When was the last time you checked your phone? When was the last time you looked at social media or an app on your phone? I’m guessing you answered with “a few minutes ago,” or maybe at most, an hour ago. If so — you’re not alone. Americans spend over 10 hours a day on screens and about five of those hours are spent on their smartphones. Is your brand where your consumers are looking?
Marketers are definitely taking note of the shift in consumer habits, which has resulted in mobile advertising spending increasing a whopping 40 percent for 2017 (it increased 38 percent from 2015 to 2016). Those dollars are being wisely invested — ecommerce is expected to make up 45 percent of online shopping by 2020, which justifies the shift in spending and labels it a requirement, not an extravagance.
But throwing money at mobile advertising isn’t enough. It’s important that, as a brand manager, you understand how mobile advertising works and what you can do to master it. Here are the main points you need to know to master mobile advertising in 2017:
Spray and pray is not acceptable
There’s something so much more personal about a smartphone than a personal computer. We keep our smartphones on us at all times. We go to sleep with them and we wake up with them in the morning. Because of this, we think of our smartphones as a sort of extension of ourselves, which makes untargeted, impersonal advertisements for products we aren’t interested in all the more repulsive.
The public has been desensitized to advertising on websites because of the disaster that was early-2000s online marketing. It’s critical that we as marketers work together to make sure that those mistakes aren’t repeated. Respect your audience’s’ time. Invest in making your…