What is the impact in digital marketing of the proliferation of different Operating Systems for Mobile?

Digital marketing uses all digital media, including adoption mobile devices, to develop communication and exchanges with consumers. The proliferation of digital marketing has created a new challenges for marketers today and also created opportunities for highly interactive, rich communications between consumers and brands.

There are many different mobile devices operating systems currently being used. Some of the most well-known include IOS, Windows Mobile, and Android. Most of them are associated with specific brands of phone made by specific companies while others are open-source and are available on a variety of platforms. All of these have their own unique features as well as areas where consumers demand.

The impact in digital marketing of the rapidly growth OS on the mobile devices, it is the key factor that focusing on which operating system that driving to move the digital information to your consumers will fit your target market  and then building mobile applications that not only add value to your consumers, but increase the awareness of your brand or products 

Companies have more channel to let consumers to access their information by using different OS in their mobiles device. Indeed, the OS on the mobiles devices is giving rise to a new multi- platform to all companies for their consumers, people who accesses the information through a combination of different OS in the mobiles devices, enabling them easy to get information's whenever they want and wherever they might be. Today, the mobiles device are more affordable for the connectivity, inexpensive devices that make mobile devices cheaper, the OS are easy to use, and all apps using on mobile devices that provide both better communication for consumers to consumers where they are.

  

What is the impact in digital marketing of the proliferation of different Operating Systems for Mobile?

The impact will be the cost of designing different campaign that needs to works well with different platforms. The monetary cost, efforts and time need to be invest to ensure the different campaign works well as well as maintaining it.

As a digital marketer, we may need to do extensive research to find out the profile of the users that used the different platforms so that we are aware of the audience we are targeting. People will behave differently in different platforms at different times.

To overcome the above, we need to put in metrics to figure out the audience’s behaviour, analyse the metrics and adjust or drop the campaigns accordingly.

However, I believe in the long run, there could be a standard for all the platforms to make life easier for everyone.

What is the impact in digital marketing of the proliferation of different Operating Systems for Mobile, i.e. Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Ubuntu, etc

In my personal view, the biggest impact on digital marketing of the proliferation of OS for Mobile would be the need for speed to catch up with synchronizing the compatibility and optimization for the different mobile platforms.

In today’s market, most companies are still resistant or slow in optimization for the different OS platforms for customers who are using different mobile devices. Hence, when more and more different type of OS starts to surface in the market through the different mobile devices, and at high speed rate, consumers may not be able to enjoy full optimization on their mobile devices when their OS is the newest in the market. This is especially so with the latest trend in “multi-screen” users in every household, where consumers uses multiple mobile devices at the same time at home or at work and the different mobile devices are of different OS.

However, it is also due to the above trending of fast growing mobile devices with latest OS that will greatly contribute to the higher demand in digital marketing. This is especially so for news and publications sector, where the demand for creation and maintenance of news for consumption on more mobile platforms are exceptionally high, which in a way generates demand for digital ads placement as well.

According to many different reports, mobile ads grew 80% in 2012. At $2.6 billion, mobile now accounts for more than 7% of total digital ad spending. eMarketer projects it will hit 21% by 2016.35. At the end of the day, although conversion rates vary by mobile operating system, it is still important for digital marketers due to continued rapid growth in mobile search traffic. Therefore, rapid optimization for mobile platforms across different OS will definitely lead to greater ROI for digital marketers.

Potential of the “Smart” Watch

Nowadays with the upcoming portable wearable devices such as the google glass, and wearable gadgets such as fitbits (fitness bands) which offers the user with biometric data such as distance travelled, sleeping patterns and etc. 

Smartwatches offers the convenience of answering phone calls, taking photos and messaging, together with 4G internet access as well as GPS. It just opens up more avenues for digital marketers to access data about the user using the watch or to promote their products through this platform. 

Like mobiles, smartwatches will travel with their users thus this makes it a great device for location-based marketing.  With all the data accumulated from the biometrics or the location tracking functionality, the data can be catered and analyzed on what the user’s habits are and perhaps the digital marketers can make use of the data from that to send messages to their phones or the smart phone as a reminder when they are near a certain location and consumers could check into a location using their smartwatches, and have mobile-marketing messages, coupons and offers delivered to them that will be only made available for the person using the smart watch for example. 

That perhaps is a opportunity on how the data obtained can allow the marketers to understand how to increase the user wants to buy the product or use the product in the first place.

To spread relevant messages across more effectively, marketers have to think how they can make use of the space constraint on the smart watch to their advantage is one of the factors to think about. Whether the use of QR codes or NFC function can in turn compensate the lack of space and how the message can be transferred to another mobile platform or desktop through the watch is something to be considered. 

Functions like the fingerprint scanning from iPhone 5, could also be used on the smartwatch if purchasing of single item or payment is needed. By including NFC capabilities, the smartwatch could then be used by consumers to redeem coupons or loyalty points at an NFC terminal in any brick-and-mortar store.

Its not surprising that there will be more and more apps pertaining to the use on smartwatches or functions that would be further explored like motion / gesture control and others, like games for example.  Imagine playing candy crush on your watch. The potential of introducing adverts through the games for example?

playing candy crush on your watch? 

With the emergence of smartwatches from Samsung, Sony, Pebble from kickstarter, big giants like HTC and Apple are all coming up with smartwatches of their own. Nissan is also coming out with smartwatches for car drivers with biometric tracking and accessibility to the internet to name a few. Smartwatches are getting more and more vesatile as technology improves by leaps and bounds. Seeing the trend that it is going, I’m sure there will be more exciting features  coming out very soon and great opportunities for digital marketing so as to speak.

Marketing in the New Social Media

The growing popularity of new apps such as SNAPCHAT, and a few other emerging players such as FRANKLY, WICKR and BLINK – reflect emerging trends in the social media landscape.

Firstly, we are seeing a stratification of social media users group. With the advent of private messaging groups and erasable messaging features, teenagers are forming a distinctive group of social media users via various ‘teenage-friendly’ messaging apps. These groups are distinctly different from other groups of users such as the Gen-X and Babyboomers groups due to the content they share and the way they communicate.  

Secondly, a new sub-culture is emerging; one that exists mainly in the mobile realm, thrives on personal connections, offers interesting visual content, and offers impermanent records.

Last but not least, social media is gravitating towards messaging apps that can be used to share all kinds of information, including the use of in-app purchases. In a way, many of these messaging apps , such as KakaoTalk (South Korea), WeChat (China) and LINE (Japan) etc. have developed their winning business models that are driven largely by large pool of local adopters.  As such, there may not be one universal social media messaging model that can work across different cultures but the winning model should be sufficiently flexible to suit what works in the local culture.

As such, for digital marketers, it may be useful to take note of the following trends:

• Personal connection. Young people are showing us that they are more interested in connecting online with people they already know. Marketers should find ways to make their messaging more personable and unique to such private groups.

• Mobile enabled. Marketers need to ensure that their communication strategy incorporates mobile platforms, whether by means of apps or by making web portals e-mobile friendly.

• Visual Imaging. Messaging via interesting and captivating visual imagery is a given in the new social media.

Can Snapchat as marketing tool?

What is Snapchat? It is a mobile app that allows users to take photos, record video, add text and drawings, and send them to their list of friends. Users can also set a time limit up of up to 10 seconds for how long they want their friends to be able to see their content before it completely disappears. Who is sharing these photos?  The majority are young group of people between the ages of 13 and 25 but there is a growing audience of people over the age of 40.

Snapchat has 5 million active users and the reports have shown that over 200 million photos are shared each day. This is up from 150 million just two months ago. To put this into prospective for you, Snapchat has surpassed the amount of photos shared on Instagram and they continue to close the gap on photos posted on Facebook, so that can Snapchat be turned into a marketing tool to promote your brands. Any companies like to use on the most recent social media. There definitely are situations in which some social media platforms may not be right for your company. When you considering Snapchat as a marketing tool, you may want to ask a question, will it fits your target demographic. Is your company targeting mainly young group?  Than Snapchat might be another marketing tool to implement for your brand.

When the company marketing on Snapchat, it is important to remember that whatever you share is going to available for a very little amount of time. You only have a maximum of 10 seconds to build excitement so you want to be sure that you are creating content at the right place and right time to your audience. SnapChat provides users with the ability to form a personal connection with their recipient. Unlike other social media, Facebook or Twitter where the majority of posts and messages are public, and belong to the social network once they have been published. It is where you can count your followers or retweets, SnapChat does not allow you to keep a record. As a marketers, you need to keep track of the activity through other social sites. This means you need to have a good hold on all things social, and must be prepared to react quickly.

However, doubts can the tool will become widely adopted by marketers and unlike of Twitter and Facebook in the long term. Marketers have so much choice in social networks at the moment, and so there really needs to be a huge benefit to creating and establishing a new one. For those marketers keen to experiment with the app, I think it is before you jump in and use Snapchat, you have to choose which social platform and tool is the most appropriate for your brand and audience. Your audience may not be ready to jump onto the new tools so think about what you want from the tool and can it deliver it for you.

Snapchat As A Marketing Tool?





Now you see it, Now you don't!

How Snapchat had evolved into a phenomenon digital marketing tool since it was first created in 2011 was so fast, that it almost replicates the speed of how the photos remains seen via the app itself.

There were a few campaigns which used Snapchat successfully:

The first UK retailer - The Co-operative Travel, had used Snapchat to target students through a brand awareness campaign by sending a discount code via Snapchat and getting them to friend the page in Facebook after the image disappears.

Another successful campaign was to promote a new film for Swarovski Entertaiment where it had posted images and videos on Snapchat and encourge the users to try and capture a screenshot of the posts using a hashtag, where selected fans were then rewarded with a swarovski pendant.

There had been many debates over how such short images/videos could work out as successful marketing campaigns, but from another prespective, many customers had made hasty decisions in a rush to not lose out to time, hence, creating impulse purchases. Example of how a store could promote discounts of their store items, by getting customers to pose with the items, showing their brand and then posting in on Snapchat and sharing it with friends, to be rewarded with a discount of purchase of the item.

With over 100 million users and 350 million snaps being exchanged on a daily basis, Snapchat is a force to be reckoned with for digital marketers and especially when the brand is targeting the youth audience.