The following is an exclusive guest contributed post to MMW by product marketing manager at Adobe Campaign, Mickael Bentz.
Today customers use their mobile devices for more than just apps and mobile Web and mobile marketing requires much more than just branded apps. It’s pluralistic, rich in opportunities spread among many different channels. A great mobile app is like a gold nugget, but it’s only one among many. Don’t be fooled into putting all your mobile marketing eggs into that one, very challenging, app basket.
Let’s examine a typical smartphone user’s journey through this Business Insider graph of the breakdown of the 58-minute average smartphone daily time-spend.
- Talk
The top spot, at 26 percent of smartphone use is captured by talk. Clearly, an app won’t help here. To maximize value here, marketers need to:
- Run call-center campaigns
- Make sure your phone number is easy to find when a customer searches your brand on Google and possibly buy ads that show your phone number
- Add “click-to-call” or “call back” buttons on your website
- Texting
Next is text, capturing a 20 percent slice. In this segment, marketers should consider:
- Run text-based campaigns
- Add invitations on your offline ads and digital properties to engage with your brand; these could be e.g. “Text COUPON to 5677 to receive a 20-percent-off coupon” or “Text your email to 5660 to subscribe to our newsletter and receive valuable offers”
- Social
What’s next? Social networks, at 15 percent time-spend. To leverage this slice:
- Optimize your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter presence.
- Considertrying out trending-messaging apps, such as LINE or Snapchat, sending funny messages, selling stickers, etc.
- Mobile Web
Almost as large a slice as socialis mobile Web, at 14 percent. Here, marketers can maximize results by
- Optimizing your site and contents for mobile browsing. Customers on their smartphone’s mobile browser don’t care about your corporate history, the latest news release, or your corporate vision.
- Optimizing navigation and clearly displaying your phone number, address, and customer-service contact information so your customers can easily find you and get what they want.
Email grabs 9 percent. Here, it is important for marketers, at minimum, to
- Make your email message design responsive.
- For added value, make your email context-aware. I.e., display specific banners for mobile users based on device detection and include specific content based on the time of the day or user location.
- Gaming
Games account for 8 percent of smartphone time usage. You could try to create an amusing game, but you’d be competing with gaming pros, so you’re unlikely to come out on top. Instead, consider the following:
- Partner with those pros so your brand banner appears on items for sale within the game and/or on free download copies of the game (remember how the producers of the film Rio partnered with Angry Birds, who came out with Angry Birds Rio?).
- Alternatively, you can buy in-game ads.
Which of the above mobile marketing activities are you already covering? Which others have you found to be effective?
