Tag: retail marketing trends

A recent data analysis has found that retailers, brands and restaurants will be spending more on smartphone ads.

Digital savings experience, RetailMeNot Inc, has recently released its report on a recent study it conducted, titled “The Rise of Mobile Marketing Spend in Retail,” in which it stated that restaurants, retailers and brands will be investing more of their advertising budgets in the smartphone channel.

The study looked into the responses of over 200 retail marketing execs with authority over ad budgets.

The most notable point from this study was that among all the participants in the survey, 87 percent said that they had the intention to make a larger investment into mobile marketing this year. This was the case across all the different retail categories. It was noted that the marketers were shifting the way the budgets would be spent, sending more toward mobile ads and other smartphone based opportunities, while withdrawing funds from certain other more traditional channels.

This trend toward mobile marketing occurs as consumers engage less often with print newspapers, catalogs and TV.

According to RetailMeNot CMO, Marissa Tarleton, “We’ve seen increased interest from our retail partners working to better understand how mobile marketing channels like RetailMeNot can help them drive brand awareness, traffic online and in-store, and ultimately sales.”

She also pointed out that retail marketing leaders have been looking to make larger investments into digital media by way of mobile advertising. Attribution capabilities are assisting in allowing those marketers to gain a more thorough understanding of the overall positive impact of what they spend in this area.

Tarleton underscored the fact that the outcome of this survey only further supports the feedback that RetailMeNot has already been receiving from its retail partners. Such feedback includes the opinion that many traditional marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to move as quickly as is necessary toward a new mobile marketing direction while still being able to take the necessary time to go over the metrics and understand what is or is not paying off in terms of the impact their investments are actually having. It looks as though the challenges of this transition are highly commonplace.

Legacy brands face struggles that newer companies don’t seem to have to deal with.

Companies built in a more digital age seem to be making the transition to a smartphone-based economy with much greater ease than legacy retailers that have a long history that hasn’t had anything to do with mobile marketing.

Macy’s was one of the companies that has a long history but that has managed to keep up with mobile tech.

According to marketing exec Serena Potter from Macy’s, the company has observed a rapid migration of customers from their desktop computers over to smartphones. That said, despite the fact that the company has a long history in brick and mortar and e-commerce, it realized that it would be vital to place a considerable focus on m-commerce and mobile marketing if it wanted to keep up with the expectations of customers. That said, while she explained that “It wasn’t an obstacle for us as much as it was a steep learning curve.” She added that “You didn’t know what you didn’t know.”

There is a great deal more than the technology that must be mastered in order to implement successful mobile marketing.

What traditional retailers are discovering as they attempt to implement mobile advertising strategies is that they can’t simply stick to the same concepts that have been successful throughout their history. Using smartphones as a marketing channel is not simply a matter of running the same types of ads on a smaller screen. Instead, there is a great deal that needs to be re-learned in terms of apps, the mobile web, loyalty programs, data collection and metrics to understand which campaigns have – and have not – been successful.

These same challenges are not quite as powerful among retailers that have been created more recently, with a mobile-first mindset already in place, said Potter. She explained that Macy’s had been focusing on desktop optimization for many years and had mastered that channel. It became highly predictable. However, with mobile marketing, “you have customers accessing different information, with different intent. A lot of research and a lot of discovery is happening and it’s all on the go,” she said.