Mobile marketing has become one of the most important channels for internet access among the world's population in recent years. There are 4.18 billion unique mobile internet users, which is 91% of the total internet users and 36% of the global population.
What does this mean for mobile app marketers? The main idea is that there is a huge market to reach out on mobile devices. And while the mobile market is expected to scale further, modern marketers should definitely implement this channel into digital marketing strategy to reach their target audience.
Bhavesh Talreja from Globale Media, AI-driven mobile advertising platform, has shared some of the digital marketing trends that marketers and publishers should be mindful of.
Pandemic Impact on Mobile Marketing in 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the world economy, apart from affecting millions of individuals across the globe. The mobile apps industry was not an exception. Despite people being forced to stay at home during the pandemic, they still preferred to spend their Internet time on mobile devices.
While the coronavirus pandemic has stagnated applications in certain categories, the popularity of others is increasing tremendously. For example, mobile apps for social communications have seen sustained growth in unique visitors since pandemic restrictions.
Though COVID-19 has had an inevitable impact on mobile ad spend – with 30% of respondents across APAC, 27% in India, and 46% in Indonesia expecting their mobile budgets to decrease – the channel has been one of the least impacted by the pandemic.
Social Media and M-commerce Expansion
Smartphones have been popular online shopping devices for many years. During the coronavirus pandemic, however, people started using their mobile phones as the primary tool for e-commerce transactions. Consequently, the number of grocery delivery apps has risen significantly – up to 200% from February to mid-March 2020. Evidently, the mobile shopping trend is going to continue next year, thus app marketers in this category have an opportunity to grab market share by building a healthy-growing user base. For grocery shopping, there is no primordial go-to app. Thus, with the help of app retargeting, marketers can work towards being on top-of-mind of users.
Retailers and marketers will also be looking to leverage the selling opportunities on social media. As people are trying to alleviate boredom being at the lockdown, such social media platforms as YouTube, Instagram, Tiktoc, Netflix and others have become even more popular on the app and Google stores. The statistics shows that the total number of social media platforms and messengers’ downloads has increased by a factor of 2.5 since the pre-COVID-19 period. Thus, more marketers are adopting social commerce, since social media platforms now provide all necessary marketing tools to reach out the target audience.
Ads Automation
Nowadays, publishers concentrate all their efforts on their apps' optimization to the changing user needs. They need mobile ads to be effective and enable them to meet target KPIs, like ROAS or CPA. They need more ads, more tests, and they need them fast. This is one place where they require help, and the help comes with automation.
Ad automation along with artificial intelligence technology makes it possible for publishers to test new audiences, geographic locations and placements at scale while automating the launch of new ad campaigns based on the best settings. Ad automation tools are already being used by a good number of publishers but are expected to grow in popularity by next year.
Video Content Marketing
Globally, the video marketing industry is worth $34 billion today. According to the experts, this number will grow to $54 billion by 2023. Marketers claim that video ads fetch them faster and more significant ROI.
Multiple researches have shown that users are likely to consume video content over any other form of content available on the internet. Videos are easy to understand and a great source of entertainment and learning. As a result, by 2021, 80% of internet traffic will be from videos.
Video ad market is huge, and it is not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Globally, consumers spend 84 minutes a day watching online video in 2020, up 25% from 67 in 2018.
Voice Search
Nearing the end of 2020, voice search is growing at a tremendous rate and cannot be ignored by marketers. Its popularity is growing not only in basic tasks such as navigation, phone calls, or playlist management but also in activities like calendar management, email operations and shopping.
Voice searches are expected to account for over 50% of the online searches in 2021. Consequently, they have the potential to turn digital marketing upside down. As a result, marketers need to make proper use of the voice search SEO for their ads, in order to reach the target audience in 2021.
Transparency and Regulations
After the industry relieved after surviving the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, the following years have brought even more legislation on privacy and data security.
Probably the biggest talking point in the AdTech industry this year was about the depreciation of the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) option in iOS 14. The biggest User acquisition and remarketing companies were busy deciding how to tackle the accurate device ids attribution via alternate attribution methods. The LinkedIn feed was filled up with the news about how these changes would impact iOS campaign attribution and what's coming next in the industry. Then, Apple decided to postpone the suppression of IDFA to the next year giving a sigh of relief to the whole industry and leaving them with the much needed time to evolve the attribution and remarketing methods and prepare for the next era of User Privacy. On the other hand, the same challenge would be one of the most interesting events in early 2021, and we’ll see how the industry will adapt to this major change.
As the digital marketing trends are moving towards more strict policies and compliance with regulation, the pressure on quality and transparency will continue to grow. The positive aspect of this evolution is that transparency and regulations demand has encouraged companies to become more agile, increase data accuracy, and target more productively. Marketers will have to rethink how they track and collect data in the coming year as it is not available in abundance.
Role of OEMs
Smartphone usage is all-time high across the globe and estimates suggest that 36% of the world's population will have at least one smartphone by the end of 2020. The global electronics assembly market is substantial in size, consisting of approximately $1.3 trillion in terms of cost of goods sold (COGS) as of 2019. Samsung, Huawei, and Apple are the leading OEMs, with multinational companies such as Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Lenovo / Motorola, and LG closely following. OEMs play an important part in deciding how, where, and when mobile devices are used in the app economy.
Before the app store was created, OEMs themselves had the liberty to choose the apps that the users could install and download. But now, another factor has come into picture - consumer preference. Consumers have different preferences while searching for apps and OEMs are adapting to this by distributing their technology straight into the hands of the user.
Although OEMs play an important part in determining the usage of mobile devices, it all depends on the availability of internet and connectivity. Mobile carriers know this truth well, and as a result, they are expanding their networks to new markets where a rise in smartphone usage has resulted in increased demand for better internet speed and mobile coverage.
5G to Open Further Opportunities
In the following years, 5G is perceived to be one of the biggest developments in mobile marketing. The new technology provides more space, supporting 4K video streaming and a high-defense augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experience. Also, latency in the network is projected to be decreased by 10 to under 10 miles.
What does that mean for brands? Well, a more powerful engine will have richer experiences. Today there are several 5G telephones on the market. Experts expect that by the end of this year we will have more in the industry. If (or when) the majority of the mobile users receive 5G, their brand service expectations will be modified. Thus, when building digital consumer journeys, the marketer needs to adjust the strategy for it.
This means that as 5G is embraced by most citizens, there will be some disturbance. Success is possible for those who early adopted it into their marketing strategy. And the ones who are lagging, though, will compete to upgrade their systems and processes for 5G entry.
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