Chris Babayode, MD at Mobile Marketing Association
Consumers regard their mobile devices as the ‘go-to’ for advice, assistance and access to a wide range of real-world and digital services they rely on every day. Significantly, the more consumers can do with their personal devices, the more they depend on them to do even more.
What’s more, consumers also instinctively reach to their devices to interface with the real world around them. It’s the first screen they view in the morning and it’s the last interaction before they go to bed. Depending on the research you read, consumers are looking at their mobile screens anywhere between 150 and 200 times a day.
It’s clear that consumer behaviour effectively endows the smartphone, the first and most important screen, with an exciting new capability at the centre of the customer experience. As we showed in Volume 1 of this e-book, mobile has become The Great Connector, able to bridge the digital and physical realms to influence and trigger activities in the real world, be it conversions, interactions and other ‘calls-to- action’.
Whilst the advance of mobile – smartphones and feature phones, as well as tablets — has caused a sea change in consumer behaviour, it is also transforming the role of location and context in marketing and advertising.
At first, so-called static data — household data, data stored in CRM systems and data gathered via cookies during PC browsing and buying sessions —helped marketers understand their customers better.
Today mobile takes this to a new level, empowering marketers to build more dynamic and holistic audiences and so meet growing consumer demand for personal, relevant and valuable content, marketing, advertising and assistance— where, when and how they want it most. It is effective, allowing brands and marketers to achieve amazing results, because where we are also defines who we are.
In our view, effective advertising doesn’t just target the right audience; it targets their ‘location context’. It’s this capabilities combination that equips brands and companies to deliver marketing that is appreciated and valuable because it is inextricably linked to the world around us and related to our lives — and what we are doing— at precisely that point in time.
The fact that consumers are simultaneously moving through the virtual world as they move through the physical world with their device, provides brands and marketers access to a new depth of user location data, information that allows them to integrate location-based tactics into their mobile marketing efforts.
In Mobile: The Great Connector (Volume 2) we explore how location data and context are coming together to enhance the entire marketing cycle. The way is clear for marketers to harness mobile — and the location context data and insights it offers —to build better audience profiles and bridge the digital and physical worlds.
Clearly, the role of location in advertising is changing. This is a key finding contained in the recent MMA Guidance Report entitled Location Audience Targeting.
It stresses that options for location-based mobile audiences have expanded far beyond what is necessary to execute simple geo-fence campaigns. The capabilities are coming together to offer marketers both sophisticated targeting options and exciting insights on new ways reaching the right consumer on their mobile device with the right communications in the right context.
A good example is Neutrogena, one of the winners of the Smarties Awards we also profile in the eBook. The company cleverly linked its advertising to weather, a context that impacts consumer actions and influences decisions.
In the award winning campaign we feature we explain how Neutrogena tapped the unique capabilities of mobile to raise awareness of its Neutrogena Winter Love and drive impressive results.
But the brand didn’t go to consumers — it went to their hands.
To do this it created a media-first by using adaptive marketing to merge numerous data into an opportunity. The aim was to reach the hands of women in Turkey between the ages of 25-45 who had also bought a personal care product within the last two months.
Smartphone temperature sensors did the rest, providing the ‘trigger’ that allowed the brand to show a banner ad to the targeted audience only in cases when the smartphone temperature was under 10 degrees Celsius. The display ad on the smartphone reminded women that Neutrogena can protect their hands even at this temperature – that is, at the phone’ s temperature. The targeted audience activity was effectively directed from online (mobile) to offline where women could make the purchase in a nearby store, for example.
The innovative campaign exceeded expectations. It targeted the cold hands of more than 3 million unique users, generating a massive 5.5 million impressions. Users visited Neutrogena’s Winter Love campaign page 160,000 times to have more information about how to protect their hands. As a result, Neutrogena reached its highest ever market share, reaching 17.8% in its category, a result which the brand called “an unprecedented success story in Turkey.”
This is just one of the many brands case studies and examples of best practice we showcase in the eBook, a publication we can produced to provide you with an expert guide. We encourage you to download the new eBook and draw from it to architect the strategies that will allow you to drive positive results for your company and great experiences for your existing and new customers.
(This article is an excerpted from Mobile: The Great Connector (Volume 2), a comprehensive eBook authored by Peggy Anne Salz, chief analyst and content strategist of MobileGroove, in collaboration with the MMA EMEA and member sponsors Inspired and Brainstorm. Register here to download your free copy of this essential marketing resource.)
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