Does mobile fit into your marketing mix?

Mobile devices have become a powerful way for marketers to leverage key customer geo-location data and gain deeper insights into consumer behaviour, according to experts from mobile ad platform, InMobi.

InMobi’s head of strategy for Australia and New Zealand, Brendan Watmore, said the mobile app ecosystem has impacted human behaviour in ways no marketer was ever able to predict.

“We’ve seen how much mobile has grown much more organically,” he said. “Today, something like 65 per cent of all browsing in Australia is done on a mobile device, but that represents only 14 per cent of the overall time spent on mobile. The rest of that time is in-app.”

Currently, InMobi offers in-app and mobile Web advertising, providing information from over 10 million mobile devices in Australia. The platform recently amplified its data capabilities with a strategic partnership with consumer insight sources, Experian.

InMobi collects a range of marketing-driven data points about customer behaviour, such as which devices customer use, which publishers they looked, their location and their telco provider. With Experian, it is now looking to combine that with consumer insights.

According to Watmore, one of the new and interesting set of data signals to consider from mobile is geo-location data, which is where the partnership with Experian comes into play. The partnership will enable this data to be matched with the consumer traits of specific households, providing new targeting and analytics capabilities for marketers.

“We think this is exciting for a lot of marketers,” he said. “It’s about looking at where someone is located, where they have been, and what we can infer about that behaviour in terms of their consumption or intention.”

By tracking which devices belong to specific consumer industry segments, InMobi can see where those devices travel and continue to track those mobile signals, Watmore continued.

“We see a lot of people using their devices for gaming when they’re killing time and are more open to be engaged with an ad or brand message,” he explained. “So if we can deliver the right message to the right audience in that moment, they’re more likely to get engaged with that message.”

The challenge for CMOs, according to InMobi’s principal research scientist, Ian Anderson, remains to incorporate new insights into consumer mobile behaviour with other behavioural patterns in a way that provides real, deeper insights they can act upon.

“Data and in particular, mobile data, is now and is going to be really influential in the decision-making processes of businesses moving forward,” he said. “You can’t lie to your phone - it knows where you’ve been. And even though we have huge volumes of data, we’ve found our mobile data sets are helping brands gain deeper insights.”

Read more: Forrester: Mobile marketing is lacking strategy and governance

Adopting mobile marketing for the masses

Experian A/NZ managing director, John Merakovsky, agreed, adding mobile is not just a platform for delivering marketing messages, it’s also a powerful vehicle for helping understand consumer behaviour.

“Experian has always been at the forefront of initiatives to improve consumer engagement, using technology and data to improve interactions between brands and people,” he added. “We immediately saw the potential with InMobi because the mobile space brings a wealth of new information that can help us develop even stronger profiles of customer prospects.”

Mobile devices enable marketers to collect anonymised real-time behavioural data, getting closer to understanding the buyer, added InMobi’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand, Jon White.

“Traditionally geo-demographic data was used to segment markets based on household characteristics,” he said. “The assumption was people of similar type behaved in similar ways. It gave marketers an idea of their addressable market, but it didn’t help you identify when those people were ready to buy. Now, marrying these two datasets together is very powerful indeed”.

Overseas, InMobi has already been worked in partnership with third-party data companies to leverage data capabilities and has provided a more holistic audience view for a few years now. But it has only rolled out the same capability in Australia for the last 12 weeks.

Experian will exclusively work with InMobi over the next two years. Customers of the InMobi platform can now access Experian’s household data sets, with a roadmap of products to be developed over the next few months.

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