Mobile Marketing

How Mobile Technology is Revolutionizing Marketing, Communications and Advertising

Daniel Rowles

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749479800
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Mobile Marketing is a clear, practical guide to harnessing the mobile consumer and tackling the rising challenges of divided user attention across multiple screens at the same time. It demystifies the vast spectrum of tools and techniques now available and explains how to optimize these dynamics into an innovative and effective mobile marketing strategy. Now that website search rankings take into account mobile optimization, no serious marketer can do without a thorough understanding of mobile.The first edition of Mobile Marketing won the Judge's Choice Award in Social Media at the Small Business Trend's 2014 Book Awards. This fully revised 2nd edition includes straightforward explanations on mobile optimized content, app development, social media and proximity based marketing. It has also expanded to include two brand new chapters on mobile and email and on location-based devices, plus cutting-edge updates on advances in wearable technology, mobile payments, virtual reality and strategies for the changing user journey. Integrated with tactical checklists, easy application frameworks and powerful case study insights such as Heineken, WordPress, MailChimp, Nike Training Club (NTC), Google Play and Moz, it provides a full overview from service provision and technology integration to content strategy, ready to capture fast-moving consumers on the go. Online resources include a digital marketing instructors manual, supporting lecture slides, example exam and self-test questions, and a content calendar template.

PART ONE

Mobile marketing in perspective

01

Introduction

It’s very easy to start thinking about mobile marketing from the perspective of the tactics we are planning to implement: that great idea for an app, a beautifully designed responsive website or a clever idea for using mobile payments. The reality, just with any digital marketing activity, is that it’s generally a very good idea to take a step back and fully understand what we are trying to achieve and the environment we are working in.

Part One therefore is all about understanding the broader environment we are working in. It will help you understand who the mobile consumer is, get a core view of the technology involved and finally show you how to set objectives for your mobile marketing.

This core knowledge will help you inform your strategy before you start to embark on the tactical journey of implementing your mobile marketing campaigns (which is covered in detail in Part Two).

Although this section explores some of the latest statistics and developments in mobile marketing, we also acknowledge that this is a fast-paced environment with constant change. For that reason, we have pointed out numerous resources along the way, as well as compiling the best of these on our website.

This first part of the book is also here to stop you wasting time and money by highlighting some of the key risks of mobile marketing. It is very easy to be seduced by new technologies that offer fantastic creative opportunities. However, without the grounding of how this fits into an overall strategy and a clear measurement framework to tie things back to our objectives, there is huge potential to be very busy without being productive in any way.

I still see, on an almost daily basis, Facebook pages for the sake of Facebook pages and mobile apps for the sake of apps. This generally starts in one of two ways. Either somebody senior says, ‘Why don’t we have an app? Go make an app!’ or somebody comes up with a half-baked idea that starts its life without any proper planning. The end results are generally disappointing and costly. This then gives the impression that mobile is costly, complicated and ineffective. In reality, any marketing done in this way is generally a disaster.

This section, however, is not about looking at the negative. It’s all about embracing the huge and exciting potential that mobile marketing offers and doing so in a risk-mitigated way. This will help you make the most of your resources and should save you a lot of stress.

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What Part One will help you do

• Make sure you have a clear view of the environment you are working in.
• Understand how mobile makes up part of the user journey.
• Set your objectives and understand the mobile technologies that might help you achieve these objectives.
• Highlight some of the key risks you will face along your mobile marketing journey.
• Understand how to cope with a fast-changing environment and see how our website can help you stay up to date and on top of the latest developments: http://www.targetinternet.com/mobilemarketing.

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02

Understanding the user journey

We can now interact with businesses from pretty much anywhere we have some form of internet connection. On the bus, travelling by train or whilst walking along. This image of mobile marketing being all about mobility in its purest sense is often used, but defies the reality of how we are actually using mobile devices in the majority of cases. Most mobile usage is done at home, in the office or somewhere else stationary, and most of it is about ‘me’ time (Gevelber, 2016).

So if it’s actually not about using your phone when moving, why is Hotels.com’s ‘Hotel Booked in Freefall’ video (TheJTHolmes, 2011) so successful (attracting over 1 million views in YouTube at time of publishing) and often quoted as a great example, as it is in Google’s excellent Mobile Playbook.

Well, first of all it’s a fun and engaging concept that grabs your attention. Somebody trying to book a hotel room on a phone whilst jumping out of a plane is a fairly extreme idea! However, it achieves its objectives as a piece of marketing because it demonstrates and reinforces a key value proposition. That is the idea that Hotels.com makes it quick and easy to book hotels.

This alignment with value proposition and what the consumer actually wants is essential, and although it sounds obvious, is more often than not completely missed in mobile marketing campaigns. The reason that this basic concept of alignment with consumer requirements is missed is that we (or the partners and agencies we work with) are blinded by the technology and creative options.

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The consumer and business-to-business

Very often when we talk about ‘mobile consumers’ we immediately start to think about somebody buying a product in a shop or a website. However, I think we should look at the consumer in a broader context, and part of this will include anyone that is engaging with our mobile marketing in some way.

For this reason, when we talk about the mobile consumer, we will also be considering those making business-to-business (B2B) purchasing decisions. Clearly the requirements of somebody checking the reviews of a movie are very different to those of somebody checking information on the supplier they are about to meet, but they do hold the same principle in common. That is, that we need to understand what this consumer is trying to achieve and in what context.

In many cases mobile marketing is dismissed in the B2B environment as something that is more suited to business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, but I would argue that the whole point of mobile is its personal nature and the need to understand the target audience’s objectives and context.

Business users mix their personal and business time on mobile devices, and with social platforms like LinkedIn it is possible for this line to become even further blurred. For example, I may be relaxing and staying up to date with my social contacts and I may be looking at the LinkedIn app as part of this.

We clearly need to look at B2B and B2C marketing differently, but many of the same core principles apply. At the core of this is understanding our target users’ needs and context, then using mobile marketing to service these needs an...