How Has the Extensive Adoption of Smartphones Affected Digital Advertising?

There are very few innovations that truly transform how we live and work as a society. Refrigerator, the microchip, those tiny things on the end of shoelaces that make them not untangle. In all solemnity, it really isn’t that often that a consumer product comes along that essentially changes how society operates, nevertheless the smartphone truly has.

Take for instance how we use our smartphones. They’re much more than the age-old cellular phones. They’re on-demand key to our social media streams, our email, and more significantly, the entire Internet. This constant connectivity has altered how we interact, empowering distant friends and relatives to fundamentally participate in our daily lives. It’s impacted how we shop, with 55% of smartphone users signifying that they have utilized a smartphone to price compare when shopping. Moreover, more than a quarter of smartphone users use their phones to read online reviews that influence their ordering choices, and more than a third have scanned a QR code with their phone for info.

For the retail industry, this all adds up to a major marketing element. Smartphones are not just a onside street, after all. If customers can use them to access info, then businesses must use that similar technology to share info with those users. This is where Digital Advertising comes in.

Digital Advertising is a bit of a general term. Some people use it alternately with online advertising, nonetheless that’s not quite accurate. All online advertising is Digital Advertising however Digital Advertising takes place online. It’s a big industry. Mashable reports that, Global Digital Advertising spending broke $100 billion for the first time, according to eMarketer, which forecasts the business will grow another 15.1% this year. These numbers replicate advertising received on desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets, without text message ads (SMS, MMS, and P2P). Aprojected $31 billion of that was spent in the U.S. alone.

With so much smartphone use, the marketing and advertising industry cannot depend solely on Internet advertising for their digital messaging. Relatively, marketers must traverse the often-complex waters of direct marketing via smartphones. Consumers are steady to opt-out when brands over-message them with texts and other phone-based notifications such as push-data options. Yet customers opt-in to begin with because they do want to connect with their favorite brands. They want coupons, exceptional and exclusive offers, product notifications, and sale info. This means marketing must toe the line between supportive and intrusive, much as it does with social media.

The key here is for brands to offer a stream of useful info via social media and purposeful ads online while sending push notifications and text messages to cell phones on a planned basis as well as when those smartphones’ GPS capabilities facilitate location-based app push notifications. Those location-based services are among the most crucial elements of a Digital Advertising campaign using smartphones. When users can not only choose to “check in” via Facebook and Foursquare but essentially be made aware that they are within a specific range of a business’ location and offered an incentive to come in, they are far more likely to involve with the brand than if they simply see a banner ad while browsing online. Smartphones offer real-time marketing opportunities to users who truly want to associate with your brand.

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