According to Mayank Garg, creative technologist at Innovations Digital, the slower take-up of mobile marketing techniques comes down to a lack of education and understanding.
“There is a wide gap in most agencies’ understanding of how mobile platforms should work in the region. In the Middle East, the first goal is to create stunning looking apps, which makes most mobile offerings very limited in their functional use of what a user needs,” says Garg.
“Quite often, I find that clients are suggesting mobile apps that are mere clones of their website and/or repositories of data. Until we can define what a user needs and address those in terms of functionally-strong apps, we can’t really say that the region is even breaking even with the rest of the world.”
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Paul Parsons co-founder of DigitALL, who has worked with a number of hotel brands in the Middle East, agrees: “I think the biggest problem in this region is there are a lot of marketers who still see mobile marketing as distributing 100,000 texts.
Once they understand the capabilities and the instantaneous element of it, that’s when they’ll actually start to see the benefit.”
It’s easy to see why this perception about SMS may exist; in 2010, 6.9 trillion SMS messages were sent worldwide, according to Portio Research. As Garg explains, however, the numbers associated with SMS don’t necessarily equal results.
“It has the ability to reach the largest audience and serve the most impressions. However, just like the series of annoying email blasts that hit an inbox daily, we see low conversion through this push,” she says. This is perhaps why some luxury brands have decided against this approach.
“While Jumeirah has experimented with SMS marketing, there is still a perception in the Middle East that this method is more intrusive than email or other targeted messages,” discloses Terry Kane, director of digital strategy. “We are a proud proponent of ‘permission marketing’ and take our responsibilities very seriously. As a result of this, SMS marketing is no longer a part of our marketing mix.”
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Mar 16, 2012 , India
It's true Middleast lags behind, though savvy with technology & latest gadgets, i am sure an offer their way to the newer generation, will start the ball rolling. Secondly hoteliers are more dependent on OTA's and the corporate sector + walkins, basically other than the UAE all other regional tra...