3 Challenges of Mobile Marketing

As consumers are seeing more personalization in mobile marketing, they're starting to feel that brands are growing a bit more intrusive. New technology strategies, such as geo-fencing, allow marketers to push intrusive advertisement to user's Smartphone’s when they're in or near a set geographical location.

However, brands need to tread carefully before they enter stalker territory. While the mobile market is an untapped gold mine of inexhaustible data, annoying consumers may tarnish your reputation.

Here are 3 mobile marketing challenges and ways to solve them.

Context

Personalization will help marketers push more timely promotions and effective campaigns. While most consumers want personalized discounts in return for their loyalty, a study from Infosys discovered that 78 percent of consumers are in favor of targeted ads, but only 16 percent are willing to share important data to help retailers target them.

This might make some marketing initiatives too intrusive to consumers who are attached to their Smartphone’s. And, now that companies like Lenovo are embedding ad words into the actual hardware, the question of "who can we trust" is becoming more pertinent.

For this breed of targeting to work, marketers must gently push their campaign towards the context of a customer's needs, lifestyle and behavior, while trying to casually compel consumers to come to them.

Connection

Though consumer behavior is being aggressively tracked from both offline and online technology, critics point out that data does not explain causality.

For instance, marketing companies may know which products consumers buy together, but the data doesn't reveal why they made the purchase. While knowing that women buy lipstick and wine together might help brand optimize its supply chain and communication channels, it won't help with advertisement or brand positioning.

The data doesn't reveal the sequence of purchase. Do women buy lipstick before grabbing a bottle of wine? Or does another item on their shopping list trigger it? The message here is that data mining doesn't explain why people do what they do.

For marketers to truly make sense of their consumers' path to purchase, they need to combine big data with consumer insights pulled from social media and from their very own conversations with customers.