encompass blog

Mobile marketing has always moved at a fast pace. Even so, the shifts we saw in 2020, prompted in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic, were relatively unprecedented. Calendar year 2020 saw a record-shattering $223 billion expenditure on mobile marketing worldwide, representing a year-over-year increase of some 17 percent. And when the dust settles on 2021, we feel confident in saying that we will see another fairly sizable investment.

For years, digital marketing professionals have been beating the drum for mobile-friendly content. You’re probably familiar with the basic argument: These days, a majority of us access the Internet not through desktop or laptop computers, but rather via our phones and our tablets. There is ample data to support this argument, and thus it has become conventional wisdom that website content needs to be easily accessible from any kind of screen or device.

These days, the term “mobile marketing” may almost seem like a redundancy. So much of the consumer experience happens via tablets and mobile devices, it should go without saying that brand outreach efforts hinge on being mobile accessible.

It may seem as though paper coupons have been around forever. That’s not exactly true, but they’ve certainly been part of the retail experience for several generations, going back at least as far as the late 1880s. But while coupons remain prized by many consumers, the form these coupons take is changing. In fact, new research reveals that mobile coupons are about to overtake their paper counterparts in terms of overall popularity.

Consumers are generally aware of the latest tech product roll-outs—for example, recently announced devices from Apple or Android—but may not be as familiar with such finer points as location data policy. As a result, many mobile users may not realize that both Apple and Google have recently made subtle tweaks to their own stated policies. This has implications for the consumer, but also for the advertiser; in today’s post, we’ll be focusing on this latter point.

Though it’s hard to remember it now, it really wasn’t that long ago that we were all living in a pre-Snapchat world. Even popular social platforms like Pinterest have come into their own over the past few years, while the social media cycle has also brought us the rise and fall of Vine and, to a lesser extent, Google+. The point is that the social media landscape is anything but static. Even within established venues like Facebook, there are big trends and shifts happening all the time, such as the recent advent of Facebook Live streaming.