Targeted creativity: the era of you

Today consumers have richer and more amazing content choices than ever before. Think Spotify for music, Instagram for pictures, YouTube for videos, Amazon for books, Netflix for TV and apps for games. Combined with mobile, all of this content is available at the tip of your fingers any time, anywhere on screens that give you gorgeous sight, sound and motion.

With so many options and such powerful personal and social devices, we are truly at the start of ‘the era of you’, with content being 100 per cent self-driven. The new consumer is an individual but with a powerful social voice, as illustrated by the fact that even within our private lives we are always connected, allowing us to go social with our opinions in the click of a button.

In this complicated zone where private, public and shared coincide, advertising will need to meet these complex expectations and deliver personally relevant brand experiences in order to succeed.

Consumers expect more: more fun, more entertainment, more access, more information and more value. As a result, creative matters more than ever before and a ‘mobile first’ mentality will be essential for brands to reach, engage and keep consumers active.

Don’t try to put a square peg in a round hole – advertisers should approach mobile creative with a fresh mindset to enjoy the impressive engagement rates it can yield.

The combination of clever design, intuitive engagement and a distinct call to action are leading to 250 per cent higher engagement results than industry standards. Mobile is the most direct, intimate link with a consumer that a brand can have and marketers need to know how to use it.

There is a specific recipe to get this relationship right and help brands leverage mobile to engage consumers: a mobile-first technology platform comprised of award-winning creative, quality user data and precise analytics that enables marketers to increase brand engagement through successful mobile advertising.

Brands wanting to engage busy, overwhelmed consumers in a fast-paced world must utilise context-specific, personalised creative campaigns – where the true power of the creative is seen by the right audience at the right time.

When executed correctly, rates of engagement are very high in these targeted, personalised campaigns. However, creatives should ensure they don’t overwhelm consumers by attempting to deliver too much in one experience, a tactic that can often alienate.

Less is definitely more in the case of mobile – a simple campaign is more effective for engaging consumers with a brand. Campaigns that deliver too much, too fast and in too personalised a way can have an adverse effect and can unsettle a user, alienating them from any brand perceived as too intrusive.

Ads should be clever, drawing in the user visually with appealing, eye-catching design. They must be seductive, compelling the user to interact with the ad, and the call to action should be intuitive. A simple but innovative, well-designed ad will connect the dots between mobile ad creatives
and consumers.

Apps can also play an important role in building brands, with global downloads set to grow to 160 billion on consumer handsets and tablets in 2017. With smartphone users spending more time on apps than internet browsing, they mustn’t go unnoticed in the marketing campaign mix. But for an app to be successful, it must deliver engaging content, otherwise it could do more harm than good for a brand.

Mobile advertisers must look to deliver engaging, targeted, context-specific content that is also accessible in a format that continues to align itself and support campaigns delivered through other media. By focusing on key metrics such as lifetime value (LTV) and average revenue per user (ARPU), mobile app analytics tools have enabled developers to understand who their best users are.

InMobi Analytics provides key metrics, but equally importantly, it is also able to attribute these metrics back to acquisition sources such as advertising networks and campaigns.

This gives advertisers the ability to understand where their most valuable users come from, which allows them to make better use of their mobile advertising budgets.

Mobile technology has led to a new opportunity for advertisers and brands to reach consumers, and the most successful campaigns are proving to be those that leverage the foundations of a mobile lifestyle, instead of simply translating a traditional marketing approach to suit a mobile audience.

Be bold. Yielding the best results comes down to the ability to offer ‘utility’ to customers, through optimisation of rich media. Advertisers need to combine rich media with performance ads – then add context, relevance and targeting to build a recipe for success.

Among the many benefits that mobile marketing can deliver, the existence of big data stands at the forefront. This data, collected from millions of global users, can enable appropriate targeting to ensure that the right consumer receives the right message at the right time, producing a more relevant (or timely?) experience than any other means of advertising.

Mobile app analytics are just some of the tools that offer reporting on user behaviour to provide brands with key insights, including how much
time is spent in the app and in-app purchases. But these tools also need to make brands capable of acting on these key insights: an area where InMobi Analytics specialises.

InMobi Analytics delves deeply into the realms of in-app reporting and campaign attribution to actually provide an engine with which brands can engage with their users.

It is all about optimisation – delivering an advertising campaign directed at acquiring valuable users.

In this way, InMobi Analytics is more than just an app analytics tool. It is an early-stage mobile CRM system, and is vastly more effective than traditional approaches.

For example, InMobi achieves more than 100 billion monthly ad impressions from at least 690 million customers in more than 165 countries, therefore enabling the company to analyse big data continuously and to improve both brand and agency strategies.

There is much to learn with so much data on hand, but one thing we already know. Mobile is the future and the future is mobile.