Advertisers are looking more and more toward mobile marketing as marketers look to develop a multi-channel strategy combining online and offline activities, according to a survey from Econsultancy and Speed-Trap.
The survey found that almost two-thirds of marketers wanted to link internet and hard copy data to optimise the user experience.
Paul Berney, managing director for Europe at the Mobile Marketing Association, said that there is a growing expectation among consumers that they will be able to instantly interact with brands and organisations.
He suggests that leveraging mobile CRM technology could help to increase communication between marketers and their clients as phones are the “ultimate on-demand device”.
The advantage for businesses using this type of software is that it allows them to specifically target their campaigns.
A recent report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), found that expenditure on mobile advertising in the UK exceeded expectations last year, totalling £28.6 million.
Meanwhile, a faltering economy isn’t dampening marketing spending plans for the rest of the year for a majority of nearly 1,000 companies surveyed by e-mail services vendor StrongMail Systems, 85 per cent say they’ll increase or maintain marketing budgets in the second half of 2009, with e-mail one of the top areas slated for increased spending.
The poll suggests companies may be spending more on marketing because they think consumers will be upping their spending too. Of the 979 executives polled across a range of industries, 34 per cent predict customers will spend more in the second half of the year than they did in the first.
Thirty-one per cent of executives polled said they think shoppers will spend the same in the second half of 2009 as in the first.
Of the 42 per cent of executives surveyed who plan to increase their marketing spend in the second half of the year, 81 per cent say they’ll spend more on e-mail, while 58 per cent plan to spend more on social media initiatives.