Author: Denny

Legacy brands face struggles that newer companies don’t seem to have to deal with.

Companies built in a more digital age seem to be making the transition to a smartphone-based economy with much greater ease than legacy retailers that have a long history that hasn’t had anything to do with mobile marketing.

Macy’s was one of the companies that has a long history but that has managed to keep up with mobile tech.

According to marketing exec Serena Potter from Macy’s, the company has observed a rapid migration of customers from their desktop computers over to smartphones. That said, despite the fact that the company has a long history in brick and mortar and e-commerce, it realized that it would be vital to place a considerable focus on m-commerce and mobile marketing if it wanted to keep up with the expectations of customers. That said, while she explained that “It wasn’t an obstacle for us as much as it was a steep learning curve.” She added that “You didn’t know what you didn’t know.”

There is a great deal more than the technology that must be mastered in order to implement successful mobile marketing.

What traditional retailers are discovering as they attempt to implement mobile advertising strategies is that they can’t simply stick to the same concepts that have been successful throughout their history. Using smartphones as a marketing channel is not simply a matter of running the same types of ads on a smaller screen. Instead, there is a great deal that needs to be re-learned in terms of apps, the mobile web, loyalty programs, data collection and metrics to understand which campaigns have – and have not – been successful.

These same challenges are not quite as powerful among retailers that have been created more recently, with a mobile-first mindset already in place, said Potter. She explained that Macy’s had been focusing on desktop optimization for many years and had mastered that channel. It became highly predictable. However, with mobile marketing, “you have customers accessing different information, with different intent. A lot of research and a lot of discovery is happening and it’s all on the go,” she said.

The company has reported that it has experienced a net profit increase of 32 percent during Q3.

Tencent Holdings Ltd has released its third quarter data and within it was a report that mobile games were a considerable driver of the 32 percent increase in net profits that occurred during that span of three months.

The reason these specific mobile apps received this credit is because of the growth and advertising they showed.

This underscored the resilience of Tencent despite the fact that the economy in its home country, China, has been slowing down. The powerful results played an integral role in assuaging some of the worries that had been expressed about the ever rising competition within the mobile games marketplace in the country. A spike in advertising revenue during that same quarter also looked promising to investors who were looking directly at mobile ads as an area in which Tencent had room for growth into the future.

More than half of the revenue that Tencent managed to bring in during Q3 was from mobile games.

Tencent is the largest social network in China as well as its biggest online games company. From the three months that closed on September 30, the net profit increased by $1.17 billion from having increased by $888.89 million during the same quarter the year before. Revenue for that quarter increased by 34 percent to 4.18 billion.

That occurred even though economic growth as a whole has been slowing down. Earlier in November, Chinese President Xi Jinping cautioned that the economy in the country was facing both global and domestic uncertainty. The president indicated that Beijing was able to withstand growth that was as low as 6.5 percent.

According to analysts, the economic fluctuations don’t usually cause too much of an impact on the demand by online gamers. Since Tencent has placed a considerable focus on mobile games, it means that it has become a company that is not as vulnerable to the directions of the economy as its competition. Tencent explained that the smartphone game app revenue it earned was $832.34 million, which was 60 percent higher than it had been in 2014. It was also 11 percent higher than it was during the second quarter.