We’ve all heard of mobile apps – the applications we download to customize our Smartphone depending on our interests. Today, there are apps not just for finding the local Starbucks, or a good Italian restaurant; the game has escalated to mobile apps synced to your workout schedule, dietary intake, tee off times and even your baby’s high tech diaper!
With these specialized apps comes a new opportunity for advertising – more targeted, more direct and seemingly more successful. The notion with mobile advertising is that we now know the behaviours of our consumer (using a mobile app for dieting, for example) and we can then target their behaviors with advertisements. Imagine an ad for a free sample of a diet fruit bar that pops up onscreen when you upload your diet data to your app, it is that simple.
Take a look at the charts below, it provides a good sense of the direct connection between seeing an ad and acting on that ad by visiting the business, visiting the website, looking the business up on a map, and calling a business and actually making a purchase. It appears as though a mobile app user, if targeted correctly with advertising, is likely to be an active consumer.
Advertising has become very sophisticated because our audience, the consumer, has become increasingly knowledgeable and tech-savvy. Consumers are using technology more and as they understand what it can do for them, they are both consciously and unconsciously making choices about what they want to see on their mobile or technology device. We now have audiences that have many customized choices at their fingertips, so our goal as marketers has to be to hone in on who our audience is, and then give them what they want. We need to deliver our advertising in a more subtle and smart way, because once you become “one of those annoying ads”, you’ve lost the audience in a click of a button.
As a result of all this, we are seeing more and more advertising related to consumer behaviour; for example, with roughly 40 million photos uploaded to Instagram via mobile everyday, advertisers now post photos encouraging users to interact on a popular workout app, leading to a free sports drink offer after they’ve uploaded their data and their workout is finished.
Advertisers are trying to make their brands useful, and while that has always been the case, with new technology we are trying to meet people at the point of need, and that is the brave new world of advertising.
Was this blog post informative? Are you using mobile advertising? Do you think it is relevant to your business? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below.
CreativeWorks Marketing 