The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has completed a detailed survey, conducted in partnership with CollabCentral Consulting, which has highlighted the challenges and opportunities facing digital marketers in mainland China who want to use mobile innovation to drive results.
The detailed research, which was based on responses from 20 major marketers in China that represent brands spending nearly US$30bn globally on marketing, revealed that over 82% of marketers in the country are heavily focused on using mobile as a key tool to make their brand aware in the market, rather than purely for sales, e-commerce or driving sales through offline channels.
The survey revealed that tactics and strategy for the medium is due to change dramatically within the next year. Despite the slowdown of the Chinese economy, e-commerce and m-commerce are still, nevertheless, enjoying steeper growth curves in China than any other country, effectively driving consumers to purchase either online or offline. Apple, for example, was China’s biggest market in the world – that shows the strength of the market in most respects. According to IBM, 50% of local research is conducted from mobile devices.
Over a fifth of respondents said they expect mobile to continue being used solely for marketing and awareness in a year’s time, with less than half of them mentioning that mobile is poised to become a cross-purpose marketing and sales channel. It goes without saying that the deepest and most rapid transformation happening today is mobile. But it’s so much more than the device itself. Mobile is a platform for transacting in motion. Mobile provides insights that are unattainable from any other source, mobile is part of everything we do and will do in the future, and these are times where we can leverage the interactions into valuable and real opportunities, some that only come once at a time.
“Clear vision leads to action and this shift in recent months amongst the marketing community of China to leverage mobile as a business driver, beyond marketing and communication is a great signal to start acting upon”, said Nishtha Mehta, Founder and Chief Instigator at CollabCentral Consulting.
The study also revealed that the number of organizations/marketers using China’s popular mobile messaging app, WeChat, has seen an increase of over 305% since the WFA conducted similar research the same time last year. In 2015, 85% of marketers said they have used mobile messaging as their key marketing communication platform in the past 12 months, up from just 21% in 2014. That is an astronomical jump for just a year.
The most effective techniques for leveraging online to offline (O2O) sales reported by the respondents were mobile loyalty and gift in-store redemptions and trial coupon redemptions. However, most respondents described themselves as ‘low’ (32%) or ‘mid’ (52%) level in terms of O2O technical sophistication and commitment, highlighting the work left to do to raise capabilities, both internally and externally.
Internally, much needs to be done to break down silos for O2O to flourish and the vision to come to full life. 74% of respondents identified a lack of integration between departments as being a key barrier. 68% of respondent cited the main external barrier was the lack of readiness of retail infrastructure to integrate mobile payments or enable coupon redemption.
“If stores do not carry the mobile connected technology required to make O2O work, or are not sufficiently integrated with online or offline environments, then even the best O2O techniques will struggle to get off the ground,” said Matt Green, Senior Global Marketing Manager, WFA. “Closer and faster collaboration between the retailers, marketers and companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent is needed.”
Finding the right partners to make O2O work will be a key challenge over the next 12 months. When asked who’s best placed to help you in moving fast towards mobile’s integration with offline (retail store), 64% of respondents said they need to rely on multiple partners working together and 56% said they need a mobile agency or specialist.
“Marketers need to be bold. The speed of change in China is unprecedented. What’s relevant today might be replaced or outdated tomorrow itself. Move fast, use test and learn cycles to establish best practice principles, and then aim to scale these across brands,
source :12ahead.com
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