Today more than ever before, the path to purchase tends to pass through mobile. According to Forrester, more than a third of all domestic sales this year will involve mobile at some point in the purchase cycle, from initial awareness to product research to in-store price comparisons. Consumers have become increasingly reliant on their phones not only for making buying decisions, but also for actually buying goods: Mobile commerce is expected to hit $142 billion by 2019 in the U.S. alone.
“Mobile shopping is no longer a future trend,” says Rebecca Jen-Hui Wang, of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, co-author of a recent study on how mobile changes shopping patterns. “It is happening now.”
But merely acknowledging the significance of mobile isn’t enough. To maximize the potential of the mobile age, savvy marketers must also understand how people are shopping using their portable devices—and develop strategies that target those consumers accordingly.
The shift to mobile is shaping consumers’ shopping habits in a number of ways, including influencing the types of products they tend to purchase on various devices. Mobile shoppers are more likely than their desktop counterparts to buy familiar goods that are quickly used and replaced, in large part due to the limitations of researching an unfamiliar product on a small, portable screen. But while it may appear that mobile might not be the best platform to introduce a new product, there have been many instances where mobile is used successfully to establish a brand, especially via social channels. Case in point: the Mercedes-Benz GLA compact SUV.
The GLA launch campaign targeted millennial drivers with stylish mobile ads showing how various photographers and brand ambassadors packed the vehicle for a road trip. The campaign displayed the branding ads to the same people on both Facebook and Instagram—steering a 54 percent boost in visits to the Mercedes-Benz website. Pairing those ads with Facebook direct response ads targeted at the same users produced a whopping 580 percent increase in site visits.
“Using Instagram as part of our digital advertising mix means we can meet young buyers on their home turf,” says Eric Jillard, former GM of marketing services for the automaker.
Yet for every ounce of potential that mobile provides marketers, it presents an equal measure of challenges relating to targeting, attribution and measurement.
As the number of devices consumers use has ballooned, it’s become increasingly tricky to match a person precisely to all of their devices and browsers—which is the underpinning of successful targeting and measurement. And with mobile expanding marketers’ range of potential consumer touchpoints, the task of properly attributing which efforts result in a sale has also grown more difficult.
Fortunately for marketers, mobile ad technology is keeping pace. Mobile ad platform provider 4INFO, for example, has developed a patented matching process that accurately pairs mobile devices with the people who use them and their residential address. Doing so enables marketers to gain real-world insights about the people who live at that address—and to serve targeted ads to every screen in the household, from desktops to smartphones. Most importantly, attribution solutions that use in-store sales lift measurement help marketers make the most of their ad spending.
“Marketers and agencies need to know if their mobile ad spend is driving actual sales,” says Tim Jenkins of 4INFO. “Not just online or via mobile commerce but in stores as well. That’s where 94 percent of all transactions occur. Whether launching a new product or trying to take market share from a competitor, more than 200 studies have been conducted on 4INFO’s platform that demonstrate the actual return on ad spend for mobile ad campaigns. This provides marketers with greater confidence about where to spend in mobile advertising.”
Such tools are making mobile marketing easier—even as the stakes get higher. “The more opportunities you give a customer to interact with a retailer, the more the value of the retailer goes up,” says marketing professor Lakshman Krishnamurthi, another co-author of the Kellogg study. “And the more the sales revenue from that customer goes up.”
Mobile has increasingly transformed into a prime opportunity for marketers to invoke interactions between customers and retailers. Brands that understand mobile’s impact on the purchase cycle—and think smartly about the targeting and measurement methods—will delight both consumers and the boardroom.
