Show Up On Your Residents’ Lock Screen

People spend more time on their mobile phones than on any other device nowadays. Mobile phones allow us to stay connected, shop, or stay informed. The coronavirus pandemic has also encouraged a lot of people, who were forced to stay home, to resort to mobile wallets and online shopping while adopting mobile payments.

And most of them are pleasantly surprised by how easy and useful they are. Businesses, therefore, try to reach people with mobile strategies. What is preventing municipalities and communities from using the same approach?

Medium Is The Message

In the 1960s, Herbert M. McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher, invented the expression “the medium is the message”. Since then, marketers have learned how media context impacts our processing and attitude to a marketing message. Such as while reading a recipe, we are definitely more likely to respond to an advertisement promoting cooking stuff.

Or, while people live on their mobile phones, they would be likely to engage with your mobile messages. That’s because the frame of mind of the people impacts the effectiveness of your message.

Mobile wallets, such as Apple Wallet and Google Pay, enable municipalities to deploy an affordable mobile strategy. The mobile wallet is a service that manages digital content from multiple brands and that enables transactions. It is in the hands and pockets of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Digital Municipal Information Card

For a city, town, village, or a community, it is not that complicated anymore to show up on their residents’ lock screen and deliver timely and interesting information. And boost ongoing and targeted communication without a need for developing a mobile app. With a digital municipal information card in a mobile wallet, people can view news and updates on what is happening in their local area.

This information card can easily be available to everyone through QR (quick response) codes and links on the municipal website, in the hall newspaper, and on other printed materials. Everyone who downloads the card gets a smart bookmark to local news in his/her mobile wallet.

You can broadcast invitations to local events and public meetings, or helpful real-time notifications. Including emergency communication. You can also target people based on their current location, and offer them useful location-specific updates. Downtown, near the municipal hall, at the local cultural center or around the school, people can receive reminders of upcoming concerts, exhibitions, performances, and other events.

Last but not least, such a digital information card allows for making one-click calls to a municipality official. Or for sending one-click emails, reporting claims, and of course providing feedback.

Originally published at https://becomedigital.life on August 17, 2020.