Kahuna has just released its second industry mobile marketing benchmark report, revealing key insights to help brands engage customers with strategic, personalized messaging automation.

The 70 percent figure is telling.

“The finding underscores the importance of omnichannel integration in the age of mobile, when customers increasingly are relying on mobile devices in a wide range of communication modalities — push notifications, in-app messaging, email, and others,” a report summary shared with MMW reads.

“While other benchmarks are finding that roughly half of all consumers are already opening their email first on mobile devices, the numbers become even more dramatic for customers of mobile-focused brands,” said Adam Marchick, CEO and co-founder of Kahuna. “Because mobile-first is quickly becoming a trend for marketers, it behooves them to watch these and other usage patterns.”

In other findings, push notification opt-in rates remained steady. The opt-in rate across iOS and Android increased slightly from 62 percent to 64 percent since the last Kahuna Index report.

While Android continues to have a much higher opt in rate, permission changes related to Android Marshmallow could disrupt that pattern.

Last, but not least: ad blocking will likely raise acquisition costs.

“Recent consumer adoption of ad-blocking tools are encouraging more brands to look closely at their owned communication channels,” said Douglas Roberge, strategic services consultant at Kahuna, and author of the report. “While it is doubtful that there will be an adpocalypse — the radical deconstruction of the advertising industry — a long-term trend that brands can bet on is expansion of owned communications. With our quarterly benchmark, we hope to track that development in detail as it happens.”

The post Report: Mobile Rapidly Surpassing PCs for Email Engagement appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The new offering is said to enhance the ability of advertisers to deliver precise multi-screen and multi-channel advertising.

That means that now, for the first time, brands can serve ads on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at the same time their ads, or competitors’ ads, are running on television.

And that — in a word — could be huge.

“4C’s TV Synced Ads powered by Teletrax identifies TV programs and commercials within seconds of broadcast and triggers digital campaigns for synchronization and/or competitive response,” according to a statement provided to MMW. “These ads can be delivered through social, video, display, and search channels across phone, desktop, and tablet devices for truly integrated marketing. This enables advertisers to reach the right people, with the right content, at the right place and time.”

Other advantages are that marketers can leverage targeting based on predictive data science, capitalize on pre-optimized, custom audience segments, and manage complex campaigns with simplicity through bulk editing, smart groups, and auto-optimization tools.

“The 4C and Teletrax product integration provides a solution for marketers to reach today’s consumers given their multi-tasking and multi-screening behavior,” explains the company. “Sixty one percent of U.S. TV viewers simultaneously use phones, laptops, or tablets while watching TV (TiVo, 2014). While watching primetime TV and commercials, 71 percent visit a social media platform during the commercial and 64 percent visit a social media platform during the TV show.”

“To keep pace with changing consumer interests on multiple devices, advertisers must be nimble and more thoughtful when developing strategies to reach relevant audiences,” said Dr. Alok Choudhary, 4C Founder and Chief Scientist. “This powerful offering, which is based on proven data science, provides advertisers with many layers of multi-screen targeting and yields more precise engagement and ultimately a better brand experience and outcome.”

The post 4C Connects TV with Social Media for Double Whammy of Multi-Screen Brand Outreach appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“Pinterest quickly attracted a substantial audience of committed users, and marketers are more interested in it than ever with the promise of social commerce on the horizon,” reports eMarketer. “But women are still the site’s main audience, with male internet users in the US avoiding the network en masse.”

The hoary details? Spring polling from the Pew Research Center revealed that 44 percent of female internet users in the U.S. are also users of Pinterest. Among male internet users? Make that share a measly 16 percent.

It should come as no surprise. While national stats show men are spending more time in the kitchen these days, Pinterest is still a place where more women congregate to talk cooking, crafts, and kid stuff.

“No other demographic characteristic had such a major effect on Pinterest usage,” adds eMarketer. “Though older adults were less likely than their millennial and Gen X counterparts to spend time on the image-oriented site, the differential was closer to a factor of two than to a factor of three. And usage rates were comparatively even depending on income or ethnicity/race.”

Pinterest probably shouldn’t mind. Women are big internet buyers, and the site’s recent addition of “Buyable Pins” could strike a chord with its largely female audience.

According to eMarketer, 47.1 million US internet users will use Pinterest monthly this year.

The post Social Media Marketers Take Note: Women Way More Likely to Use Pinterest appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is guest contributed post by Deidre Bakker-Riches, owner of a boutique marketing firm and consultancy, Twlv31 Marketing, and the Head of Communications for Las Vegas advertising agency, Up All Day Creative Solutions (originally published by Mobile Leaders Alliance).

It was June 2011 when Google unveiled its latest product — a new social endeavor designed to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, better known as Google+. From that point forward the search engine giant catapulted itself into the social media realm and Google+ had all the buzz.

Fast-forward to summer 2015, and Google’s social platform is still making headlines… however, not in the same way it did four years prior. On July 27, Google announced on its blog that it would no longer require people to use a Google+ account in order to login to its other, more popular services, such as YouTube. Ah, the first nail in the Google+ coffin. The blog stated:

“When we launched Google Plus, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes.”

While this change will likely result in the downfall of Google’s social platform, the vast majority of users were thrilled (especially those YouTube enthusiast). And, fortunately, Google had even better news on the horizon for the mobile world.

A few weeks later, on August 10, Google announced yet another change that was underway — Google Hangouts was finally getting its own site. The new dedicated website for Hangouts will provide a communication platform for instant messaging, voice and video calls. Google said that these “big improvements” would make Hangouts faster, simpler and easier on the eyes… and now, it can also better compete with Facebook’s standalone messenger. More importantly, this change is beneficial for users who were active on Hangouts, but didn’t want to be required to login to Gmail, Google+ or Google Chrome in order to use the messenger.

Then, on August 18, Google revealed its third major change… aka the Golden Ticket! In an effort to prevent the overwhelming urge to dismantle and throw your Wi-Fi router in the garbage or perhaps out the window, Google announced it partnered with TP-LINK to launch OnHub, or as they call “a different kind of router for a new way to Wi-Fi.” To help alleviate endless headaches and spotty connections, OnHub (with its stylish design) promises to make your existing Wi-Fi faster, more reliable, and provide you with the ability to easily update and fix your connection.

To use the OnHub router, customers simply download a Google app to their smartphone, called “Google On” (available on both Apple and Android). The app will then walk you through the setup process, tell you how much bandwidth your devices are consuming, let you run a network check, and even inform you of any Wi-Fi issues and provide suggestions to fix them. In addition, instead of continuously losing your username and password, the Google On app will securely store all of your information enabling you to easily text or email it to a friend so they can join in on all the glory that is fast, reliable Wi-Fi. OnHub is currently available for pre-order for $199.99 from a variety of online retailers and will be for sale in retail stores in the U.S. and in Canada in the coming weeks.

With all these developments, it is clear that Google is genuinely trying to revamp and improve its entire mobile and social experience for the better. And although we may eventually see the demise of Google+, giving Google Hangouts its own platform while also launching OnHub are certainly steps in the right direction — hey, if Google can fix my Wi-Fi issues, count me in!

The post From Google+, Hangouts & WiFi — Google Revamps its Social Experience appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Now UberMedia has patented a way to make it better. Basically, instead of focusing on where a consumer has been or locations the consumer has expressed interest in, its system tracks where people actually are at any given time.

UberMedia, a cross-screen mobile ad platform combines more than 1.5 billion first-party mobile data signals to deliver hyper-focused ads, has just patented it, too.

Called “Location Visit Optimization” (LVO), it’s proving a successful way to boost “relevance and performance of mobile ad campaigns based on real-world location visits.”

“Although mobile advertising has come a long way, marketers still struggle to link their sales data to their campaign in real-time,” said Bill Gross, founder and CEO of UberMedia and Idealab. “LVO changes all that by allowing marketers to optimize on what matters most – real-time, real-world location visits. This method represents the next phase of mobile advertising, and has already proven to dramatically increase marketing results for automotive, fast food and hospitality brands.”

Reportedly, a host of national fast-food chains, automotive advertisers, and hotel chains have all seen location visits more than double with LVO.

Want to know more about LVO? Check out the infographic below.

The post Tracking of Real World Location Visits of UberMedia System Looks Like a Winner appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“The very first app most U.S. mobile users open in the morning is for social networking, and the last one at night is for entertainment — but the app category with the highest loyalty, or frequent and consistent use, is news & information.”

That’s the assessment served up this morning with the publication of Opera Mediaworks’  Q2 2015 State of Mobile Advertising report.

The second quarter, marked by a number of major overlapping sporting events, including the NHL and NBA championships and the opening of the American baseball season, also showed high use of sports apps, with a more distinct preference for morning than any other of the popular categories.

As for the platform wars, not much has changed this time around. Android leads in traffic and revenue generation, the report summary explains, but iOS is still on top for monetization.

Want to know more? The full report is available now for review here.

The post New Report Says Social Media is the ‘First App of the Day’ appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The complimentary webinar hosted by Direct Marketing News titled, “New Mobile Rules For Search, Social and Display: Data-Driven Strategies For More Clicks, Calls and Sales,” is taking place today — Tuesday, July 14, at 1:00 p.m. ET.

Presenting the webinar will be Blair Symes, director of content marketing at DialogTech and Joel Grossman, senior vice president of technology at Leapfrog Online.
To learn more, or to register for today’s webinar, click here.

The post Today: DialogTech, Leapfrog Online Hosting Webinar on New Mobile Rules For Search, Social and Display appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“This move represents a new departure for the world’s largest social media platform, given that Facebook has never shared the revenue it generates from video before,” notes PureContent. “It may also represent a challenge to YouTube in the drive to attract video creators to use particular platforms.”

What does Facebook want to do? Surely, not pay out any more than it has to … but the social media site is making a big, big play for more video these days.

“Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships at Facebook, told tech news website Re/code that many of the company’s partners have told Facebook that a revenue sharing arrangement “will be a big motivation to start publishing a lot more video content to Facebook,” reports PureContent.

Reportedly, revenue sharing will be limited to a newly introduced feature on Facebook known as Suggested Videos. The new feature is a sub-section of the news feed.

“If a user clicks a highlight in a particular category under News Feed – sports, for example – that video might open in Suggested Videos, which, in turn, would display other highlight videos in the sports category.”

How much money? The Facebook revenue split is said to be the same as that employed by Google-owned YouTube. That would mean a creator of a video gets a 55 per cent share of the revenue. The remaining 45 per cent goes to the host platform. Of course, ads will not play on Facebook in the same way that they do on YouTube.

Facebook is currently testing Suggested Videos in a test phase expected to last several months. No word yet on exactly how the feature will work or how it intends to charge advertisers.

The post Sharing the Video Wealth: Facebook Announces New Video Revenue Split Deal appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That news comes from a first quarter survey by Strata, a major software firm for media buying and selling.

Interestingly, the number of agencies still unsure about online video ROI declined by 25 percent within the same time period, according to the survey.

“Reflecting agency confidence in video advertising ROI, 65 percent of agencies say they are more interested in streaming video sites like Hulu and YouTube than a year earlier, which is also a 12 percent increase from the prior quarter,” notes Strata in a recent release. “Eighty-two percent report it is very important or important to access online video sites such as YuMe, Videology, or Tremor.”

“Whether digital video, or other media types, is bought direct or programmatically, the survey is highlighting the critical need of our clients to demonstrate ROI in a much more fragmented marketplace,” said Joy Baer, STRATA President. “And as eyeballs continue to migrate, the pressure to effectively and efficiently recapture that reach is a real challenge and one that we’re embracing.”

Other findings include the fact that 16 percent of agencies plan to spend at least a quarter of their budget on paid social advertising, the highest number ever recorded in the Strata survey. And for the first time in the history of the survey, more agencies are focusing their digital ad spend on search (76 percent) as compared to online display (75 percent).

The post Strata Survey: Video Confidence Growing; 43% Increase from Previous Quarter appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Over the last decade, Facebook has evolved from a small network of college students to a site with billions of users worldwide. Throughout this gradual change, marketers have taken advantage of the site’s loyal user base and wide reach. Soon, branded Facebook pages became the norm, and the typical news feed was filled with a mix of content created by friends, family and brands.

But, Facebook is hoping to take the site back to its roots by providing each user with an experience that is less commercialized. Facebook’s most recent algorithm update shows users content from the friends and family they interact with most on the site. The algorithm also favors visual posts and avoids pushing branded content to news feeds. While marketers may believe that this means the glory days of Facebook marketing are over, it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather than giving up, brands need to adjust their strategies to meet Facebook’s changing preferences.

Here are three Facebook features that marketers need to keep in mind when adjusting strategies for marketing campaigns:

Peer-to-peer sharing

Facebook favors user-generated content over posts that are created by a brand. So, a brand’s Facebook posts will show up in more news feeds and reach exponentially more consumers if users share them. To encourage sharing, brand posts should not be overly promotional, but should be compelling, timely and informative. Consumers are more likely to share something that tells a story and creates an experience.

Brands can also take advantage of the user-generated preference by encouraging users to post about their brand experience on their own. Offer incentives for consumers to post images of products or events related to your brand. Create hashtags that are timely and relevant to your consumers’ interests that will encourage them to post relevant content. Brands should plant the seed with their messaging, but let Facebook’s preference for user-generated content spread it throughout its network of billions of users.

Visual nature

Facebook will also push photos and videos to the tops of news feeds. The new layout displays photos much larger, creates collages of multiple photos posted by a user and automatically plays videos. Marketers should take advantage of this by posting more photos and videos along with the content they’re sharing on the site. In fact, marketers can generate up to 94 percent more views and significantly boost engagement levels by incorporating compelling visuals into their social posts.

And brands should make sure that this visual content has consistent branding and voice. Photos and visuals should always include a logo, hashtag or tagline to make sure that the brand messaging doesn’t get overshadowed as the content is shared from consumer to consumer. It’s easy for content to get lost among the noise created by Facebook’s billions of users each day.

Tagging

To expand reach, marketers should also take advantage of Facebook’s tagging feature. When a post is tagged, it links to specific user profiles and is then accessible by that user’s entire network. So, by tagging a few dozen consumers in a photo, it can reach tens of thousands more.

The tagging feature is also a great way to get more consumers to interact with your content. Since Facebook prohibits a brand from tagging consumers in posts, brands need to encourage followers to tag themselves or friends. For example, if a brand sponsors an event and posts an image of the event, that brand could offer incentives for consumers who were present to tag themselves. This forces consumers to visit your page, find the photo and tag themselves.

While many brands are worried that Facebook’s algorithm changes will prevent them from engaging with consumers in the same way, brands can actually take advantage of the site’s changes by implementing a proper social sharing strategy. By using branded visuals and encouraging tagging and peer-to-peer sharing, brands can still use Facebook to reach both current and new customers.

The post How Brands Can Revamp Facebook Strategies to Expand Reach appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.