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Note: This article was originally written for and appeared on MobileMarketer.com

I sat recently on a panel about mobile marketing analytics at the eMetrics Toronto conference.  It was a wide ranging discussion on marketers’ use of mobile advertising, the mobile web, apps and even SMS, as well as a debate on how mobile campaign success should be defined and measured.

While my fellow panellists and I were not short on opinions, it was an audience comment that struck me as particularly revealing and raised a number of important issues for brands building their mobile web properties.

The comment went something like this:

“We’ve built a number of mobile websites for clients but we find that when mobile users visit the full web version, they stay on that version of the site even when presented with an option to switch to a mobile optimized view.”

Scary stuff if you’re invested in the mobile web space. But let’s unpack this observation a bit as there’s a lot we can learn here.

Now, it wasn’t the right forum to ask a ton of follow up questions and I didn’t get to speak to the gentleman who posed the question after the panel, so I’m going to make a couple of assumptions:

• The full web version of the site is served up as default regardless of whether the visitor comes from a computer or a mobile phone.
• Most visitors tracked or referenced had devices with full web capable browsers such as an iPhone or Android device.

There’s also some important information that we just don’t know:

• Who are the clients in question? What is their business, what are their products or services?
• How are the full web sites built? Flash heavy? Mostly HTML?
• How prominently was the ‘mobile view’ link displayed?
• What is the content being consumed by mobile visitors and how does that compare to a wired visitor?
• How do mobile visitor site visit times, page views per visit and bounce rates compare to wired visitors?

When I heard the remark, I proposed that this situation actually created a great testing point for him and his clients. Instead of having the full web version set as default for mobile browsers, use device detection and serve up the mobile optimized version and see how many switch to the full web version.

With this type of A/B test, you can now see how a mobile-friendly version impacts content consumption, visit times, page views and bounce rates and then bake that information back into your content strategy and site design.

If your mobile site is already well designed with a data-driven content strategy, you should see improvement across page views and bounce rates. What happens to your visit times will depend more on the content you’re offering and the nature of your business. Is the information ‘snackable’ or response-driven like it would be for a retailer? Or, are you a publisher whose content naturally demands more sustained consumption?

The case for having a mobile site has been well stated elsewhere and there’s plenty of evidence supporting the development of a tailored mobile experience to account for unique mobile behavioral dimensions and device capabilities.

The real outcome of this exchange, for me, was a clear, broad definition of how to road-map your mobile web development from an analytics gathering to development input perspective. Here’s a four-step high level view:

Step 1: Use existing web analytics to gain a view into mobile visitor devices, content preferences and usage patterns.

Step 2: Develop a content strategy based on content preferences and consumption patterns. Develop a design strategy based on device and OS trends. Consider how content consumption relates to a user’s context.

Step 3: Leverage device capabilities (e.g. GPS, accelerometer, camera, and messaging) based on content strategy and contextual relevance. Wherever possible, build in response mechanisms.

Step 4: Test the mobile version against wired web norms and mobile content and design premises using mobile-centric analytics. If behavior fails to validate premises, adjust accordingly.

Just because something is working, doesn’t mean it is delivering maximum performance. A streamlined mobile version of your website will likely do a better job at delivering against KPIs than a full web version viewed on the device. To make sure it does, use the data you already have at your fingertips.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Four Mobile Web Experiences You Can Offer Customers
• The 3 Dimensions Of Effective Mobile Email
• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• 5 Steps To Address Mobile Customer Fragmentation
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper

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.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Four Mobile Web Experiences You Can Offer Customers
• The 3 Dimensions Of Effective Mobile Email
• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• 5 Steps To Address Mobile Customer Fragmentation
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper

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.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
• Two Words For The Mobile Future
• 3 Mobile Marketing Nuts For Brands to Crack
• Frictionless Mobile Marketing
• How To Roadmap Your Mobile Web Development

Google became a multi-billion dollar behemoth one nickel at a time through its AdWords program.  Look how that turned out.  You take one billion nickels and all of a sudden you have a lot of money.

What’s the lesson here?

Building anything successful requires patience. You need to learn what works, execute it well and that will lead to a solid foundation with an attractive upside.

So what does this have to do with mobile marketing?

Well, building a successful mobile marketing channel for your brand requires careful thought and patience.   Too often there’s a failure to appreciate the opportunity to nurture extended or ongoing participation or an expectation that mobile is some sort of silver bullet.

Two of the worst examples of this thinking are ‘single scoop’ promotional campaigns and iPhone applications with limited utility or where the core customers don’t map well onto the device’s user base.

A lot of mobile marketing efforts are focussed purely on short term promotional programming.  The prime example is layering SMS contest entry over an existing promotion.  There is most certainly a place for this type of execution. SMS has reach and familiarity among consumers and it allows you to entice desired behaviour with an incentive. The problem starts when brands either don’t use the opportunity to ask the consumer to opt-in for future communications or don’t bridge to another mobile experience that prompts action or deeper brand involvement.

The second mistake was getting swept up in the iPhone hysteria. I won’t call anyone out, but I can think of several brands that launched apps that were either so gimmicky that they were likely deleted or forgotten after a single use or the customer base was clearly not well represented among the iPhone user base.  Flurry, a mobile analytics firm, has some very revealing stats about application loyalty. Unless you have a strong core user base on the device and an application that genuinely adds value, save your money.  While launching an app can open up a new audience for your brand, it also creates tremendous pressure to offer something compelling and useful.

In both of these cases, the biggest danger (apart from wasting money) is that you’ll start to view mobile as an ineffective channel. You’ll be underwhelmed with the results or not realize the power and opportunity that earning a share of the consumer’s mobile device can offer you.

Here’s my lens for viewing effective mobile programming:

Merge campaign tactics into relationship programming

Short-term campaigns do have an important role to play in mobile marketing. They are great demand generation and customer acquisition vehicles. They can help move units with ‘clicks to bricks’ offers. They can support brand building efforts among key demographics.  But make sure you’re looking at these campaigns as part of a broader strategy that uses the personal and connected attributes of the channel to deepen customer engagement, loyalty, advocacy and propensity to purchase.

Bake value into your programming

Consumers aren’t going to give you a share of mobile without getting something in return. There has to be a value exchange that’s weighted in their favour. Contest prizing certainly fits the bill, as do coupons and other discounts or exclusive opportunities. But the value can also take the form of something that offers genuine and repeatable utility. A simple, common example would be an allergy medication company sending out SMS pollen count alerts to opted-in customers.  Consider both one-time and long-term involvement with each and every consumer interaction.

These approaches take time and patience. You will need to test and learn, continuously. Some efforts will work better than others. It may take time for your audience to fully embrace your mobile efforts and for you to gain the necessary insight into their mobile habits and preferences. But thoughtful and measured mobile programs will create a solid foundation in a channel that is increasingly central to your brand’s digital footprint.

Note: This post can also be found on Profectio.com

Possibly Related Posts:

• Four Mobile Web Experiences You Can Offer Customers
• The 3 Dimensions Of Effective Mobile Email
• Launch and Learn – Driving Campaign Success with In-Flight Optimization
• 5 Steps To Address Mobile Customer Fragmentation
• Mobile + The New Direct White paper

During a mobile advertising presentation at a recent digital marketing conference, I heard the presenter say sheepishly that this was not “the year of mobile”.  Besides injecting a self-defeating note into an otherwise interesting and compelling presentation, I have a hard time understanding why some people feel a need to constantly parrot this statement.

Mobile is a marketing channel, not a religious experience.

Would anyone know what “the year of mobile” will actually look like? Will marketing spend suddenly leap exponentially? Will consumers rise up in revolt demanding more brand presence in the channel?

Today, I’m taking a stand and refusing to participate in the “is it/isn’t it the year of mobile” discussion anymore. It’s unnecessarily apologetic and absolves everyone of the responsibility for seizing the opportunity in front of them.

And there is significant opportunity.

Mobile penetration in Canada skirts around 75% (a number greater than internet penetration at least according to some). We send over 20 billion text messages annually (and have been doubling that number just about every year). Over 20% of Canadians regularly use the mobile internet. AdMob, one of many mobile advertising networks, served just under 200 million Canadian impressions in August ‘09. And let’s not forget the iPhone, right? The audience exists and is exhibiting appealing behaviour.

There is second debate that I’m going to stop getting drawn into – the cost of data in Canada.

Yes, it’s higher than just about everywhere else and should probably be lower. Yes, the carrier oligopoly doesn’t help. But the truth is you can get 500MB of data for about $30/month. I’m definitely an above average data user and rarely come close to that amount. If you have 1GB of data (probably costing about $45/month), you’ve probably got way more data than you need unless you’re regularly streaming video.

For me, the data debate is less a question of cost and more an issue of a disproportionate value ratio. That is, it seems overly expensive because there’s a relative lack of available content and experiences. Your internet and cable bills are likely to be at least as much, and probably more, than your mobile data bill. But less issue is taken with that because of the dizzying mass of content those channels support.

So what to do? Well, there are grounds for optimism. The very fact that there is talk of “the year of mobile” suggests that we all recognize the channel’s potential and want to see it realized.  There are certainly marketers and publishers that are active in mobile and succeeding.  Perhaps the blame for the sluggish uptake is two-fold. The mobile industry needs to do a better job aligning and defining expectations, measurement and ROI. Marketers need to be willing to invest, build, test, learn and refine. There’s rarely reward without a little risk.

Elsewhere, it’s been suggested that 10% of your marketing budget should be devoted to mobile. If that number frightens you, I challenge you to invest 5% of your budget in mobile for 2010. Launch a mobile internet site. Test some mobile advertising. Build a mobile opt-in database. If you are concerned about the data issue, try SMS marketing. Text messaging offers the widest reach and enables all kinds of promotional and direct response tactics.

The right tactical mix will be different for each marketer but there are plenty of willing providers to help you navigate the options and manage the technology side.

Don’t wait. Make this your “year of mobile”.

Note: This piece was cross-posted on Profectio.com

Possibly Related Posts:

• Managing Your Mobile Marketing Strategy: Introducing the Mobile Maturity Diagnostic.
• Two Words For The Mobile Future
• 3 Mobile Marketing Nuts For Brands to Crack
• Frictionless Mobile Marketing
• How To Roadmap Your Mobile Web Development