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?

Possibly Related Posts:

• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge
• Brother, Can you spare a text?

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:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge
• Brother, Can you spare a text?

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.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge
• Brother, Can you spare a text?

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:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• The 5% Mobile Challenge
• Brother, Can you spare a text?

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:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• Brother, Can you spare a text?

Here’s a snapshot of some of my tweets and some back channel conversations:

0 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.

about 5 hours ago from SocialScope · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation

about 5 hours ago from SocialScope · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation

about 5 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation

JohnMcCauley66: RT @JCDunn: I guess its now a compliment to have ppl pecking away at mobiles during a conference presentation #mixxcanada #twitterholics
about 5 hours ago from UberTwitter · Reply · View Tweet

The rest of my coverage can be found here and you can get the full picture via a Twitter Search on #mixxcanada.

PS. Yes, this may be the easy way of doing this, but after a day of live tweeting, I have thumb fatigue. It’s a legit condition…

PPS. If you know how to embed a Twitter search into a blog post, I’m interested.

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And nothing, I would argue, is more convenient and simple as sending a text message and having a small donation tacked onto your monthly cell phone bill.  Agreed?

Well rejoice.

Canadians can now do just this thanks to a just-announced partnership between the CWTA and the Mobile Giving Foundation. As of this moment, there’s only a handful of approved charities (Plan Canada, Jays Care Foundation, Best Buddies and the Children’s Wish Foundation) but expect that to rise.

Key for the success of the initiative, 100% of all donations go the charities themselves and you still get a tax donation receipt.

On the surface, this is geared towards increasing charitable donations among younger consumers who are also the heaviest texters. But text messaging has become such a common activity that it should really appeal to anyone.

A few other thoughts:

• The best use case for this is for micro-donations (say $5-10) at events or via street team solicitation.
• Charities should also be using this opportunity to build their mobile database by getting opt-ins for future communication. If they aren’t able to under this program, it should be urgently considered.
• Extend the experience by building out simple mobile websites where you can futher education around how donations are being used. You never know how that might drive up donation levels.
• Suspicion of carriers is high, so really sell the 100% donation and tax receipt.

I can’t emphasize enough the opportunity this provides to create a sustained dialogue via the mobile channel.

You’ve qualified a consumer’s interest by their very act of donating. By securing an opt-in, you can now provide updates on how the money is being used (simple SMS updates or use the SMS to push to a mobile site housing picture or video updates), new fundraising events and initiatives (why not mobile ticketing?), or even  subsequent donation calls to action.

I imagine the solicitation of future donations might be controlled and there should be guidelines around the frequency and relevance of communication. But properly designed, you can manage consumer preferences and ensure a high degree of relevance. Do that, and you’ve got a powerful new direct response channel.

So…would you spare a text?

Possibly Related Posts:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge

It’s a new position for the company, but a natural one given their mandate to “help leading organizations start, grow, deepen and measure relationships with their most valuable customers.”  They’ve got a lot of experience in the life sciences and CPG/retail verticals, which is a great fit for mobile when you think about how personalization & contextual relevance can make such a huge difference for customers in those settings. The client mix goes beyond those industries and, let’s be honest, what organization wouldn’t benefit from strengthening the bond between its brand/services and its customers?

My first two weeks have really been about onboarding as much information as I can about the organization and fleshing out how mobile will fit into the overall service mix.

A couple things have really jumped out as tremendous assets for the growth of the mobile practice:

• There’s a real emphasis on making sound strategic decisions backed up with well-researched qualitative and quantitative analysis.  Programs are always based on solving real business problems and with clear, measureable ROI (whether ‘return on investment’ or ‘return on innovation’) in mind;
• The in-house marketing design & technology is really strong, especially on the user experience and database management side;
• There’s a lot of very smart people who really care and work hard.

Broadly, my mandate is to be the go-to-guy for mobile subject matter expertise and business development. I’ll be hands-on with both program strategy and campaign tactics, working with mobile media partners and managing any outside vendor relations.

A big bonus for me is the platform offered by the emphasis on strategic analysis and measurement. Mobile, especially in Canada, lacks solid benchmarks for program spending and results.  There’s the firepower here to change that and move mobile from a ‘nice to have’ to an essential digital channel.

While you can contact me though this site or on Twitter, if you’d like to connect when I’ve got my work hat on, reach me at jdunn[at]digitalcement[dot]com.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge

iPhone applications get most of the attention in marketing/technology circles. While the device’s market share is growing steadily, and handsets with similar capabilities are becoming more common among the average consumer, when a brand launches an iPhone app it gets lots of attention in the trade press but the majority of mobile consumers are left to either drool jealously or yawn (if they’re aware of the app at all).

It remains true that the vast majority of consumers have non-smartphones and the more widely used non-voice phone feature is text messaging (though some studies say the camera).

I could trot out stats to back this up but they aren’t hard to find. Okay…here’s a decent summary of US-specific stats.

Instead, I was thinking about a simple analogy to explain the difference.

Mobile is like pie.

Take a look at any dessert table and you have an assortment of tasty treats to choose from. Same with mobile where you have apps, advertising, internet, messaging, gaming, video, etc….

Think of apps, especially iPhone apps as that rich, creamy chocolate eclair (or cheesecake, keylime pie…). It’s a delight for your sense, offers the most intense flavour, but not everyone’s going to able to have it. For starters, they may watching their weight (just as consumer’s have to think about their wallets before getting a iPhone).If you have it at all, it will be a small portion….just like the audience reach for these devices currently.

On the other side of the spectrum is apple pie. Who doesn’t like apple pie? It’s simple, homey goodness that still gives you plenty of sweetness and won’t offend people’s taste buds or waistlines (unless you start dumping cream all over it). Apple pie is like SMS. Go ahead and have a bigger slice…and reach a bigger audience.

We can debate where mobile internet, advertising and so on fit into the continuum. But what’s important for me is that you need to find the right tactics to reach your target audience and device-specific programming may be right for you, but it could also be unneeded calories.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Easing Into B2B Mobile Marketing
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 2
• Mobile’s 4 ROIs – Part 1
• Avoiding A Mobile House of Cards
• The 5% Mobile Challenge

I took the line that let’s not focus on emerging applications and top of the line handsets. While they offer the richest experiences and most robust tools, they make up such a small percentage of the overall mobile market. Instead, let’s drill down to more basic tools such as SMS and even the trusty camera and look at mobile as both a set of tools that everyone has available to them and as an extension of a living, breathing, human out in the real world.

Anyway, here’s the deck:

This really just represents some preliminary thoughts on how mobile can be leveraged to acquire, engage and mobilize a community of interest. I may be way off base so feedback, as always, welcome.

The session was recorded so when that comes out I’ll update the post, or you can check out the Refresh website for yourself…the deck might make more sense with my running commentary.

You can also find the decks from the other presenters who did 5 minute talks on their experiences with community here.

I’d like to thank the Refresh team for inviting me to speak. I really enjoyed myself and had some great conversations after my presentation. If you haven’t been to one of these events, you really should. Next one is, I believe, a summer social.

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• Refresh Events: Talking You Down From The Bleeding Edge