5 Proven Strategies for Rapid Telecom Revenue Growth

The global telecom industry is entering a high-stakes era of transformation and opportunity. According to the Global Telecom Services Market Size & Outlook 2025–2030 (Horizon), the market is projected to generate USD 2.1 trillion in 2025, surging to nearly USD 2.87 trillion by 2030—a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.6% between 2026 and 2030. This impressive trajectory is fueled by the rapid acceleration of mobile ad tech adoption, an explosion in connected devices, and the mass rollout of 5G infrastructure worldwide.

While growth potential is strong, so are the headwinds. Slowing ARPU growth, intensifying customer acquisition costs, and the encroachment of OTT services—from streaming giants to messaging apps—are eroding core telco revenue streams. At the same time, digital-native consumers are demanding more personalized, agile, and seamless experiences, leaving legacy systems and traditional service models increasingly obsolete.

The imperative is clear: telecom operators must diversify their revenue streams and accelerate digital transformation to stay competitive and future-ready. Fortunately, technologies like 5G, IoT, and AI-powered automation unlock new data monetization pathways. Equally transformative are innovations in mobile video advertising, led by platforms such as moLotus mobile video advertising and interaction platform, which enable telcos to automate mobile video interactions, deliver hyper-personalized promotions, and drive high-margin ad revenues—all without requiring app downloads or costly data plans.

However, sustainable growth won't come from technology adoption alone. It will require strategic agility, sharper execution, and business model reinvention. This article presents five proven strategies telecom leaders can implement now to drive rapid and profitable revenue growth. Whether you are aiming to increase ARPU, cut churn, boost margins, or unlock new service lines, these insights will help position your business for long-term success in a dynamic global market.

1. Embrace High-Margin, Mobile-First Advertising Models

As telecom revenue from traditional channels like voice and SMS declines—pressured by the dominance of OTT players and shifting consumer behaviors—diversification into mobile-first advertising is no longer optional. For telecom operators navigating 2025, the most sustainable growth is increasingly coming from high-margin, value-added services.

Mobile advertising is a key lever. Global mobile ad spend is projected to exceed USD I trillion by 2032 (Source: Fortune BI), as brands move budgets toward platforms offering automation, personalization, and immersive engagement. Telecom operators, with their subscriber intelligence, massive reach, and infrastructure, are equipped to tap into this opportunity.

Platforms like moLotus have enabled telecoms to launch fully personalized 40-second mobile video campaigns sent directly to subscribers’ inboxes—without apps, data usage, or internet. These campaigns span the full customer lifecycle: onboarding, upselling, renewals, and retention. Telcos using moLotus often report gross margins of up to 60%, enabled by its low-cost structure and high campaign performance. Its frictionless, app-free model ensures broad accessibility, particularly in mobile-first markets.

In parallel, platforms like WhatsApp are evolving into ad channels, especially through WhatsApp Business and Click-to-Message campaigns, where brands engage directly with users inside the messaging app. While powerful for conversational commerce, WhatsApp’s scale is constrained by opt-in limitations and lacks native video advertising capabilities—areas where moLotus holds a distinct advantage.

TikTok, another mobile-first platform, leads the short-form video ad market, with its For You page offering exceptional engagement. However, rising competition and ad saturation are driving up costs, and most campaigns depend on constant content production and creative refreshes, often a challenge for telcos and their SME clients.

Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram) continue to dominate mobile ad spend, offering powerful audience segmentation and retargeting. Yet, with increased competition, privacy constraints, and diminishing ROI on certain formats, telcos are seeking complementary or alternative channels that offer greater control and lower cost per engagement.

By integrating platforms like moLotus into their advertising portfolios—alongside offerings via Meta Ads, WhatsApp, and TikTok—telecom operators can unlock recurring, high-margin revenue, reduce churn and increase ARPU. The most forward-thinking telcos are already repositioning themselves as AdTech enablers, not just connectivity providers. In doing so, they are creating new revenue channels and deeper brand relationships—critical differentiators in the competitive telecom landscape.

2. Unlock Customer Data for Smarter Monetization

Telecom operators possess one of the most valuable yet underutilized assets in the digital economy: deep, real-time customer data. With insights into subscriber demographics, usage patterns, location behavior, and transaction history, telcos are uniquely positioned to become not just connectivity providers but intelligence partners, enabling smarter monetization across industries.

The industry is now shifting from siloed data collection to actionable intelligence. As advertisers demand more precise, deterministic targeting—grounded in real subscriber behavior rather than probabilistic models—telcos have an opportunity to deliver personalization at scale while maintaining strict privacy compliance.

moLotus is enabling telcos to utilize massive, first-party subscriber data in personalized mobile video campaigns. By using telco-owned intelligence (age, location, device type, billing cycle, past transactions, etc.), moLotus allows brands to run campaigns across the customer lifecycle—from onboarding to retention to upselling. Importantly, all data used remains anonymized and secured within the telco environment, ensuring full compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and PDPA. This positions moLotus as a key driver of ethical subscriber data monetization, offering deterministic reach without third-party tracking.

Meta Ads continue to offer granular audience targeting via interest and behavioral data. While effective, this model often relies on third-party data and is increasingly challenged by privacy regulations and cookie deprecation. For telcos, Meta can serve as a complementary tool, but reliance on external platforms limits control over audience insights and monetization margins.

Google Ads delivers strong performance through keyword and search-based targeting. However, telecoms using Google Ads for customer outreach or third-party brand partnerships must contend with high bidding costs, opaque algorithms, and limited access to granular subscriber data. The value of telco-owned data is not fully monetized in this model.

WhatsApp Business enables 1:1 interactions and transactional messaging, making it effective for support and simple promotions. However, it lacks deep ad personalization capabilities. Telcos can't fully monetize their subscriber intelligence via WhatsApp, as the data remains under platform control and message templates are restricted by compliance rules.

As advertiser demand grows for deterministic targeting and measurable results, telcos must lead with data responsibility and transparency. The winners will be those who use first-party data for real-time personalization, enable advertiser-friendly rich media formats (e.g., moLotus videos, brochures, greetings, etc.), ensure data security and regulatory compliance, and build direct monetization pipelines without platform lock-in.

Data is no longer a raw material; it is a strategic differentiator. Telcos that invest in the right ad tech tools and partnerships can unlock entirely new revenue streams by becoming data-powered platforms, not just service providers.

3. Automate and Scale Customer Engagement

As telecom operators grapple with rising customer expectations, intense competition, and the growing cost of human-led customer service, automation has emerged as a powerful lever to reduce costs, improve experience, and increase lifetime value. The future of customer engagement is not only automated—it’s intelligent. Manual processes—onboarding new users, upselling plans, resolving service issues—are expensive, slow, and often inconsistent. Automation streamlines these tasks, while AI brings precision, personalization, and proactivity. In 2025, telecoms are moving beyond basic chatbots toward AI-powered lifecycle marketing, where engagement is continuous, intelligent, and scalable across millions of subscribers.

At the forefront of this automation is the moLotus platform, offering a breakthrough feature—moLotus AI Agents—reimagining brand-customer communication. It’s a virtual, AI-driven agent that acts as the personalized spokesperson of the telecom brand—delivering targeted, human-like communication directly to customer inboxes. Using big data, behavioral analytics, and transaction history, the AI Agent tailors messages for each subscriber in video format, ranging from onboarding tutorials to offers, renewals, and loyalty rewards.

It reduces call center and support costs, drives consistent upsell and cross-sell offers, and improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. Telcos are achieving high-margin, low-touch engagement.

While moLotus offers a telco-native approach to mobile automation, other popular platforms like WhatsApp, Meta, and Google are also increasingly deploying AI-based tools to streamline customer engagement. Each platform, however, comes with its strengths and constraints.

Take WhatsApp Business API, for example. It supports AI-powered chatbots that can handle frequently asked questions and tier-one customer support queries. Businesses also use the platform to trigger bill payment notifications, send recharge reminders, and facilitate plan selection or customer feedback through conversational flows. Despite these capabilities, WhatsApp engagement is fundamentally reactive and one-on-one, requiring user opt-in and internet connectivity. Unlike moLotus's app-free, offline capabilities that enable widespread campaign delivery to an entire subscriber base, this model presents scalability challenges, especially in regions with limited internet access.

Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, offers automation through AI-powered ad optimization, dynamic creatives, and automated placements. Lead generation chatbots help collect customer information and guide plan recommendations, while retargeting tools allow telcos to re-engage users based on prior interactions. However, Meta’s strengths lie primarily in top-of-funnel automation. Its utility wanes for telcos looking to automate deeper lifecycle stages such as upselling, onboarding, or loyalty, mainly due to its reliance on user behavior within a social ecosystem and the requirement of continuous ad spend.

Similarly, Google Ads and Performance Max campaigns have enabled telcos to automate customer acquisition with AI-generated ads deployed across Search, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. Tools like Smart Bidding optimize for conversions, and dynamic search ads respond to real-time user behavior. These features are valuable for driving new leads but fall short in delivering personalized, ongoing engagement across the subscriber lifecycle.

4. Forge Strategic Brand Partnerships

Telcos have always held a unique asset: direct, permissioned access to millions—sometimes hundreds of millions—of verified mobile users. In today’s fragmented advertising ecosystem, this access is extremely valuable to brands seeking performance, trust, and personalization at scale. Strategic partnerships enable telecoms to monetize that access while enhancing customer experience and loyalty.

moLotus, a telco-native platform, exemplifies this shift.  moLotus has already forged impactful, win-win alliances with major telecom operators across Asia. In Indonesia, its partnership with Telkomsel is transforming the country’s USD 20 billion advertising market by reaching over 270 million users and aiming for USD 300 million in revenue over three years. Meanwhile, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison (IOH) is using moLotus to tap into its nearly 100 million subscribers, generating consistent, high-margin revenues. These partnerships demonstrate the immense value telcos can unlock by becoming direct advertising platforms.

While moLotus is telco-native, other platforms such as Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and Google Ads also offer brand-partnership opportunities, especially through programmatic ad placements and sponsored content. However, these platforms often rely on cookies, bid auctions, and app environments, adding layers of cost, complexity, and compliance risk. Facebook, in collaboration with Globe(Philippines), launched a pilot deployment based on TIP principles to connect a small village in the Philippines that previously lacked cellular coverage.

Vodafone (Global) expanded its partnership with Google, focusing heavily on Cloud and AI. The partnership indicates future plans for Vodafone TV to incorporate ad functionalities managed through Google Ads Manager. This indicates an intention to utilize Google's ad tech stack for monetizing their content platforms. Vodafone, like many large telcos, is a massive Google Ads spender for customer acquisition across its various markets.

Increasingly, brands are using WhatsApp Business for one-on-one customer interactions. Some telecoms co-host service and promotional campaigns on WhatsApp, though scalability is limited due to opt-in requirements and reliance on internet access. Faced with numerous customer queries, Indosat implemented a WhatsApp chatbot, also through Infobip, which now handles over 200 individual use cases, improving customer satisfaction by 40%. Airtel allies with WhatsApp chatbots (Airtel IQ) to provide instant, 24/7 customer support, answer FAQs, and handle various inquiries, often with seamless handoff to live agents for complex issues. They use rich media like images and videos for better engagement.

5. Transform Customer Processes for Operational Efficiency

As telecom markets mature and competition intensifies, operational efficiency has become a core lever for revenue and profit optimization. Outdated customer processes—manual onboarding, fragmented communication, legacy loyalty programs—are no longer sustainable. To remain competitive and profitable, telecom operators must modernize their customer interaction models through automation, mobile-first engagement, and intelligent process design.

Digital transformation plays a central role in this evolution. Telcos are increasingly turning to automation technologies that reduce operational overhead while improving customer satisfaction. Platforms like moLotus are helping lead this shift. Built specifically for telcos, moLotus enables operators to automate a wide range of customer lifecycle communications—from onboarding and billing reminders to upsell nudges and thank-you messages—without requiring mobile apps, data usage, or human intervention.

moLotus’s quick response options – Call, SMS, USSD, mgram, Weblink, etc., significantly lowering customer interaction costs. Telecom partners using moLotus have reported up to 30% reduction in costs, alongside measurable improvements in loyalty and ARPU. Its frictionless format also helps streamline customer journeys, minimizing drop-offs and manual follow-ups.

In addition to platforms like moLotus, marketing automation solutions such as HubSpot are increasingly being integrated into telecom operations, optimizing CRM workflows, real-time engagement, and better campaign management. These platforms are particularly useful in aligning sales, service, and marketing functions to drive revenue-focused outcomes.

One area witnessing rapid innovation is mobile loyalty. Traditional card-based programs are giving way to dynamic, mobile-first loyalty solutions. Here again, moLotus is enabling telcos to digitize rewards, track customer feedback, and push personalized offers based on behavior—all at scale. The result is deeper customer engagement, improved retention, and stronger brand affinity.

Efficiency is no longer just a back-office concern. In today’s telecom landscape, transforming customer processes is directly tied to revenue growth, cost optimization, and competitive edge. Operators that embrace process automation, mobile-based interaction models, and data-driven workflows are not just improving service—they are future-proofing their businesses for sustained profitability.

Conclusion

The future belongs to telecom operators who move beyond legacy models and embrace smarter, scalable growth levers. Unlocking new revenue streams and high margins is possible through win-win partnerships with scalable go-to-market platforms like moLotus. Now is the time for telcos to act—innovate, automate, and monetize—to lead the next wave of telecom revenue growth.