My voice

Over the past month or so, I have had several meetings with digital marketing teams in both retail and CPG companies. The original premise of my meeting was to demo/pitch our (eCO - eXtendMobility Consumer Outreach) interactive mobile marketing/analytics platform and services. So far, the responses have been good; we are in next level discussions with most of our prospects. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most of the prospects didn’t have a clear strategy around mobile marketing. They all felt the need to do something on the mobile channel, but were grappling with the details around how to make it actionable, and more importantly how to measure the performance of the mobile initiatives. This got me thinking about the essential elements of a mobile marketing. If I had the opportunity to come up with the mobile marketing strategy for any of these companies, how would I do it?

Here are my two cents around how to establish a mobile marketing strategy:

First and foremost, we need to embrace the fact that mobile is a complex marketing channel with more than one way to reach consumers on their handsets - SMS, Mobile Web, client apps (iPhone, Android, etc), bluetooth. It is important to clearly understand all the nuances involved in communicating in these micro-mobile channels. We should always remember that when we talk about mobile marketing, it applies to all of the above mentioned micro-mobile channels, collectively. So, remember, iPhone app alone does not qualify as mobile marketing strategy. Look at the big picture.

Once we understand the complexity of creating marketing communications through various micro-mobile channels, we can then focus on best practices on how to set up a measurable mobile marketing strategy.

Here are my thoughts around how to make the mobile marketing strategy measurable and effective

Integrated - It is important to make sure that the mobile marketing initiatives are in-line and integrated with the rest of the marketing initiatives, such as email, online, direct mail. It is a good practice to establish this parity so that consumers can freely adopt to consuming marketing content on their mobile phones. This parity in marketing programs will make it easy for consumers to move between marketing channels (email - online - mobile) seamlessly and will help in understanding the consumer behaviors and cross-channel attribution. 

Commerce driven- The underlying reason for any kind of marketing is to promote commerce, increase the basket size, up-sell/cross-sell. So, why should mobile marketing be any different? We need to make sure that there is a clear commerce element in all of the mobile marketing initiatives. I don’t mean in a literal sense where each mobile marketing message is an offer or coupon. It can be informational message or alerts about recalls, but when syndicated the right way, it should result in long term value, build consumer loyalty, which in-turn results in repeat visits (purchases). Mobile channel can also be used purely as a medium of communicating with the consumers, educating them of the benefits and finally driving them to show up at the nearest retail store - increase foot traffic to the stores. This strategy can be further enhanced by the location aware mobile marketing campaigns. 

Data in - Data out - Mobile marketing is extremely data driven. In order to get the most out of mobile marketing initiatives, we need first try to answer the following questions before we come up with mobile marketing initiatives:

Who are the target consumers?

What do the consumers want to receive?

Where do the consumers want to receive?

When do they want to receive?

Similarly, we also need to make sure that we gather as much data possible to connect the dots from the moment a marketing message was sent to a consumer to the time the consumer shows up at the store (or online) to redeem (or take some action) the offer. This data will be extremely valuable in performing attributional analysis across multiple channels.

Marketing message -  The mobile marketing strategy should automatically account for the nuances involved in delivering a marketing campaign across the micro-mobile channels (SMS, mobile web, client apps, etc). It is important to make sure that this section of the strategy is fully automated, otherwise it might take up additional internal resources to manage the mobile marketing initiatives. 

Personalization - Personalization is always a must-have when it comes to delivering to consumer’s mobile phone. At the very least make sure that the mobile marketing strategy should account for some form of machine learning algorithms to ensure that consumer does not see what he/she is not interested in. 

I would always love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.

If you found this perspective interesting, you can follow me on twitter @araman1. Please feel free to share this if you found it useful.