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As advertisers devote an increasing share of their media budgets to mobile advertising, experimental campaigns are morphing into sustained efforts.  Even those brands just getting started in the channel will have heard the success stories and won’t be satisfied with ‘seeing what happens’.

Results matter and maximizing ROI or driving toward pre-defined, tangible goals places increased pressure on effective campaign management and optimization. Clear and measureable campaign objectives are the essential starting point. Acknowledging mobile as a powerful direct response channel and building in conversion points will improve targeting efforts.

However, simply setting up your campaign and letting it run its course denies the opportunity to leverage the rich data set that mobile advertising generates. Device, time, content, creative, destination and conversion metrics are among the points across which a campaign can be evaluated. Knowing how to interpret and translate that data into in-flight campaign optimization can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a failure.

Let’s get some assumptions out of the way:

1. You’ve done your homework and have a good sense of which devices your target audiences are likely to be using (or you’re casting a wide net across mobile users).
2. You have a mobile-friendly post-click destination. If you’re driving to a wired web destination go back to the drawing board.
3. You have access to media and conversion performance data in the shape of publisher/network reporting and post click tracking using Google Analytics or a mobile analytics service.
4. You’re a savvy enough planner – or work with one – so your media buy is leveraging properties with good content affinity to your message and your audience.
5. You’re working with a publisher/network that will let you adjust campaign targeting in-flight.  (I’ve yet to work with one that won’t; it’s in their best interest.)

At the very least you’ll be seeing the top-line reach and response stats – impressions, clicks, and click through rates (CTRs). These are helpful in providing a baseline for measuring your optimization efforts.  Content, geographic, time and device-specific reporting are the next level of mineable data.

The second baseline measure will be conversions. If you’ve managed to get consumers to click on your ad, don’t simply direct them to a flat landing page. Instead, have some response or engagement points to take advantage of the click. With that in place, you’ll be able to generate conversion rates or engagement levels.

Now that you have your campaign set up and you’re collecting performance data, here’s a list of questions you need to ask yourself to identify opportunities that will enable performance improvement via ongoing optimization:

Media Metrics

1. What are you CTRs by creative unit? Run multiple calls to action or creative treatments and adjust weight according to performance.
2. What are you CTRs by time? Focus on day parting to deliver more impressions when your message has the greatest currency.
3. What are you CTRs by device? Device metrics go a long way towards validating audience profile assumptions and ensuring relevant offers, content and design strategies.
4. Which content or context (e.g. location) dimensions are performing best? Cross-reference those results with creative, time and device CTRs.
5. Are your mobile search keyword groups fully exploiting aligned location or urgency searches? Search is a low cost, high conversion channel when deployed sensibly and managed properly.

Conversion Metrics

1. What content is generating the most views on your landing pages? Remember, mobile content consumption will likely follow a different pattern from web browsing.
2. Are there choke points in your conversion funnel? With multi-page interactions (e.g. registrations), you may notice drop off at certain points. Streamline the process to minimize friction and maximize familiar behaviour triggers.
3. What are the conversion comparisons between different devices? Could your content or design strategy be adjusted to take advantage of device browser or feature capabilities?
4. How do your conversions compare across geographies? What happens when you layer on device data to that metric? How about time of day metrics? Tweak your media to follow those patterns.
5. If you’re attributing revenue to your conversions, are some sources more profitable than others? How are different offers translating to conversion rates?

While some of these might seem obvious and different conversion points (e.g. landing pages, downloads, coupons, commerce, etc.) have unique dimensions to address, the fulcrum for mobile advertising success is the effective use of the added data layers that mobile devices, context and design/content strategies offer.

Be Smart. Tip the scales in your favour by acting on in-campaign reporting.

NOTE: This post appears as part of Mobile Marketer’s Classic Guide to Mobile Advertising 2010 package. You can get the full guide here.

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At Digital Cement, we’re focused on digital direct marketing. As part of articulating our POV on how specific digital channels can be used in effect customer acquisition efforts, I wrote a white paper on mobile as a direct marketing channel.

Here’s the intro to give you a flavour for the paper’s scope and focus:

The paper is a survey of these subjects rather than an exhaustive treatise.  It’s meant to provide thought starters for deploying mobile marketing programs in a way that sets the foundation for sustainable growth and verifiable success framed by a customer-centric approach.

You can find the paper here.

Hope you find it interesting and useful. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

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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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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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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.

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Mobile is, in a very real way, an extension of the owner into the world. It’s a conduit to their social graph and a way to process, document and engage their environment.

This is why their mobile is the first thing many people check in the morning, the last thing they check at night and the one thing they keep with them at all times.

Device features and functionality serve as both a tool and accessory and this is a key mark of  social artifact.

There are only a couple of other things that are ‘fetishized’ like this: cars, certain other consumer electronics, fashion. The form is for many just as important as the function.

This is why providing genuinely valuable and useful (whether entertaining, informing or rewarding) experiences that are wrapped in some degree of personal relevance are the only way brands can expect to earn a significant ’share of mobile’.

Use this lens when thinking about how to acquire and engage your mobile customer and you will be on the right track.

You will still need to test, learn and revise.

You will still need to start by understanding your customer’s mobile profile and habits.

But now you will have a framework for talking to customers when and where they want to talk to you and be able to do it over and over again.

Note: This is the first in a series of short posts – fragments really – generated from slides I use in various professional presentations.  They are pieces of my approach to mobile marketing.

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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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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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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

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With mobile devices basically glued to the hips & ears of most people, they’re a marketing channel filled with powerful opportunities for brand engagement, direct response and relationship marketing.  The device, though, gets a disproportionate share of attention – what’s the latest & greatest handset, what new features or software/applications are being introduced, etc…

It’s important to remember that mobile marketing is about people not devices.  The devices provide the platform and tools to engage, but you are still attempting to reach living, breathing human beings in all their rational and irrational glory.

Here are three people-centric ways you can go wrong with mobile marketing.

1. Abuse Consumer Permission

The mobile phone is a highly personal consumer extension. For many people it’s the most direct conduit into their lives. It’s no accident that one of the most often bandied about phrases regarding mobile is ‘always on, always with, always personal’. While this presents great opportunities for marketers to gain direct access to consumer preferences and intentions, it can also be a slippery slope if one isn’t careful about they communicate with consumers that have taken that first step and ‘opted-in’ to a marketing program.

Publisher Simon & Schuster recently got dinged for $90 million in damages for sending unsolicited text messages to consumers. If you can get a consumer to engage your brand via mobile, whether through SMS, an application or the mobile web, you have to take care to manage how any future communication is rolled out. The best approach is to explicitly ask the consumer if they want to receive future communications. You can take that one step further by getting a consumer to define the type of communication they would like to receive, when they would like to receive it and how often you can send them information.

This kind of thinking gives you more information about who you’re talking to and increases the relevance of your content. You’re happy because you’re increasing the depth of engagement. The consumer’s happy because you’re offering increased value.

2. Fail to account for context

Since the mobile is always on and always with, it’s intimately tied to what a consumer is doing at any moment and where they are. This creates a fertile ground for offering a deep utility to consumer action and habits. Applications which leverage location based technology provide the best use case for enriched utility, but even SMS marketing needs to account for context. Delivering coupons through point of sale media offers immediate value and can aid purchase intent, for example.

Content should be ’snackable’. Genuine and practical utility should be baked in to any experience. Ask yourself what are you trying to achieve and where consumers are likely to be when they’re interacting with you. More often than not, they will not be stationary, they will be on the go looking to meet an immediate need or want or entertain themselves.

3. Missing out on ‘bridging’ opportunities

Other than abusing consumer permission, creating a shallow mobile experience is the most common mistake I see in mobile programming.  This can be as simple as a text to win contest which doesn’t offer an opt-in for future information. More commonly, I see mobile advertising campaigns where the post-click experience simply fails to account for the fact the consumer is engaging via a mobile. This includes linking to a non-mobile optimized website. But I’ve also seen badly designed sites with no functionality such as an automotive advertiser who’s mobile site doesn’t include features like a dealership locator, a test-drive sign up form or even an email submit or click to call for more information.

If you’ve gotten a consumer to click on your ad why would you not take full advantage of this by extending the experience and bridging to another destination – either on the mobile device or into the ‘real world’.

As marketers become savvier at developing mobile experiences, these types of issues will (hopefully) fade into history. Keeping the consumer front of mind in any campaign design thinking is vital. The mobile device is just a tool, though one rich with features and a powerful platform for direct-to-consumer engagement. Focussing on the device rather than the user will lead you down the wrong path.  Take care to avoid these three pitfalls and you’ll be that much closer to earning (and keeping) your share of mobile.

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