The significant rise in global smartphone usage in recent years has led to a type of oversaturation in regards to mobile marketing. There are simply more and more marketing options and opportunities for engaging with the customer base and converting new clients. With the emergence of even more international markets developing every day, some countries in Latin American, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asian Pacific are witnessing rapid and substantial growth in upwards of 60% per year from revenues generated through mobile advertising strategies.
Current estimates predict that the majority of all internet connections will eventually be derived from mobile devices by as early as 2017, leading many to grow increasingly concerned with the need to utilize these types of marketing campaigns most effectively. As more and more countries around the world are seeing a significant increase in the numbers of middle class citizens, this extra disposable income is become very attractive for all types of business and industry as a means of boosting their related revenue streams. Smartphones web searches are quickly becoming more common worldwide than those from laptops and desktop PC’s or even digital tablets. As a result, the need to utilize mobile marketing to its maximum potential is becoming more critical.
However, keeping this in mind, making the assumption that the same mobile strategies being utilized in Western markets should be exactly duplicated in the nearly emerging countries might prove to be a critical mistake. While it is often common practice to take the currently working marketing model, duplicated, and expanded even further, the contributing individual factors of these campaigns can vary greatly from region to region. Factors such as methods of engaging the customer, words usage and timing can be vastly different and unpredictable from one country to the next. Recent studies of billions of individual consumer marketing interactions across 40 different countries have proven that the “one size fits all “strategy for online marketing simply does not apply, especially in regards to mobile advertising.
In order for any marketing strategy to be ultimately successful, whether the campaign is of a mobile methodology or not, the basic understanding of the local culture and marketing trends is critical. Additional considerations might also include the specific time of day that is most effective in reaching the targeted consumer, individual nuances and preferences of the marketing campaign itself as it relates to local customs and culture, and even individual marketing trends witnessed in each related country. While the basic rules of marketing can to be somewhat standardized from market to market, many of these new emerging communities may require for these rules to be either bent, broken, or slightly modified in order to achieve maximum results.
An example of some of the slight differences might be in the introductory citations that are used in the mobile marketing messages. For example, in the West, it might be perfectly acceptable to use the greeting “Dear Valued Customer”, but in other markets such as Nigeria, terms such as “select” or “lucky” have proved to result in higher levels of customer engagement and interaction.
What we must really keep in mind when creating new mobile marketing strategies for these emerging markets around the globe, there is no one perfect style or approach that will always work. While many marketing campaigns may be very similar in content and style, it often requires a great deal of time, effort, and analysis in order to craft a winning marketing strategy that will actively engage the intended customer base within this new market. Even though there may be very slight or subtle differences in the wording of the marketing campaigns, the differences in results, or lack thereof, can often be enormous.
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