Burger King gets points for leveraging SMS to raise awareness of new products with a wide audience, but the brand is missing a key opportunity to drive sales by not customizing messages to activate recipients.

Burger King continuously uses MMS to push out promotions to its SMS database that tie into bigger marketing campaigns but lack a call-to-action to actually get a consumer into a restaurant. Quick service restaurants have been particularly active in SMS over the years in pushing out aggressive, time-sensitive offers, but Burger King’s initiatives highlight the importance in getting mobile right at the local level.

“Franchised QSRs operate within a web of corporate regulations, local market needs and limited marketing budgets,” said Zach Zimmerman, marketing manager at HelloWorld, Pleasant Ridge, MI.

“This fragmentation can make it tricky to execute localized and targeted mobile marketing campaigns,” he said. “Burger King appears to be using MMS at the corporate level to advertise national promotions, raising brand awareness of existing offers rather than delivering localized or mobile-exclusive discounts and promotions.”

Mr. Zimmerman is not affiliated with Burger King. He spoke based on his expertise on the subject.

Burger King did not respond to press inquiries.

Missed opportunity
Burger King’s messages always include a picture of a product above a piece of copy that encourages consumers to try it out at a nearby location.

For example, a message sent last week from Burger King promoted a new offer for a $2.99 small hot coffee and muffin sandwich.

Underneath, copy read “Offer ends 2/28/14. Participating restaurants during breakfast hours. Restrictions apply.”

However, there is not any information on which stores the offer applies to or an incentive to encourage consumers to go into a store.

Burger King could have used a variety of different tactics to make the message more effective – including a video or a link to a store locator or coupon.

Additionally, the SMS messages could be segmented towards specific markets.

Alternatively, the images that are already included in messages could be turned into incentives to get consumers into stores. For example, a piece of copy could encourage consumers to show the picture to a store employee to receive a coupon or offer.

Other recent similar messages have included a Valentine’s Day promotion for a deal on sandwiches, $1 burgers and a holiday promotion for gift cards.

Stacking up to the competition
Compared to Burger King, competitors Jack in the Box, White Castle and Carl’s Jr. seem to be getting SMS and MMS right at the local level with campaigns that activate in-store traffic.

During the recent Super Bowl, Jack in the Box stirred up some hype leading up to its TV spot that debuted a new cheeseburger with an MMS blast. The message gave consumers a sneak peek at the upcoming ad and an image of the product that could be redeemed as a coupon in-store.

Additionally, 40 Carl’s Jr. locations in Texas and Oklahoma reported a 17 percent mobile coupon redemption rate as a result of sending out local offers. The coupons are redeemed by typing in a code at the point-of-sale.

White Castle also tapped mobile last year to set up customised location-based SMS alerts.

Focusing on local markets like these brands are doing can pay off for QSRs with coupon redemptions and in-store traffic, according to Jeff Hasen, Seattle-based chief marketing officer of Mobivity.

“We’ve seen terrific recent success with QSR clients driving people into the store during the Polar Vortex and for product introductions that actually yielded higher sales despite giveaways of product or reduction in price,” he said.

Additionally, both Carl’s Jr. and White Castle’s campaigns are part of more integrated campaigns that the chains are using to build up loyalty and drive repeat traffic.

“QSRs should use mobile as a part of their loyalty programs,” said Aaron Clark, vice president of mobile sales and operations at HelloWorld.

“Rewarding customers for repeat orders or visits ensures they will return and creates a rich engagement between consumer and brand,” he said. “For example, if you’re only a few points from getting a complimentary meal somewhere, you’re more likely to go there to eat and get those extra points over choosing a different restaurant.”

Losing relevance?
Although marketers do not appear to be slimming down their mobile messaging initiatives, consumers are increasingly becoming less responsive to messages that bombard their mobile devices.

Take Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of Whatsapp, for example.

With consumers using their mobile devices in new ways to connect with their friends and family members, there is a possibility that SMS-based campaigns could dwindle in relevance for marketers eyeing social media and other tactics to connect with consumers.

Therefore, it is critical that marketers do not invade consumers with un-relevant or too many messages.

“As marketers, we need to reach people where they are most, which is their mobile phones,” HelloWorld’s Mr. Clark said.

“If a customer is opting in to receive mobile messages from a brand, app, etc., it’s because they want to receive that information to their phones, so it’s imperative to make sure you’re leveraging that request for frequent engagement in an effective manner,” he said.

Source: Mobile Marketer

Facebook’s plan to acquire mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion has earned the ire of frustrated media, competitors and industry pundits, and the envy of those VC-backed, revenue-less digital wonders waiting in the wings to be swooped into Google’s or another Silicon Valley giant’s arms.

Before discussing what this means for marketing, here is what this acquisition may really be about: an effort to dazzle and arrest decline by an over-valued social media company that is recognizing how fleeting user loyalty and advertiser revenue can be. In other words, Facebook – with its 1.2 billion accounts – has tied India to become the world’s second-most populous entity after China, but quantity has not translated to sales – as many marketers eyeing the two Asian countries have discovered.

What’s up …
If media accounts are any indication, Facebook is shedding young consumers at an alarming rate, something that is not attractive to advertising agencies making media-buying decisions or advertisers paying the bills.

Another strike against Facebook is the lack of a sustainable revenue stream. Even as it boldly pivots to becoming a mobile company – and who has not heard that shout across rooftops – Facebook will soon discover that advertiser money flees with the audience, especially if impressions and click-throughs do not lead to brand lift or sales.

Now would be the time to trot out a big case study on how Facebook helped a brand achieve its goal with measurable results in terms of higher consumer engagement or more sales. Now would be the time to showcase how mobile buying on Facebook across mobile and online channels convinced advertisers that ad interruptions in a social context – or confusing readers to distinguish ads from user content – is the right environment to generate positive feelings for the advertised brands. Do not hold your breath, for it is not in the nature of the uncurated social media crowd to be judged by the same metrics that other media are.

What has happened is clear: Facebook is buying relevance, even if that lead will evaporate in a couple of years when a new application or service will supplant WhatsApp. Wall Street, in its usual blurred understanding of Silicon Valley’s shenanigans, will salute this deal through with a slap on the wrist of a few percentage points shaved off Facebook’s share price in the short term. And then it will be business as usual for the very investment bankers, banks and venture capitalists who shuffle the money chairs on the decks of yet another Titanic bubble about to burst in a year or two when the market will suddenly discover the iceberg in its path: social media revenue growth is not sustainable simply because audience interest in evolving platforms is not.

Any social content and communications model that requires the customer to do the heavy lifting on a consistent basis will not thrive – Facebook is not IKEA. The audience will tire and will move on to a new platform. It simply is the nature of the beast. At one point, it was Facebook that was the cat’s whiskers. Then it was Twitter. Then SnapChat, and now WhatsApp. Bet on something else in a year. In the meanwhile, 55 employees of WhatsApp, including the two founders, and partners at Sequoia Capital – which poured in $60 million to fund the messaging app and will receive a $3 billion payoff – will soon be shopping for a grander lifestyle.

… comes down
Funnily enough, if Facebook was really interested in controlling the messaging environment, it should have made a pitch for T-Mobile, the nation’s fourth-largest wireless carrier that is in play. Carriers are the new mobile gatekeepers. Or it should have bid for Time Warner Cable, one of the top five cable companies that controls Internet, wireless and television access to tens of millions of U.S. households.

Mobile advertising on Facebook is growing quickly

So will this deal have any trickle-down effect to brands and retailers? Highly doubtful. WhatsApp built its credibility by eschewing ads. It charges only 99 cents a year after the initial year of free usage by a subscriber. So the grand total of revenue from that stream is $450 million, if all 450 million users continue to use the service year after year, even factoring in churn. Facebook has not announced its intentions on integrating ads into the service, so brands cannot be part of the fleeting WhatsApp message exchanges. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on record Feb. 19 to say that ads are not the right way to monetize messaging systems – and he is right on that count.

Which means that the ad agencies are left high and dry and without the ability to play middleman in the creative and media planning and buying processes of the world’s largest mobile acquisition so far.

And publishers? They are keeping fingers crossed that overwhelmed advertisers really do not squander their budgets on the latest shiny object from that new weaver of American dreams: Silicon Valley, or Sollywood.

Read the entire article

Author: Mickey Alam Khan (Editor MMD)

As consumers spend more time within mobile applications, marketers are beginning to understand the opportunity of in-app advertising and throwing more money behind the channel, but experts believe marketers are still behind in the game.

According to a report from Maz, consumers spend 40 percent more time reading content in apps than on Web sites, but marketers are still hesitant to ramp up in-app ad spend. At the same time, Juniper Research just put out a report that predicts that in-app advertising spend will grow to almost $17 billion by 2018, so that reality may be changing in the near future.

“The mobile app market is a huge, fast-growing market with over 1 million apps, $26 billion in revenue and 102 billion downloads in an industry that didn’t even exist five years ago,” said Marc Parrish, an advisor at Appboy, New York. “Any marketer who is not looking to increase spend in reaching this channel has his head in the sand.

“Most marketers don’t even know that in-app ads exist as a format,” he said. “Facebook is the forcing function, educating the marketing that there is money to be made in mobile ads.

“Facebook’s mobile monthly average users increased 45 percent in just a year, from 604 million monthly average users in the second quarter of 2012 to 874 million monthly average users in the third quarter of 2013. That’s serious growth.”

Consumer behavior
When it comes to advertising, marketers should always respond to consumer behavior in order to reach consumers where they are.

In this case, consumers are clearly spending more time within apps.

According to Maz, a company that powers more than 600 apps in Apple’s App Store, Google Play and Amazon Appstore, consumers spend 40 percent more time reading content in apps than on Web sites. Consumers spend the most time with entertainment publications, at an average of 38 minutes per issue, with sports coming in next at 23 minutes per issue.

Apps such as American Media-owned Star Magazine, Country Weekly and Soap Opera Digest are seeing consumers return to an app for up to 12 sessions per weekly issue. The entertainment app average is seven sessions per issue.

“In general I think people are spending more time on mobile devices, and most of the time is spent within apps,” said Shouvik Paul, vice president of business development at Maz, New York. “It’s not very often that you open up your browser on your phone and type in facebook.com, you just go to the Facebook app or Twitter app.

“Another big feature of apps in general are push notifications, specifically on a lot of the Apple devices,” he said. “If I have the app, it notifies me when there’s breaking news, so I don’t have to remember to go to it.”

An infographic from MAZ

Ad spend
If consumers are spending more time reading in apps than Web sites, it makes more sense for brands to be investing on a higher level on apps to get in front of those consumers.

According to Juniper, marketers will begin to understand this opportunity in the next few years.

A new report from the research firm predicts that in-app mobile ad spend will reach $16.9 billion by 2018, up from $3.5 billion last year. The report expects that in-app ad spend will grow at a higher rate than mobile Internet, messaging and ringback tone ad spend.

Mobile ad spend in 2018

A number of brands have already begun tapping into this opportunity. For instance, Starbucks recently launched a new campaign that mixes sponsored content and full-page ads into the Flipboard mobile application.

Dating site AYI has also seen success with in-app ads. The company saw more than a 200 percent increase in application downloads since leveraging mobile app install ads on Facebook.

However, Mr. Paul thinks that marketers are not yet doing enough when it comes to in-app advertising.

“There’s huge room for improvement in apps,” Mr. Paul said. “The app world in general is still in its infancy. If you think about the early days of the Web, advertising then was pretty terrible. Nobody really knew what they were doing. And that’s what we’re seeing now in the app world.

“We work with a lot of magazines like Forbes or Us Weekly, all these magazines have a lot of ads,” he said. “They expect users to see that Gucci ad in a magazine and tap on it. If you tap on it, it can play a video or open the advertiser’s Web site in the app. The problem is there’s no real call-to-action.

“The technology exists where you can have someone transact right within the app, yet marketers are using it much like they do with standard print magazines where it’s just about the branding. There’s a lot more they can do in terms of tap here to go purchase this pair of boots you’re seeing on this model.”

Source: Mobile Marketer Daily

Author: Rebecca Borison

IBM, known for its pioneering research in almost all things technical, has predicted that eCommerce may well lose out to physical retail in the next five years.

In a recent series of predictions from IBM, known as the ’5 in 5′ – which takes an educated guess at the innovations that’ll change our lives in the next five years – IBM has cast it’s eye over to the retail sector. It hasn’t taken a conservative approach to the future either, making a prediction that would surprise many involved in the industry: online will eventually lose out to brick-and-mortar retail.

Obviously this isn’t what many would expect, after all, online stores have enjoyed success for a while now, and behemoths like Amazon dominate the space without the need for any physical stores. There are other companies, such as WalMart, BestBuy and Tesco who have a rather healthy grasp on both the online and offline world of retail. But for the most part, if you’re not doing well in the online relm, you’re probably beginning to flounder on the high-street too.

So, what’s led IBM to think that things will change so drastically in the next five years? Well, thanks to research its doing with various retailers around the use of ‘cognitive computing’, it believes that customers can finally have the immediacy of physical shopping, with the “intelligence” of online.

This means that your customers will be able to walk into your stores and instantly be recognisable to staff. These staff members will know past shopping habits and anything a customer could well be interested in buying, meaning that when they decide to look for some help, they’ll instantly be given the help they want most. Of course, customers don’t have to go looking for help as mobile apps and augmented reality apps will help make their browsing experience in your stores far more seamless.

It’s a little sketchy on how it plans to deal with fulfilling customer’s desires to take an item home that day, after all a local store may not have that item in stock – or may not stock it – meaning that online could well win out in the delivery stage of purchases.

Speaking to Venture Beat, Vice President of Innovation at IBM, Bernie Meyerson, elaborated on why IBM believes the future of retail is in physical stores.

It’s not just about customer fulfilment, it’s also about creating an infrastructure that allows customers to gain insight and experience products hands-on. It also helps reduce the issues that surround online delivery, such as the vast amount of transport needed to shift items across the country. He believes it’s a way to help reduce pollution.

Meyerson also believes that this future of retail would be far more secure and private than shopping online where data is stored for humans to look at alongside your personal information. Here, in IBM’s stores of the future, you could come in, be offered the right products for you by a computer, and leave with nobody the wiser as to what you’ve bought.

The most interesting thing of all is that this vision of the future isn’t the ‘Us Vs. Them’ of physical against online, both competing for sales. Instead, this is a totally omnichannel approach, one that combines it all into one experience in a store. As Meyerson says “you’re combining the best of both worlds.

“On one hand you have a very personal relationship, which some people do prefer. At the same time, the technology they have available to serve you is as good as anything that’s been available in online shops. It’s an interesting evolution, and it is coming.”

Meyerson concluded by saying, “As you probably may have heard, there are a number of online shops that have talked about setting up brick-and-mortar showrooms, for this precise reason.”

Author: Vaughn Highfield

Source: Total Customer