Marketing And The Mobile Media Revolution: Tips On How Marketers Can Capitalise On The Growing Push For Mobility

Indians cannot live without their smartphones, and the unprecedented growth witnessed by the country’s app market underlines their love for their mobile devices. According to a recent report by App Annie, India outpaced the US in terms of the app market growth in 2016 with more than 6 billion app downloads from Google Play. The country also occupied top spot when it came to the time spent on mobiles; users from India spent nearly 145 billion hours on their Android devices, nearly 35 billion hours more than the second-placed Brazil. These statistics are music to the ears of Indian marketers.

With budget smartphones and extremely cheap 4G/LTE data tariffs having become the norm, India as a nation has leapfrogged over the ‘Personal Computer’ revolution to climb directly onto the mobile-first bandwagon. This presents unprecedented prospects to create better and more result-oriented mobile-driven marketing initiatives. But how can this massive marketing opportunity be realised? Here are a few tips that can help Indian marketers in capitalising on the growing push for mobility and maximising their brand salience:

Customer Experience, Data, And Personalisation

In today’s interconnected, digitally-empowered age, customers have asserted the role of brand evangelists who can make or break a brand’s fortune through word-of-mouth publicity. This is what makes customer experience the top priority for marketers. Gathering user feedback through messages and app notifications can help in identifying common consumer pain-points and addressing them for an enhanced end-customer experience.

The importance of personalisation in enabling a superior brand experience cannot be stressed enough, either. Smartphones today have become repositories of constant real-time information pertaining to all aspects of their users’ lives, including their likes, preferences, and requirements. The onus falls on marketers to extract the right data from this vast database and to analyse it to generate an accurate profile for every customer, which can help in creating highly-tailored sales funnels that nudge customers to commit to purchase. Brands such as Amazon and Netflix have already demonstrated how creating personalised brand-customer interactions that meet and exceed consumer expectations can result in greater brand affinity and maximise loyalty and sales.

Content And Gaming To Drive Maximum Consumer Outreach

Marketing is innovative selling, and content is right at the heart of it. With content that appeals to its target audience, content marketing helps brands in driving more traffic and influencing conversions whilst also generating and sustaining visibility and consumer mindshare in the long run. But with mobiles fast replacing PCs and laptops as the first-screen for an increasing percentage of consumers, there is a need to optimise content to make it more suitable for mobile-based consumption. Ensuring their content marketing initiatives are designed to be accessed on smartphone screens through either apps or web-based browsers can help marketers in generating better impact for their respective brands.

More And Better: Driving Engagement Through Video-Based Marketing

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but nothing beats video when it comes to creating a marketing buzz. According to a report by HubSpot, videos featuring products/services can positively influence the purchase decision of nearly 64% online shoppers. Another study by Simply Measured indicated that video-based content is shared 1200% more than the combined shares accumulated by links and text-based content. This gives marketers the perfect opportunity to increase their customer outreach through quirky branded as well as informative ‘how-to’ videos.

Geolocation And The Rise Of Beacons For Cross-Channel Marketing

Geolocation-based marketing has been in vogue for a while now, allowing brands around the world to leverage technology to promote their physical offerings. With the number of smartphone owners in the country expected to cross 720 million by 2020, Indian marketers have an unparalleled opportunity to tap into the power of mobile for cross-channel initiatives. Geolocation-based marketing will enable marketers to push customised in-app offers to prospective consumers in a particular geographical area, thereby driving greater footfall to brick-and-mortar outlets. Proximity beacons have emerged as another medium for marketers to engage prospective customers in the physical realm, enabling more relevant and contextual marketing for a more seamless consumer experience.

Programmatic Marketing For Better RoI

Expected to comprise 80% of the total marketing spend by 2018, programmatic marketing is the next stage of evolution for traditional media buying, marketing, and advertising. It leverages consumer insights and algorithm-based approaches to create highly-effective marketing initiatives that can target the right customer through the right channel at the right time. Smartphones, with their ubiquitous, always-connected proposition, are perfect for marketers looking to roll out programmatic campaigns which can drive greater personalisation and better precision for better RoI on marketing spends.

[The author of this post is Ambika Sharma, founder, Pulp Strategy.]

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