Mobile Advertising: yes or no?

Apparently, smartphones are nowadays a crucial component of our lives. People use them for almost anything. Accordingly to the statistics, the time that people spend online is up to 4 hours and a half per day - and during 2 of these hours they surf the Internet through their smartphones. They collect information about the products or services they are interested in or they are about to buy, and they even make purchases whether the website has an e-commerce platform. 

This means that as a business, thanks to Mobile Advertising, you can reach your customers directly on their phones - placing relevant and targeted advertisements and reach the right audience. 

Let's see which are the advantages and disadvantages of Mobile Advertising.

ADVANTAGES

- Accesibility: Mobile Advertising reaches customers wherever they are and wherever they go – because it doesn't really depen on any specific location. It means that the access to the customers is complete.

- Size: with Mobile Advertising you can reach a big size audience.

- Time relevance: customers usually keep their mobiles always with them and turned on. It means that notifications about a special sales or special events can reach the customer immediatly. And in case they cannot see the message at that time, they can always have a look afterward. 

- Cost effective: costs are low if you compare them with other channels, as TV or radio or magazines. You can reach more people with less money. This is an important advantage especially when you consider a business that has large-scale distribution capabilities.

- Intimacy: customers have the tendency to use their mobile phones for personal messages and conversations. If you manage to communicate with them through the phone, you will create a sense of intimacy and establish with them a friendly and informal relationship. 

- Targeting: it is easy to target the potential customers on the basis of their locations and languages - so it is perfect for those companies that need to communicate with niche demographics. 

- Measurable: you can have an exact idea about which users are visualizing your advs and which ones are clicking on them. So basically you can measure directly the impact of the campaign. 

- Click-rate: accordingly to the statistics the click-rate on mobile is usually higher than what happens on Deskops.

DISADVANTAGES

- Copy: when it comes to Mobile Advertisements, it is easier to copy the material nd use it for commercial purposes. It means that logos, pictures and so on may be copied by competitors but also used to mock somehow your company.

 
- Huge amount of advertisements: nowadays the Internet is so full of advertisements that the users are basically stopping to pay attention to the advertisements that they see around.

- Accessibility: you will probably wait before purchasing something to have a look on your computer since on your smartphone at the end the screen is small and also the keyboard is limited so it might not be so comfortable. Also there may be some locations where the Internet signal is not so powerful so it is not possible to see the advertisements correctly.

- Lack of standardization: mobile phones present very different characteristics: different screen size, different operating systems, they can use different browsers so it could be problematic defining the perfect advertisement.

Photo credits: 1. http://on.mash.to/1GwDG8J 2. http://bit.ly/1GlvS42 3. http://bit.ly/1uet30B