Marketers have been getting excited about the possibilities of mobile for almost a decade now but it still feels like that there is a big elephant in the room and that elephant is direct response.
There are some notable exceptions, of course. The app install and app advertising world has come from nowhere to become a lucrative billion dollar industry and if you have a cute gimmicky game to promote you probably think I’m talking rubbish.
But what if you are a regular advertiser looking for gold old fashioned enquiries for your product or service? I bet that many of you reading this article have spent a good deal of time and money on mobile advertising with very little real return to show for it.
Part of the problem is that sometimes marketers – and I include myself in this – get too obsessed with the next shiny thing that comes along. And, as an industry that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of technology and innovation, we are often afraid to call bullshit on the next supposedly big thing.
Many elements of mobile can definitely fall into this bracket if you are marketer looking to generate leads and sales. However, part of the problem is that when it comes to mobile we have focused all of our attention on apps, social media, mobile video and a few other very narrow areas.
Well, do you want to know a secret? You can make calls from a smartphone. And it may seem old fashioned and there might be other more exciting ways to communicate (especially if you are a millennial) but the undeniable truth is that every day millions of people around the world still make calls from their mobile phone. And many of these calls are to businesses.
Yes, you heard that right, people are making calls and buying stuff from the businesses they call. Some recent research has shown that over 50% of people that connect with a business after a mobile search do so over the phone and 33% of smartphone owners reported using their devices to make calls more than five times per day.
And for all you data junkies out there, you can get just as much data on calling activity as you can with data leads. Companies like Iovox in the UK and Invoca in the US allow you to track every imaginable variable around a call. If you run paid-search campaigns you can even drill down to which keyword generated a call.
There are a lot of snake oil salesman when it comes to mobile but the opportunity of allowing users to connect directly with your business at the touch of a button is pretty powerful.
As long as you can measure what you are spending and the return you are getting, it’s worth cutting through the noise to find the parts of mobile marketing that could benefit your business.
Justin Rees is founder of Talking Customers
