Jonathandunn.ca » ROI

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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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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