it a great deal more.

According to a recent report, the total spending on this ad tech will breach the $10.8 billion mark by 2017.

In three years from now, spending on location based marketing is expected to represent 52 percent of all of the money spent on mobile advertising. This, according to the data from a report predicting the future of the geolocation technology, issued by BIA/Kelsey. That same report suggested that in 2012, marketers were already spending $1.4 billion on these targeted campaigns.

Clearly, in this small span of time, location based marketing spending will head skyward.

Even more interesting is, perhaps, the discovery in that same report that attribution tracking post engagement has already arrived as a “a competitive imperative for mobile advertisers, publishers, networks and ad tech providers.” This, according to the BIA/Kelsey vice president of content, Mike Boland, when discussing the firm’s forecasts.

Boland went on to explain that the penetration of smartphones, in combination with the broad spectrum of different behavioral and location signals make it possible for improved attribution to occur. This, at the same time that it is being compelled by a greater demand from advertisers to tighten their ROI. He stated that “Tying conversions back to specific ad campaigns is the holy grail of advertising, which will make campaign attribution the mobile battleground of 2014.”

The predictions from BIA/Kelsey are considered to be highly optimistic, particularly when taking into consideration the current emerging nature of this form of advertising and, potentially, its methods of attribution.

As location based marketing over mobile channels is still quite new, it is not difficult to explain why only about 3 percent of current ad dollars are headed in that direction. However, if this report is accurate, then this trend will be changing very soon, and quite rapidly.

Top execs are starting to increase the role of smartphones and tablets in their campaigns.

According to a survey that was conducted by IBM, which involved the participation of 600 senior managers, the majority of companies plan to boost their investments into mobile marketing over the next year to 18 months.

This research showed that chief marketing officers are becoming increasingly involved in the development of these strategies.

Leaders in mobile marketing strategy – which were defined as companies that have been able to create solid smartphone and tablet based strategies – have stated that mobility has “fundamentally changed how they do business.” Furthermore, the report from IBM went on to reveal that the majority of these leaders have been experiencing “measurable returns on mobile investments”.

Mobile marketing has changed the way in which execs are participating in company strategies.

For instance, according to the research director for the IBM Institute for Business Value, Eric Lesser, in many enterprises, CIOs are still taking on an important role in the creation of mobile marketing strategies. However, among the leaders in the industry, there are additional people who are also involved in this process, which includes the chief marketing officer.

Lesser explained that “We heard about the importance of getting that voice of the customer into the hands of the engineer because of the importance of the customer experience in the mobile world.” He also pointed out that they have also been discovering “parallels between the mobile environment today and the early days of e-commerce in the late 1990s”. It was explained that in this mobile marketing, there was a considerable amount of activity and that a great deal of it was oriented toward the consumer, but that there was also a notable amount of internal fragmentation in companies.

He stated that various groups are now coming up with different applications, but that there isn’t a large amount of cross-organization coordination in terms of coming up with a coherent and solid mobile marketing strategy which not only takes what people are doing with consumers into account, but also how the channel itself “can be leveraged more effectively internally.”