Tag: mobile marketing strategy

Marketers are honing their strategies in order to time their ads to appeal to females with smartphones.

In the United States, approximately 85 percent of all shopping decisions are made by women, according to a tremendous amount of recent research, and this is making them a highly desired target for many mobile marketing campaigns.

According to many marketers, the key is to attract and influence them while they are in retail stores.

An in-store marketing provider called Swirl has released its own recommendations regarding the way in which retailers can become more appealing to female consumers as they shop, and how they can influence what they buy. One of the reasons that the strategy is seen as highly important in-store as opposed to before they even head out is that women like to be able to see and touch the products that they are thinking about buying, and they like the social experience of heading out to purchase products while they are with their friends and family.

Though this is not entirely new, the difference is that they have their smartphones with them and can be reached with mobile marketing.

This has made smartphones an extremely important device when it comes to making decisions about what to buy. Retailers are now starting to see this opportunity to communicate and interact with female shoppers to help to encourage them to buy their products through various forms of encouragement.

A study conducted involving 1,000 women shoppers determined that 76 percent had a preference for shopping for clothing and apparel while in-store – as opposed to buying online – and that only 22 percent favored buying this type of product online, and only 2 percent preferred to shop over smartphones or tablets.

That said, what mobile marketing experts have realized is that while women may not be making their actual purchase over smartphones and tablets, they are using those devices to inform themselves about what they are thinking about buying, as well as to find better prices and savings opportunities such as discount coupons. A survey recently commissioned by Google showed that more than 66 percent of smartphone owners use their devices to assist them with shopping while they are in a brick and mortar store.

One third of online ad spending is directed toward smartphone and tablet using consumers.

According to the latest eMarketer study that has created a profile of the global industry for the first time ever, mobile marketing is an industry that is now worth $16 billion globally, and Google has the lion’s share of it at 55 percent.

The report also indicated that advertising over this channel represents a third of all of the global digital spending.

The eMarketer report indicated that in fiscal 2013, Google brought in over $8.8 billion in from mobile marketing. In second place, far behind Google, was Facebook, which drew $2 billion, which was an increase of just under a half billion from the year before. The third largest was Pandora, followed by the online version of Yellow Pages, YP. Last among the top five was Twitter.

As companies see increasing benefits from mobile marketing, they are redirecting their online spend toward that channel.

eMarketer pointed out in its mobile marketing report that “After making nearly half a billion dollars worldwide on mobile ads last year, Facebook—which had no mobile revenue in 2011—is expected to increase mobile revenues by more than 333% to just over $2 billion in 2013.”

This most recent year represented the middle of a new and powerful online and mobile marketing push for Twitter, which was seeing a global market share of less than 2 percent. This is expected to increase to the point that it will break the 2 percent mark this year. However, in the United States, it will hold a much larger space at 3.6 percent.

The mobile marketing dominance at Google has recently been the focus of the FTC and its competition regulators. As that massive company continues to grow and expand, it is also absorbing a larger amount of the advertising business over smartphone and tablet channels. At the same time, it is managing to keep a solid hold over to portion of the desktop advertising business.

eMarketer’s global mobile marketing report pointed out that Google will be boosting its revenues faster than the overall market’s growth over the upcoming year as a result of “continued monetization of YouTube and growing adoption of mobile advertising.”