Tag: mobile ads

A recent study has revealed that 70 percent of car shoppers using YouTube are influenced by what they see.

A new report has now been issued that provides insight into trends with regards to mobile marketing and video advertising and the impact this is having on the decisions being made by car buyers.

The report is based on YouTube data, Google search data and results from the 2015 Google/TSN Auto Shopper Study.

It also included the data produced as a result of a Milward Brown Digital commissioned study conducted by Google based on the auto shopping consumer sales funnel. Overall, this revealed that digital and mobile marketing played a considerable role in influencing the decisions made by car buyers as 70 percent of people who use YouTube had been influenced by video content when they made their auto purchasing choices.

The report provided a number of important pieces of insight into online and mobile marketing trends in car buying.

Among the highlights of the report were the following:

• 70 percent of people who use YouTube in the vehicle purchasing process said that the video content they saw had an impact on the choices they decided to make.
• The average car buyer made only two visits to dealerships before making their decision.
• 60 percent of vehicle buyers start the shopping process without knowing which car they actually intended to buy.
• Mobile searches taking place from within the actual dealership lots had risen by 46 percent over the 12 months prior to the study.

Though this data aligned with the predictions that have been made within the auto industry with regards to the influence of mobile advertising, search and video content, it is interesting to see the speed at which consumers are adopting digital methods of informing themselves and are reducing the number of visits they are actually making to a dealership before deciding on the vehicle and purchasing method they intend to use.

What is now being found is that many of the most important influences on consumers come from micro moments when mobile marketing has the greatest influence. It is at those moments that shoppers take out their mobile devices in order to learn an additional piece of information instead of going to a salesperson directly.

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.