Follow the Money

Big companies are investing big money to consolidate individual technology tools into unified systems for Mobile Marketing Automation.

The mobile app world is shifting, and there’s no better indication of that change than the money big companies are spending to consolidate individual technology tools into unified systems for Mobile Marketing Automation. What these big companies have learned – and what marketers everywhere are starting to understand – is that an Mobile Marketing Automation platform approach is necessary if you want to optimize the app user experience effectively. Only by tying content management to analytics, dynamic publishing capabilities, and marketing automation can you fully realize the potential of mobile apps for marketing.

The proof of this trend is in the money trail.

Facebook was one of the first companies to demonstrate its investment in a platform strategy. Over a period of nine months, Facebook: acquired Parse, a company with tools for managing data storage, identity logins and push notifications; bought the start-up Little Eye Labs with its product for analyzing app performance; and unveiled Airlock, the A/B testing solution for mobile apps that Facebook built from the ground up.

Amazon has also been active in developing a platform strategy. At the Amazon AWS summit this summer, the company released a new software development kit combining access to multiple Amazon app services. The SDK is a gateway to features for managing user identity and data synchronization, app analytics, push messaging and more.

And consider Yahoo. In July, Yahoo shelled out more than $200 million to purchase mobile analytics company Flurry. The Flurry assets add to a slew of other mobile technology companies Yahoo had already acquired, and have the potential to tie together disparate app management features with rich behavioral data acquired from app users.