As the search engine giant works to expand its smartphone and tablet based audience, its acquisitions continue.
Yahoo! has just revealed its most recent step in widening its audience of smartphone and tablet users in its purchase of the mobile marketing platform, Sparq.
This allows users to be able to more conveniently toggle among their smartphone apps.
This is far from the first of the acquisitions that Yahoo! has made recently in the mobile marketing area. In fact, this is only one of a growing number of small startups that are being absorbed by the search engine giant in its efforts to move into the smartphone friendly channel more effectively. The primary benefit of Sparq is that it allows its users to be able to switch from one app to another while using their smartphones. This could be highly appealing to marketers because this capability is believed to help to increase the app usage from the owners of mobile devices.
Sparq integration into Yahoo! could also help the company to use mobile marketing for monetization.
According to the founder of Sparq, Jesse Chor, who is also the company’s CEO, “We are uber passionate about mobile — we’ve been striving to build the best mobile platform possible, and are excited to continue upon that goal with Yahoo.” Chor went on to express that “Words cannot describe how ecstatic we are to be joining such an amazing team with such an inspiring mission. We see endless opportunity ahead.”
The earnings at Yahoo! haven’t been exceptionally good over the last while. During the last quarter of 2013, the company’s reports showed that its earnings had fallen by 91 percent when compared to the same time a year before. That said, one of the reasons that the earnings were as low as they were was that the company had spent a massive amount of money on the acquisition of startups. In fact, in the last quarter alone, there was $163 million spent by Yahoo! on purchasing other companies.
In December, the company took in a number of companies that could contribute to its mobile marketing strategy, including PeerCDN, a content-speeding startup, Evntlive, a startup for “virtual venues”, and SkyPhrase, a natural language software startup that has been compared to Siri.
As smartphones and tablets reach a growing number of consumers, marketers need to evolve their techniques.
As a growing number of consumers become smartphone owners and users, emerging channels are staring to make their way into mobile marketing strategy development, particularly in areas that had been greatly dominated by search engine optimization (SEO).
For many years, online efforts to reach consumers depended greatly on SEO.
Now even the brands that have been effectively implementing SEO techniques are discovering that they need to expand their mobile marketing strategy efforts to include other elements, as well. It isn’t that search engine optimization has lost its importance, but the importance on relevance is growing at a very rapid pace. In essence, this means that efforts in optimizing for search engines need to take in more than issues such as the traditional keywords and inbound links.
A quality mobile marketing strategy is proving more complicated to marketers than expected.
The reason is that there are many other factors that need to be kept in mind when thinking about a consumer using a mobile
device. For example, while the traditional SEO components are still important to these techniques, it is up to sites to prove that they matter. Search engines – and their users – are becoming frustrated with the number of results to queries that involve unrelated content.
Data from 2013 has shown that only 13 percent of screen space is dedicated to organic search results. The rest of it was primarily made up of advertising and unrelated content. This has been causing traditional search traffic at the giants, such as Google, to decline, which it has been doing since 2013. Native search on mobile is starting to cut its way into this area.
This has also caused a trend that is leaning toward those emerging channels. A good quality mobile marketing strategy must be a part of the overall SEO effort. Therefore, while it is important for regular, keyword rich (not stuffed) content to be maintained on websites, it is becoming increasingly important to include elements such as social media management and other more smartphone friendly channels so that mobile device users will be able to obtain the information and answers that they are seeking through the company’s website instead of the competition.
