The company has now rolled out mobile app install ads that are distributed as sponsored posts users can share.
Tumblr has just announced its latest in social media marketing over mobile in the form of an ad unit that it is calling its “Tumblr Sponsored Apps,” which will give app publishers the opportunity to target Millennials, who are the primary audience of the blogging service.
That demographic being targeted is also a group that is extremely mobile and that are large app users.
The purpose of the social media marketing will be to help to drive users to Google Play and to the iTunes App Store in order to encourage the download of new mobile apps. This is a type of mobile marketing known as “app install ads” and they have been a serious business on Facebook, and Twitter, the two largest social network rivals of Tumblr. In fact, 85 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from mobile, and that company adopted this type of ad earlier in 2014.
That said, the social media marketing strategy at Tumblr is slightly different from that of Facebook and Twitter.
The app install adds are designed to appear as small posts that look somewhat like a card, such as the ones that are found in Twitter streams and Facebook News Feeds. However, they are unrestricted in terms of their format, and are actually posted in the form of sponsored blogs.
The service debuted this week with mobile ads from the Betaworks, Big Fish, and GREE publishers. Their GIFs and photosets were featured, but according to the creative strategy manager at Tumblr, Max Sebala “the sky’s the limit in terms of creative.” Since the ads are actually displayed in the form of blog posts, it makes it possible for readers to share and re-share them throughout the Tumblr network by way of its reblogging feature.
To start, these social media marketing ads will be appearing exclusively on the dashboards of mobile Tumblr users. However, when the content is re-shared, it can be viewed by any user of the blogging network, including both those over mobile and using the service on laptops and desktops.
These ads will be able to follow a viewer from one device to the next.
As Facebook continues to work on broadening its social media mobile advertising possibilities, the company has started to view the new sequential ad method as a technique with a great deal of potential for boosting the ability to control branding message among consumers using the network.
Sequential video ads give marketers the ability to send targeted video ads in front of a device user when a device is clicked.
Based on what is specifically clicked by the smartphone user, and what the mobile advertising message happens to be, marketers become able to follow up on previous selections with similar video ads as the user moves from one device (such as a smartphone) to another (such as a laptop or a tablet). By being able to create a sequence of various ads targeted specifically to the user, a more complete sales pitch can be formed from one video in the sequence to the next.
This series can work its way to a final mobile advertising “sell” video that is meant to encourage an actual purchase.
When it comes to mobile marketing, video is playing a very important role that many believe will only become larger – much larger. As unique profile IDs can be generated, it provides marketers with an improved ability to sequentially target its content for the various device users as they use their social media accounts. This way, each following video in the sequence can build on the ones before it, offering considerably more control over the way that the message is ultimately delivered.
This will also give Facebook the opportunity to provide advertisers with a higher level of control in the way that their product messages are deployed. The social network is bringing together a number of different elements from its own analytics as well as those of partners in order to improve their overall ad targeting capabilities.
Facebook is capable of obtaining massive amounts of user data that is helpful to mobile advertising, based on the info held within the accounts of the various user profiles, in addition to their actual activity.
