2015 – The Rise of People-based Marketing & Thumb-Stopping Creative
Marketing is coming full circle. And that changes everything.
You obviously may have heard that before. So why is that now believable and what does that mean for you, particularly as it’s showtime for budgets and strategy? (Hint: what do your prospects and customers check more than 100 times a day and generally spend up to 25% of their available time on?)
Yes, we’re talking mobile device strategy. Smartphones, tablets and the like – all in a very big and major way. Nielsen notes that tablets are consumers’ “second screen,” with up to 40 percent of tablet owners watching TV or movies daily on their little screen.
These, by the way, represent a huge audience – an estimated 1.75 billion use smartphones worldwide. The mobile Web has overtaken PC use in more than 40 nations.
In the annual Bloomberg Businessweek “The Year Ahead 2015: A User’s Guide” annual, Carolyn Everson (Facebook vice president for global marketing solutions), sums it up: “The amount of time people are spending on their mobile device is going to allow marketers to be much more focused on reaching actual people instead of large swaths of audiences.”
Here’s a little background.
As everyone who’s cracked a book knows, marketing success traditionally – and formerly — relies on the capacity of mass-marketing to be segmented to specific target groups.
Then the Internet came along, and with it, a return to 19th century marketing. As the Second Industrial Revolution literally chugged along, so did the capacity for finished goods to be sold directly by clerks and stores. The 19th century clerk and/or sales pro was successful in conducting a person-to-person full tilt marketing campaign. The 19th century CRM was generally incredibly effective. The only difference was that the prospect database was housed in a human brain instead of a server.
The pre-Dot-com Internet opened the promise of a return to this person-to-person marketing capacity.
Now, fast-forward through a decade or so, and we’re at the beginning of the era of the all-powerful mobile device.
From a marketing perspective, with mobile devices consumers now have full control of who and what they talk to, allow in their heads, or what and where they buy goods and services.
Increasingly, a big chunk of the above takes place right on one’s smartphone or tablet.
What’s your Website look like on a smartphone? What’s your advertising look like?
Everson continues: “We have a saying that we use quite a lot with clients: ‘You need to think about thumb-stopping creative.’” (as supposed to old-style “eye-stopping creative”)
If someone if checking their smartphone or tablet, Everson points out that creative – powerful content and art – is the No. 1 attention-grabber, clutter-busting platform to get a message across. “[Creative is] arguably even more important in mobile, because of the intimacy in which people are experiencing it,” she continues.
Traditional brand-building and awareness generation through mass media isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. But if you want to reach real people in real time, mobile-focused people-based marketing with segmented “thumb-stopping” creative – just for mobile — should be in your company’s future.
By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal, The MEK Group
About Michael Snyder and The MEK Group – As the Indianapolis Star stated in2014 profile coverage, “Michael Snyder knows brands.” Snyder today is managing principal of The MEK Group, an award-winning marketing, branding and PR firm known for creating transformational high-impact outcomes. For more information, please visit www.themekgroup.com