Proof From Big Brands That Mobile Marketing Tactics Work

In recent years, mobile marketing has grown in its influence upon corporate marketing spend. It is currently only about 1% of the total amount spent on advertising, but times are changing. Studies performed by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have predicted that mobile advertising spend in the United States will increase from $3.6 billion in 2011 to $18.3 billion in 2015. The reason: several Big Brands have jumped into the mobile marketing game, and these businesses are seeing some terrific ROI.

• BMW. In early 2014, BMW began an MMS campaign to send pictures and video, as well as text messages to their customers, inviting them to purchase customized snow tires. Their conversion rate increased over 30%.

• American Express. AMEX developed an interactive user experience for customers using smartphones. American Express members can create a customized “panorama,” relating their lifestyle interests from dining and travel to shopping and sports. The company then utilized the data they gathered not only find special offers for their customers, but they deepened their relationship with customers in the process.

• Dunkin Donuts. This well-known pastry provider started to use SMS texts to drive sales, offering coupons to the customers through their mobile phones. Store traffic increased 20%.

• Harley Davidson. Late last year, Harley Davidson used a mobile marketing campaign to promote their version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” through Route 66’s mobile club and a mobile social media campaign. Holiday dealer traffic swelled, and sale of helmets increased two and a half times.

• Nissan. With the mobile ads they created for their Nissan Leaf model, Nissan showed customers “how far you can drive on a dollar.” This effective strategy caused mobile users to share the mobile ads, and drove up customer awareness about their products.

• McDonald’s. Invented the “Restaurant Finder” app to help their customers find late-night locations. Mobile users responded by downloading the app more than 1.3 million times, with an estimated ROI of two to one.

• Samsung. By sending targeted messages to people who have purchased the latest iPhone, Samsung Mobile has found an excellent way to reach savvy mobile users. They offered these individuals $300 to trade in their iPhone for a new Samsung device.

• Verizon. Using QR codes and Facebook, Verizon enacted a competition to win a smartphone. If the customer who shared the Facebook post had a friend who bought their own Verizon phone, the original customer would get a free phone. The promotion generated $35,000 in sales for an ad campaign that only cost about a thousand dollars.

With a well-planned, well-timed strategy, any business can improve their bottom line with a good mobile marketing campaign. And while mobile marketing has a great deal of room to grow, this will not always be the case. The time is now to get a foothold in the mobile advertising market: take a page from the playbook of these Big Brands. Develop a simple mobile marketing campaign and track how effective the ROI in this realm can be.