Jonathandunn.ca » Mobile Marketing

Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.

Jonathan — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:40:54 +0000

NOTE: Cross-posted from the Digital Cement Round Table Blog

What’s your mobile marketing strategy? Don’t have one? You’re not alone.

Recent research by Forrester found that 57% from a survey pool of 200 global companies either didn’t have one or only in the early stages of developing their mobile strategy.

If you do have a mobile strategy, that’s excellent. The question then is how you are going to continue to evolve your mobile programming and adapt to emerging technology opportunities and changes in customer habits, preferences, expectations, device use and build on insights from all the data you’ve generated.

Defining and maturing your mobile strategy requires a thoughtful and diligent approach if you want to deliver genuine and recurring value to your customers and maximize ROI. It’s more than just porting your web strategy. There are new customer behaviours to understand. Different dynamics for acquisition, engagement, conversion and retention activities are in play. Benefits and costs for each mobile tactical channels – advertising, web, apps, SMS, etc… – need to be weighed. A new measurement and analytics process has to be established.

Digital Cement wants to help you through that process.

We’ve developed the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic so marketers can self-assess the progress of their mobile marketing efforts and gather insight into sustainable and sensible program evolution.

We’re deliberately channel-agnostic. You won’t find out whether you should use SMS or build an app, for example. Those decisions are unique to every company, brand or targeted customer segment. What you will find out are the steps you can take to make sure you have the right framework for making those decisions.

We’ve broken out mobile strategy into 6 categories:

Audience Management
Marketing Planning
Marketing Implementation
Media Management
Data + Measurement
Integration

Each category asks you to align yourself to the descriptive statement closest to your activity level. Have fun with it. Check out each of the statements as they’ll give you insight into the road ahead.

As you progress through each section, we’ll tally up your score and at the end you’ll receive a snapshot of your mobile maturity status and some prescriptive guidance for next steps.

The Diagnostic has a web and touch screen mobile optimized versions. You can try the mobile version by directing your iPhone, Android or other webkit browsers to the same URL as the website: http://www.digitalcement.com/mobile_ready.

We’re looking at this tool as something that evolves as brand mobile marketing sophistication evolves so your feedback on the content is definitely welcome.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Digital Cement can assist you in developing your mobile marketing roadmap, there’s a form on the site or contact me directly at jdunn@digitalcement.com

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Two Words For The Mobile Future

Jonathan — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:33:01 +0000

There are two things I feel comfortable saying nearly every mobile consumer has done at some point – made a phone call + taken a picture.

Consider how intuitive those behaviours are and how seamlessly they fit into people’s mobile activity patterns. It’s natural behaviour because they’re ported from other device interactions (telephone, camera) to a mobile interaction. Just about the only new learning is which button do you press to make it happen.

What marketers should be thinking about it is hearing and seeing customer intent.

Voice and image recognition technologies are evolving rapidly. I’ll be giving more thought to how it impacts brand interface and enriches experiential moments. For now, just putting those two words out there so they can ripen on the vine.

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3 Mobile Marketing Nuts For Brands to Crack

Jonathan — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 17:10:31 +0000

If you’re a brand marketer looking to establish a mobile footprint, there are three important questions you should be able to answer to set the foundation for sustainable and modular mobile programming.

I’m not going to give you the answers. There are too many variables unique to your brand, your product/service and your customers to address these properly here…and that’s why there’s an industry built around mobile marketing and advertising.

This is a quick post to hopefully orient your thinking about mobile in a way that will set you up for verifiable success that offers your customer genuine and recurring value.

1. How discoverable is your brand via mobile?

Check your web analytics. Getting visits from mobile devices? What’s the experience like for them (god help you if your site has flash)? People are using mobile devices to source information. But mobile devices and user context require different design and content strategies. Make your mobile web presence customer friendly.

Use SMS and QR codes to activate media and promotions, build a mobile database and establish a permission-based on device interaction with customers. Always keep the value exchange in mind. It should be heavily weighted towards to consumer and deliver clear, compelling and ideally repeatable experiences.

If you’ve jumped into apps, how are you driving awareness via existing brand properties and mobile advertising (display + search)? CTRs are high. Consumers are willing. There’s a great opportunity to bridge between ads and other mobile destinations or even to physical destinations.

2. How are you addressing customer fragmentation?

Fragmentation is more commonly used to describe versioning within operating systems that creates development and support headaches. It’s a big issue. I’d argue a bigger issue for brands is customer fragmentation. Not only are consumers spread across the 3 or 4 major Smartphone operating systems, there are also differences in which features consumers are using and to what extent. And never mind the Smartphone vs. Feature phone user.

Understand your customer habits, preferences and device profiles to guide how to best address your target audience.

3. How are you balancing experimentation with ROI?

For many organizations mobile has the ‘experimental channel’ yoke around its neck. Marketers are mandated to deliver clear and favourable ROI. How to balance this? First accept the test and learn mentality as a good thing and not inconsistent with great ROI. Think beyond the single campaign towards a sustained presence. Mobile is highly measurable so set clear objectives and goals at the start. Don’t be afraid to iterate and definitely stay abreast of new technologies and tactics.

Mobile isn’t going anywhere. Embrace it and be determined how to make it work for your brand and you will prosper.

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Frictionless Mobile Marketing

Jonathan — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:07:17 +0000

It’s an unfortunate truth that many potentially successful mobile marketing + mobile advertising campaigns fall flat because the end to end experience has not been properly thought through.

The biggest culprit for this is a post click experience that directs the consumer to a non-optimized mobile web experience.

I continually see mobile advertising or QR code driven executions that push people who have done exactly what you want them to – click on the ad or scan the code – being taken to a wired web destination.

Pinch and zoom full web browsers that are common on most advanced Smartphone allow you to view wired websites with some degree of success (unless you’re using Flash) but don’t remove the fact that:

a) you’re forcing consumers to work harder than they need to in order to get where you want them to go

b) consumer context and need are often vastly different when on mobile than when comfortably seated in front of a desktop.

Two recent examples documented by mobile dude Phil Barrett at Burning the Bacon and pop culture academic Sidneyeve Matrix at CyberPop! drive this point home.

In each case, the failure to match expectations with experience created friction for the consumer and ended with dissatisfaction. In each case, people who were genuinely engaged with what was being offered are now disappointed with the brand and have blogged about it.

Regardless of the mobile channel you are using, put the consumer experience first, understand the habits and expectations, think through the various campaign touch points and ensure a seamless flow from initial interaction to value exchange to gratification.

Mobile can and should be frictionless. Good mobile marketing always is.

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Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. Featuring…

Jonathan — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:21:52 +0000

If you’re at all interested in the mobile marketing space, you should be reading MobileMarketer.com and the Mobile Commerce Daily.

Combined they offer great campaign coverage, industry trends and thought leadership across the entire range of mobile marketing, advertising and commerce.

They also put out a series of reference guides called the Classic Guides. These go deep on specific subjects such as mobile advertising, women in the mobile space and predictions for the year ahead.

This year, I’m thrilled to have an article included in their second annual Classic Guide to Mobile Commerce. My article is on page 18 where I talk about how to nurture your existing customers into the mobile channel. Since you’ve already established a relationship with these customers, they’re going to be extremely influential in the uptake of this new brand touch point.

My thinking has evolved since I wrote this piece but I still feel it offers some good foundational advice. Hope you agree and hope you take the time to read all the other articles. There’s a lot of great learning contained in that guide.

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Putting ‘Slacktivism’ To Work In Your Mobile Marketing

Jonathan — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:30:20 +0000

The always excellent “Do Something” column in Fast Company struck a particularly relevant chord with me this month. Here’s the lead:

Sending a text or clicking to vote may be the trendy way to help humankind. The question, says Nancy Lublin, is whether such so-called slacktivism really works.

The conclusion is that any kind of activism should be encouraged and some of these efforts, though they require less commitment on the part of participants, have a real and significant impact. Case in point is the massive amount of donations generated via SMS in response to the earthquake in Haiti. The blog Mobile Behaviour points out that this kind of frictionless participation empowers an altruistic impulse that is particularly appealing to GenX and Millennials who are used to immediate gratification and on-demand experience.

What made this resonate for me is the explicit acknowledgment that understanding nuances in your target consumer’s motivations, habits and preferences is vital for developing solutions that deliver positive returns.

Younger generations have behaviours that don’t map easily onto credit card donations, door to door solicitations or getting up on Saturday morning to volunteer. That’s not to say these groups aren’t deeply committed to community engagement – they most certainly are – it’s more the model of that engagement is distinct from what has been done before and is ingrained in institutional and organization DNA. The good news for brand marketers is that these insights readily extend beyond activism and into the “for profit” world.

Here’s a three-point lens for evaluating how to ‘mobilize’ key demographics like GenX & Y and Millennials (or any consumer really). Admittedly, each of these should be front and center in any demand generation/customer acquisition exercise so the comments I’ll make focus on attributes specific to engagement in the mobile channel.

1. What behaviours or preferences are you leveraging to maximize the relevance of the offer/experience?

Mobile is highly contingent on context. Where someone is and what they are doing at that moment. Typically there are three response exchanges – reward, inform or entertain. Are you able to offer something that fulfills those needs? Are you able to create a meaningful reason to ask for an opt-in for future communications? How are you positioning your offer to deliver substantial one-off value or recurring utility that will drive repeat engagement?

For those who thrive off instant gratification, knowing that I can send a text message in 10 seconds and contribute $10 towards a relief effort is an immediate validation of my contribution. If the confirmation also included a running total of all SMS donations I would also gain knowledge of the scope of our efforts.

2. How are you ensuring you’re reaching customers with the highest conversion probabilities?

This really comes down to a media planning and analytics exercise. Where are your consumers browsing? Which apps are they using? Are you better off bridging from traditional media with SMS or image response activations? What are you doing differently for new customers vs. your existing customers?

You need the data – mobile device penetration, feature use, media consumption patterns, etc… – if you’re going to make informed decisions about how to best allocate your media dollars and optimize your conversion rates.

Though SMS donations resonated with certain groups, your grandmother probably still wants to donate by handing a crisp bill to an official representative of the charity. An example that might be at either extreme of the spectrum but the core truth holds – Know those differences.

3. Are you creating as frictionless an experience as possible?

The SMS donations work because it takes seconds and the gratification is instant. Same goes for adding a ribbon to a Twitter profile or donating my Facebook status to a cause. Each of these actions is literally completed with a couple of clicks.

This attitude should be baked into your mobile experiences too. Does you mobile ad click to an optimized website (you’d be surprised how often this isn’t the case)? Has your app been thoroughly tested to avoid a buggy launch? Does the call to action you’ve integrated into your print ad follow best practices around short codes or 2D bar codes?

If you aren’t diligent, opportunities to tune out will pop up at all points along the experience chain. The focus has to be on driving from acquisition to activation as seamlessly as possible.

The promise of mobility is to make life easier – easier to connect with your social graph, easier to entertain yourself, easier to solve problems ‘out in the world’, easier to stay informed…and so on. It’s really not about ‘slacking’; it’s about facilitating experiences that maximize impact with minimal disruption.

Re-posted from: The Digital Cement Round Table

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Recent @JCDunn Work Blog Posts

Jonathan — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:36:31 +0000

In the past month or so, I’ve been contributing content to the newly launched Digital Cement blog – The DC Round Table.

The blog is the work of our demand generation team and the subject matter focus is SEO/SEM, social media and mobile. I’m contributing the latter…surprise!

I’ve four posts up there that you might find interesting:

1. Ready, Set, Go! A DC Mobile Kickoff

In this post, I outline the Digital Cement mobile practice, our philosophy, a bit on the service offering and some questions we use to frame all mobile marketing discussion.

2. Does Your SEM Strategy Include Mobile?

This post talks about a stat Google released about the connection between mobile search queries and location. I’ve added some content and outline two important distinctions between web and mobile search. Nothing ground-breaking, but some hopefully useful ‘get -started’ stuff.

3. Mobile Marketing: Toronto Public Health and SMS Success

Here I look at a recently launched program aimed at helping youth discuss sexual health issues and providing discreet ways to access sexual health resources. I share some the program experience and discuss the reasons why I feel this is, strategically and tactically, a very solid program. Hint: It’s got something to do with how much teens text.

4. Canadians, SMS and Sore Thumbs

The CWTA has released numbers for the volume of text messages sent by Canadians. They show impressive growth in both peer to peer and short code messaging and I offer some brief comments on considerations for SMS as a customer acquisition and CRM tool.

Hopefully something catches your eye.

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Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing

Jonathan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:40:28 +0000

Put your hands up if you have a mobile phone within arm’s reach. Did everyone raise their hands (mentally if not physically)? I’m willing to bet ‘Yes’.

Mobile, specifically Smartphones, has become an essential tool for business professionals. Sales, Marketing, IT and Finance professionals would lead the way, but just about any mid-level or above executive from the largest Fortune 500 to the scrappy start-up is likely surgically attached to their mobile.

A recent MarketingProfs article offered up Five Reasons Why Mobile Marketing is Prime for B2Bs. If you’re stretched for time, they are: Explosive Adoption Rates; Fulfilling Business Centric Needs; A Unique Personal Channel; New Ways Into Their Worlds and More Show, Less Tell. There’s some solid thought backing up those points and some questions marketers should be asking themselves. The bottom line if you’re a B2B marketers – your customers are constantly using these devices, why aren’t you using them to reach your customers?

It’s a good question.

My two cents is that mobile has been so heavily focussed on B2C marketing that the guidelines, best practices and case studies that typically help ease you into a new channel are lacking or not getting enough exposure.

To help, the author of the MarketingProfs piece also posted a presentation outlining a 10 step starter guide for B2B mobile marketing. I find myself agreeing with the bulk of the points raised but want to offer 3 specific recommendations not covered in either piece that can help you in your B2B mobile planning.

1. Dig Into Google Analytics

If your website is currently using Google Analytics (or other analytics programs) it will be able to tell you the amount of traffic your site is receiving from mobile phones. You should also be able to see visits broken down by operating system allowing you to begin developing a profile of your mobile customer. To be blunt, every one of those visits to your site was a lost customer opportunity. Even devices like the iPhone which have a better browsing experience still have limits (pinch and zoom, no flash) and a mobile visitor likely has different interests from a wired visitor. Failing to understand who those customers are, what they’re looking for and then serving it up seamlessly means disappointment.

2. Nurture Customers Towards Mobile

Talk to your customers. One on one interviews or more mass polls can help you gather genuine insights into how they use their mobile and what mobile content would be most valuable to them. Once you have a mobile program plan and are pushing towards a launch, seed mobile-friendly touch points prior to any new property or campaign launch. For example, make sure your outbound emails are mobile optimized (you should be doing this anyway). Begin to generate permissions to communicate via mobile through web form or email data capture. Simple and relatively cost-effective steps like this will help establish a mobile-primed audience.

3. Build In Circular Thinking

What I mean by ‘circular thinking’ is identifying tactical pathways that lead you from acquisition to conversation. You want to be able to create a frictionless loop from acquisition to engagement with your content or value proposition to permission to continue the dialogue to a firm opportunity to extend or expand the relationship. What makes this circular is the ability to repeat the ‘engagement-permission-expansion’ process again and again as you learn more about your customer and can offer more targeted communication and increase the value of your mobile marketing. The devil is in the details with this approach but the payoff will be worth the effort and will give you much clearer visibility into your campaign ROI.

The final recommendation I’ll make isn’t related to B2B mobile marketing as much as it’s a general comment about risk. Mobile will continue to be unproven until you test and learn and figure out how to best use the channel. Is the bigger risk a modest budget to launch a mobile program or the lost business opportunities by not being there?

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Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2

Jonathan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:30:02 +0000

In the last post, I looked at two measurement lenses that tracked revenue and customer habits & preferences. Return on Insight and Return on Investment give you a view for finding and then converting your target customers.

This post covers the other half of the 4 ROIs – Return on Involvement and Return on Innovation.
Return on Involvement

Involvement is the bookend of Return on Insight. If Insight is about understanding the customer, then Involvement is about the experience viewed along acquisition and engagement lines.

Acquisition involvement looks at going beyond the click in a mobile ad campaign and converting the consumer. That may be an opt-in, a download or a push to a location. In each case, a consumer action generated a tangible brand involvement.

Mobile can also test your customer’s involvement with your other media channels. The common example is a text message call to action that entices with an offer. Unique keywords help you determine which media was most effective in driving involvement. But you should also be including a mobile URL or pushes to an app download if you have those touch points. If your mobile efforts are really mature, image recognition tactics can also capitalize on mobile’s ability to bridge experiences.

Engagement dimensions provide you with the ammunition to continually improve your offering and create conditions for deeper and more frequent customer interactions.

Adding response mechanisms such as coupons or bridges to second-level experiences to SMS deployments helps you learn what offers and incentives drive conversions. Any web or app program should vigilantly monitor what activity is occurring: which features are being used, for how long and when.

Mobile efforts suffer when siloed, in terms of cross-media integration and singular campaigns. If you can earn some share of a customer’s mobile, use that opportunity to deliver ever increasing relevance and utility. That drives Involvement.

Return on Innovation

Tying all of the other three ROIs together is Return on Innovation. Consider mobile as a platform. The device offers at least seven different channels (voice, email, messaging, media, web, apps, and advertising) for connecting to your customers. Each of these channels requires strategic consideration and tactical innovation.

Extending your digital footprint and engaging customers in new and compelling ways can be hugely powerful for driving brand awareness and favourability, customer relationships, propensity to purchase and revenue.

Innovation can lead to connecting with customers in new ways, but also connecting with new customers. Those who might have never given your brand a thought may be attracted to a program that speaks to how they like to consume information and interact with their environment.

I suppose innovation is in large part qualitative, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be measured.

Customer metrics, like new acquisitions, frequency of interaction, opt-ins & outs, revenue per customer and so on, can be double counted with other ROIs while showing how you are winning with mobile.

Product & media metrics, like messages sent, visits, bounce rates, time per visits, feature use, CPMs, CTRs and beyond, help you understand what your channels mean for brand reach and how you’re making new connections.

My one warning for innovating is beware of excluding customers for the sake of producing a shiny object. Explore ways to attract new customers while furthering your relationship with existing customers simultaneously.

Real innovation, for me, involves creating value across your customer profiles and lifecycle stages.

I’ll close with as tidy a summary as I can manage:

Insight = who + where
Involvement = what + how
Innovation = why
Investment = how much.

Hopefully, these overviews have given you a starting point for earning tangible returns from your mobile programs.

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Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1

Jonathan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:30:27 +0000

It’s that time of year for nostalgic reviews of the year that was and bold predictions about the year to come. This is not one of those posts.

I’ve already issued the call to make next year your “Year of Mobile.” There are plenty of stats there to support the idea that consumers have rabidly embraced mobility and it’s time for marketers to play catch-up. This post aims to provide a lens for you to view your mobile efforts and for determining successes, failures and learning.

My proposed model involves the 4 ROIs of Mobile. Return on Investment is a common cross-discipline yardstick for success. Return on Insight has been generating more awareness as a way to quantify campaign propositions. To these, I’m adding Return on Involvement and Return on Innovation.

Return on Investment

Accuse me of over-simplifying things if you want. But for me, return on investment is a straightforward calculation of “I spent X and earned Y”. The science is in being able to draw a solid line from spend to revenue. The good news is that mobile is highly trackable when properly executed.

Mobile commerce, the most obvious path, is gaining significant momentum and will eventually become a considerable revenue-driver, but it’s very much in its infancy in Canada (here’s where the US stands).

A better bet is to use direct and CRM marketing tactics to drive clicks to bricks. One of the best examples I have seen involves BMW’s efforts to target recent customers in an effort to drive snow tire sales. The campaign used customized messaging to drive interest, saw a 30% conversion rate and netted $45 million dollars in sales out a $120,000 investment.

Using mobile coupons tailored to customer interests, delivered at key decision points or including promo codes to drive to retail and/or e-commerce are all readily executable and highly measurable.

Mobile is with the customer at points of inspiration and decision. Capture attention there and conversion to action won’t be far behind.

Return on Insight

The key to Return on Insight is the understanding you can gain about your customers’ habits and preferences. Insight should drive everything from program planning delivering ongoing optimization benefits. Plan carefully and you’ll be able to draw from data points all along the customer experience.

Information on consumer devices and their capabilities plus data on how consumers use them and where they interact with you equals pure gold for developing programs that provide genuine and repeatable utility to customers.

Mobile applications offer perhaps the richest canvas for this type of data. But you should be well into your Insight research before even considering an app build. Ask yourself “do a significant + valuable + engaged slice of my customers or target customers have and use deeply an iPhone/Blackberry/Android device?”

Both the mobile web and advertising will provide you with the same kind of actionable data that you’ve come to love from their wired cousins. Plus, you can target demo- and psycho-graphically against handset types, geography, and more.

You can gain valuable customer insight even via the lowly text message. Getting customer opt-in and then allowing them to manage preference around what content they’d like and when they’d like to get it is immensely valuable.

A view through the Insight lens will help you develop and modify program features, provide optimized experiences and allocate budget according to where and how you can best reach your target audience. Sound data and insights lead to sound programming.

In the next post, I’ll review Return on Involvement and Return on Innovation.

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