Mobile Marketing Maturity: Unlocking The Mobile-Only Future With Location Data by Julie Bernard. Available from <https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/12/11/mobile-marketing-maturity-unlocking-the-mobile-only-future-with-location-data/#2dd354fa4c30> []
Even smart brands with strong marketing partners sometimes struggle with the complexities of location data. It’s an obstacle that can discourage advertisers from leveraging the most effective approaches to mobile marketing, and it can hinder growth overall.
The scale of the challenge is significant. According to a June 2017 study that our company commissioned from Forrester, 94% of surveyed advertisers said they grapple with difficulties in working with location data. It is a story that brands have been telling for some time, too. For example, Greg Sterling, vice president at the Local Search Association, recently wrote about advertisers addressing location-based challenges. Here’s the good news: With a shift in strategy and marketing mix, the location-intelligence challenge is a dynamic that advertisers can change.
In the following sections, we look at location-data roadblocks, and we put a spotlight on the benefits location intelligence brings to campaigns, boosting an organization’s mobile-marketing maturity along the way.
Mobile-Marketing Maturity: Location Data Drives Its Growth
How do we define mobile-marketing maturity?
In a nutshell, there are three factors in play: A mature business supports mobile-marketing initiatives and assigns an organized team to achieve them, the organization effectively plans and executes on mobile strategies and the organization puts a system in place to measure mobile-marketing outcomes. These findings, in turn, fuel future strategies.
In our study, when we looked at brands with all three of these elements in their marketing mix, we identified the following common outcomes.
• Mature organizations using location data to achieve rich consumer insights were 12% more likely than their less mature peers to report increased ad-content relevance.
• Advertisers in this same category reported other brand benefits as well. For example, mature organizations were directionally more likely to increase brand awareness than their less mature peers (a 5% difference in likelihood). Brands also saw benefits to marketing ROI and targeting outcomes.
Embracing location data is key to unlocking growth and successful outcomes. As Hugo Moreno points out in this article, it is a way of bringing order to brands’ and consumers’ experiences in an increasingly mobile-to-offline world, an ecosystem that is crowded with consumer signals but also packed with opportunities to improve engagement and amplify context.
So, how do brands achieve mobile-marketing maturity? The advertisers we spoke to cited challenges, but they also highlighted solutions that can solve location-data obstacles.
Overcoming Challenges: Partnerships And The Mobile Consumer
We know that mobile marketing is growing. As TechCrunch reported, mobile apps dominate consumers’ online attention — to the tune of 52% of their time in the digital space. And we carry these portals to the online experience with us all the time in the form of our mobile devices. Still, only 26% of the respondents in our study were engaged in mobile marketing that included location data and then applied it to location-based campaigns. For brands that want to keep up with the mobile consumer, that tendency must change.
A key strategy for brands is to create third-party partnerships that can address the quality and scale of location data. These partnerships should include a location-intelligence team that can meet all the advertiser’s demands for reliable data sources, scalable campaigns and dependable accuracy. Note, also, that these parameters will change over time.
For example, an organization may need granular location data tracked over time. For another, real-time location at an event will suffice. All advertisers will want their creative content to change dynamically with location, but some will need the ability to measure offline behaviors in ways that drive an offline conversation. Others will rely on the conversion happening online. Partnerships must be able to adapt accordingly.
The brands and third-party partners that can address these disparate wants and needs will advance along the maturity spectrum, optimizing location-powered efforts for the long term and leading the marketplace. We are on the cusp of the mobile-only future; location data is the doorway that will take us there.
Mobile Marketing Maturity: Unlocking The Mobile-Only Future With Location Data by Julie Bernard. Available from <https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/12/11/mobile-marketing-maturity-unlocking-the-mobile-only-future-with-location-data/#2dd354fa4c30> []