Advertisers in the United Kingdom have clearly embraced the channel and the trend is only improving.
While mobile marketing is doing quite well in a number of different markets, in the United Kingdom, adoption has been considerable and has reached the point that eMarketer has concluded that it is “the new normal” in that country.
At a time in which a huge focus is placed on social media advertising, it is over smartphones that many people are reached.
In the U.K., there is a boom that is being experienced in mobile marketing, particularly over social media, that is expected to continue racing forward until it slows to a near plateau in 2018. eMarketer released a report entitled “UK Social Networking Trends: mobile Is Becoming the New Normal”. Its conclusions were that the entire forecast period of the report – which ends in 2018 – will see a steady growth in social media use over smartphones. It stated that this year will see 75.3 percent, but that this figure will rise to 90.2 percent in that final year.
As consumers start paying more attention to smartphones, advertisers are looking to mobile marketing.
Overall advertising and social media marketing are becoming a mainstream focus in the U.K. Brands and businesses are seeking to connect with consumers over the channel that they prefer the most, and in many cases, this means smartphones. The true opportunity is in the fact that most consumers have those devices with them and turned on, most of the time. This allows for a new and critical level of real time engagement that has never been possible before.
That new data aligns well with a study that was released in February 2014 by a social media firm called Immediate Future. It looked into the way marketers in the United Kingdom felt about social engagement offers in real-time. Though the most frequently cited benefit identified among the participants was general audience engagement, 35 percent also felt that it helped to increase customer loyalty and retention, while a quarter said that they experienced better return on investment as a result of social mobile marketing.
The study found that awareness is not a problem when it comes to mobile payments. Approximately 55% of consumers are aware of the mobile commerce services that are available to them, but few of these people are willing to participate in mobile commerce, favoring instead their credit cards and other traditional forms of commerce. Consumers also seem to be quite leery of the mobile commerce services that are available to them, especially those that involve the use of digital currency.