Mobile Marketing Trends Every Marketer Needs

In the past, advertisers tended to treat mobile as an afterthought. In today's environment, this no longer makes sense. If you want to target your customers where they spend their time, mobile needs to be a core part of your marketing strategy. We see and experience shift in mobile marketing trends every year. From the emergence of mobile commerce to the growing importance of chat apps, we see new trends keep shaping the mobile marketing scene. Here we have picked such big trends that will shape mobile marketing in near future.

1. Integration of mobile social and mobile commerce

According to many reputed analysts, the emergence of mobile commerce is likely to collide head-on with social media on the mobile allowing bigger integration of these two mobile experiences. This will only lead to allowing making purchases through the social media page of a brand.

Integrating buy buttons to social media is extremely easy. This allows marketers bigger ease in driving sales and generating leads.

2. Mobile video ads

Video advertising on mobile is rapidly increasing and slowly we can see a shift of focus from TV ads to Smartphone ads.

Already a good portion of advertisers is coming with small duration mobile-specific video ads for major native social media apps like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snap Chat, etc. Vertical video is the most popular video ad format now.

3. Mobile payments

With Apple Pay and Android Pay spearheading the integration of banking and transaction with mobile, mobile based payment option will see more adoption across buyers and businesses in the upcoming days.

The slow upgrading of terminals in retail outlets will continue to be a challenge in spite of a favorable condition for the growth of mobile pay.

4. Mobile marketing automation

Emerging technologies like predictive analytics, testing of user behaviour, personalized content and email marketing will make mobile marketing less dependent on human intervention and more prone to forces of automation.

Marketing automation software can offer really valuable insights on your customers and accordingly you can decide your strategy and fine tune things. Automation will leave less scope for guesswork allowing far better performance for all your marketing campaigns.

5. Mobile experience beyond phone

Mobile experience no longer refers to only handheld devices like phone or tablet. Today with the rapid proliferation of wearable technology your smart watch, smart car and fashion accessories are coming with digital interface creating a diverse mobile experience.

Smart watches are spearheading the wearable market and in the span of just 3 to 5 years, a majority of smart watch manufacturers will bring wearable elements in handheld devices redefining mobile experience altogether.

6. Multiple experiences instead of one-size-fits-all

While today most people talk about mobile friendly digital experience or design that is fit to address mobile requirement first, no longer 'one experience fits all' strategy will work. On the basis of interaction of people with content, you need to create multiple experiences.

Brands will need to customize content based on how users interact with them. Customizing experience with content will not just take the design of Menu or layout into consideration, but a whole lot of things including the buttons, readability aspects and the content itself. The same content can be presented differently to different users as per their preference.

7. Instead of optimizing for mobile, creating more apps

Now businesses understand the real importance of dedicated apps. Naturally, instead of focusing on optimizing the website for mobile and thinking that the needful has been done to address the mobile audience, they are increasingly depending upon native apps for more user engagement.

In comparison to mobile websites or responsively built websites mobile apps are more visually engaging, functional and accessible. Apps allow quicker and almost instant access to company products and services.

8. Personalized location based marketing will rule

Now marketers are capable of collecting more individual customer data thanks to the rapid proliferation of connected devices and app ecosystem. Marketers now can create more individual preference based, location based and more interactive experience with their marketing.

The location will be the most important aspect in mobilizing marketing messages for customers. Individual targeting according to location and other contextual data received from user devices will create more scope for automated marketing for both small and big brands.

9. Mobile chat will rule over social media

Mobile chat apps like Facebook Messenger are fast going to take over the erstwhile social media landscape. We Chat already became the most formidable social platform in China and WhatsApp is likely to cross 1 billion users in this year only.

Thanks to this instant messaging platform, now brands can easily connect users, take request, serve them and users can order or pay for goods. Chat apps evolved as the most dynamic social platform for marketers.

10. Apps are a per with web pages

By indexing app contents in search results, the usage of the app will get a bigger push. In the time to come, app contents will be a bigger source of information than web pages as mobile and native experience is gaining popularity across enterprises. This will also help to reduce the budget and concern over app launch and marketing.