The potential pot of gold in mobile marketing

Market news | November 30, 2014

By eeNews Europe

Some of the reasons for this include inertia that comes with any new media, with companies relying on tried and tested methods until the results demand change, through to inexperience and a lack of understanding on how to implement new marketing strategies within a new medium. Further, in such a scenario there is little experience to draw from and a lot of throwing mud against a wall to see what sticks.

It appears that for mobile marketing we are entering a phase of steady growth and today have a fairly good base of experience to draw from. In their latest report, market research firm MarketsandMarkets is currently forecasting that the global mobile marketing market will grow from $4,314.5 million in 2014 to $15,287.4 million by 2019, at a CAGR of 28.8%. In terms of regions, North America is expected to be the biggest market in terms of market size, while Europe and Asia-Pacific (APAC) are expected to experience increased market traction, during the forecast period.

MarketsandMarkets has this to say:

The mobile channel offers an exciting opportunity for marketers that are yet to be fully embraced. The prolific advancements in the mobile marketing industry over the years have expansively enriched the experience for the customers. The arrival of these services has also enabled marketers with a specific customer base to extend its market presence and escalate its business value. Mobile marketing is considered to be highly trackable due to the ability of consumers to respond directly and immediately. Moreover, this practice can be used to track the efficiency of other marketing channels by including a direct response call to action feature.

In the last few years, mobile marketing has opened up new opportunities for enterprises to communicate and engage with their target audience in a more effective way. However, the potential of this tool has not been fully exploited due to the complex implementation process and lack of experience in mobile marketing among marketers is believed to attribute this shortcoming.

The importance of mobile marketing in marketing practices is widely accepted due to the unique features of mobile media. Effective mobile marketing strategies therefore depend on the ability of firms to manage and operate mobile technologies and their respective features.

One caveat to all this is really based in the end-user experience, which today in many areas is not good when it comes to data services. Even 4G, in many areas is not delivering the speeds it is supposed to. Consequently, the success of mobile marketing, will to some extent depend on mobile networks delivering more robust 4G services.

For example, many customers are captive and have relatively little to do when waiting for appointments or traveling, and often Wi-Fi is not accessible as a free service. As 4G services and prevalent Wi-Fi is superior in North America, this might be one reason Europe and Asia will lag behind North America in terms of market size, in spite of having similar or higher populations to draw on.

With truly ubiquitous wireless, mobile marketing could be a gold mine.