Turning Mobile into a Performance Ad Channel for Business Customers

As we head into the height of the holiday shopping season, financial institutions’ small to mid-sized business customers must find unique ways to target shoppers. Today, small businesses are competing with larger retailers to reach consumers on a variety of marketing channels, from in-store to online. And as mobile becomes increasingly popular, it is quickly becoming the hottest battleground for grabbing consumers’ attention.

According to recent reports, this year’s Cyber Monday mobile traffic increased by 62 percent over last year and mobile purchases totaled about 16 percent of all Cyber Monday sales – meaning mobile is becoming the channel businesses should focus their marketing efforts on during the holiday season.

This presents an excellent opportunity for today’s financial institutions to not only expand their small business offerings to arm these customers with mobile marketing tools, but also enable them to target consumers in highly relevant and cost-efficient ways through use of anonymous shopping data.

Keys to Effective Mobile Marketing Tools

Small businesses are incredibly valuable customers for banks as they are more willing to pay service fees for increased convenience, but they tend to be one of the most underserved segments in the industry. With the new industry requirements and additional regulations on the horizon, today’s banks must explore new revenue opportunities, especially for their business customer base.

In an effort to attract and retain more of these customers, today’s banks are in search of tools that will give their business customers a competitive advantage over the hundreds of retailers fighting for consumers’ attention. In order to effectively market to existing customers as well as attract new ones, banks’ mobile marketing tools must feature the following key functionalities:

Location-Relevant

Banks should leverage mobile marketing tools that enable business customers to only target consumers within a specific, designated geographic region. Location-based technology is the key to targeting and engaging nearby consumers as it creates a segmented group without becoming too restrictive, therefore increasing the relevance and likelihood that the offer will be redeemed.

Behavior-Relevant

In addition to location relevancy, banks’ mobile marketing tools must evaluate consumer purchase data to determine relevant offers based on spending behavior. Using location as the underlying relevancy factor, businesses can then analyze their consumers’ purchase data and experiment with different campaigns.

Engaging

Today’s consumers receive offerings from a multitude of channels including email, SMS and social media, among others, so banks’ mobile marketing channels must have the ability to push offers to all of these channels. As previously mentioned, mobile is dominating the market in terms of reaching consumers, so banks must provide their business customers with the necessary tools to engage with today’s mobile-driven audience.

Measurable

While it is critical to leverage mobile marketing tools that consider a consumers’ location and purchase behavior to push engaging, relevant offers, if the business has no insight into what is working at checkout, then it is impossible to attribute any return on investment to the campaigns.

Now more than ever it is challenging to quantify the value of digital marketing, therefore bank’s should ensure their mobile marketing tools provide businesses with complete visibility into exactly how many inbound customers and total purchase revenue each campaign is generating, enabling businesses to attribute digital advertisement spend properly. Fortunately, banks are uniquely prepared to offer this as mobile wallets and other modern payment processes start to scale.

For example, one way that banks can offer these tools is integrating mobile marketing technology into their, or partner’s, mobile and tablet-based payment acceptance and Point of Sale (POS) solutions. By integrating this technology into a POS device, the bank’s business customers have the ability to create, manage, and distribute their mobile marketing campaigns within one, simple platform, which will in turn enable these businesses to better target shoppers, promote products more effectively and drive sales – critical during the Holidays.

Mobile offers are becoming a necessity for today’s businesses, so in order to strengthen their small business customer relationships, banks must offer unique tools. By offering these customers powerful mobile marketing tools, banks will enable effective consumer engagement on mobile channels and help these businesses grow. Otherwise, they will lose these customers to other institutions.

Greg McAllister is the CEO of PushPoint, a mobile marketing solutions provider.