Hello Brands! Are You Feeling The Pulse Of Your Customers?

There are 3.7 billion smartphone users in the world. And, more than half of them use mobile for upwards of 3 hours every single day. With such a colossal scale of reach and depth of user engagement on mobile, it is safe to say that the bulk of any brand’s customers are on mobile, all the time. Mobile has become an average consumer’s native screen and is central to many facets of her life: content, social media, shopping, gaming, entertainment, and much more. It is surprising, nay counter-intuitive, that only 5% of the market research spends globally are done on mobile.

The Power of Research on Mobile

Traditionally, consumer market research entailed a slow and arduous process of searching for people who qualify to reside in panels, maintaining the panels over a long period of time and rewarding the respondents for participating in market research.

In a day and age when the mobile consumer’s preferences change fast and where brands need to remain agile and nimble, marketers across the world face multiple challenges when conducting market research:

1. It is slow and cumbersome to reach out to target panels on a phone call or even knocking at their doors, which requires significant effort and time.
2. It is difficult to find and reach niche segments. Imagine an outreach to a panel of 2000 sports enthusiasts between the age range of 40-55 years in urban America.
3. It has generally been an expensive affair due to the costs associated with maintaining the panels, costs for retaining the members in the panels, and rewarding the respondents for their participation in the research.

Enter mobile market research: which solves for most of the shortcomings of traditional research and allows for market research to become more lean and agile.

Meet Your Customers Where They Are

Market research at its core is reaching the target audience and understanding their opinion. It is only natural that marketers need to do research where their consumers are - mobile. With the ubiquitous presence of mobile, the consistent user engagement and the availability of myriad user attributes, mobile empowers marketers to bring speed, accuracy and scale to market research.

1. Precise understanding of the customer: Through the breadth of data points available on mobile, marketers can easily and precisely identify their target customer. Information about mobile users such as basic demographic understanding, behavioural profiles such as them frequenting universities, stadiums or malls, their app ownership and usage profiles can be indicative of their interests. With this clear understanding, mobile market research not only allows for precise panel creations through customer profiles but also allows for the marketer to understand a lot more about the customer.
2. Scale of reach: Billions of consumers today are using a smartphone. With such massive scale, marketers can be precise about their identified personas without losing scale. This allows for the panel to not get exhausted easily, enabling true random sampling and minimal spillover between studies conducted on the exact same persona type or panel.
3. Speed of research: Mobile is the new native screen with most consumers spending an average of 3 hours on their devices daily. This provides an ‘always-on’ engagement opportunity to marketers for gathering responses at an unprecedented speed. Gone are the days when marketers had to wait weeks and months to get the research responses. Through mobile market research responses can be collected in a matter of hours, enabling marketers to stay nimble when making data-backed, everyday decisions.
4. It is Always On: Through the combination of scale, speed and continuous engagement, mobile market research opens up a completely new paradigm of always-on research to marketers. It enables marketers to track their brand KPIs on a trendline, removing the recency biases resulting from a point-in-time research. The always on research gives the power of gauging true brand metrics as a result of every interaction that a consumer has with a brand, be it advertising, in-store experience or the product experience.

For the past decade InMobi has been leveraging the power of mobile to help brands innovatively engage with their consumers through its mobile advertising platform. We’ve taken a step further in helping brands understand their consumer through a completely disruptive solution: InMobi Pulse - world’s largest mobile market research platform.

InMobi Pulse is designed to help marketers take insight driven and data-backed decisions, every day. Interested in learning how you can do mobile market research? Visit us at InMobi Pulse to get a demo.