Understanding how mobile marketing fits into your marketing plans
Identifying key players to help enable your strategy
Calculating the costs of mobile marketing
Aligning goals to your potential reach
Developing a mobile marketing strategy can be fairly straightforward; however, the task does involve reviewing a lot of data and sifting through marketing objective, technology, and channel details that are unique to mobile marketing. You then need to integrate these details with your overall multichannel marketing strategy. Developing and executing an effective mobile marketing strategy takes time, attention, and a keen understanding of every aspect of your market, your business, and even other businesses that provide the mobile services and connections you need.
You can make the processes as detailed and complex (or as simple) as you like, but keep in mind that developing a strategy is an iterative, try, learn, try again process. Take comfort, however, in the fact that firms both large and small throughout the world have developed and executed on mobile marketing strategies to generate results and return on their investments. You can do it, too!
This chapter outlines the process for mapping out your mobile marketing strategy. We explain how to formulate your objectives and identify key players in the mobile marketing industry that you need to interact with for your strategy to work. We show you how to calculate the costs of mobile marketing and how to evaluate your reach so you can start to define your audience and the potential size of your audience.
Marketing, at its core, is about communication and engagement. As a marketer, it's your job to communicate and engage your customer; that is, impart information and news about your products, services, and related activities to your audience (customers, clients, partners, and society at large) so that they can know what your organization does and how to engage with your offers.
Note
Mobile marketing is basically a very powerful way of enabling communication and engagement with your prospects and customers in all sorts of interactive and productive ways.
When you're planning to employ mobile marketing, you should first start with your high-level goals and objectives before you jump into tactics and execution details. You should start by thinking about how you'll weave mobile marketing into your entire marketing plan. In other words, you'll want to keep your overall goals in mind (company and product branding, customer acquisition, retention and relationship management, support/care, social media engagement) as you assemble the parts of your plan. Your overall goals may include one or more of the following:
Increasing brand awareness and recall (branding): Increase the number of potential customers that know about you, the number of news stories or blog posts written about you, click-through rates on a mobile Web site, consumer brand recall of your marketing, or your advertising programs and brand.
Generating leads and identifying new prospects (acquisition): The objective here is to fill up the opt-in database so that you have qualified, interested people to market to in the future.
Acquiring new customers (acquisition): Generate initial transactions from first-time buyers, drive first-time attendance to events or traffic to retail stores.
Increasing revenues and profits from existing customer base (retention and relationship management): That is, generate repeat purchases from customers both for existing and new products at sustainable profit levels.
Enhancing existing customer loyalty and activity (retention and relationship management): For example, increase loyalty point redemption, stimulate word-of-mouth activities, increase customer participation in programs, drive attendance to an event, store, Web site, and so on.
Improving resolution time for all customer inquiries/complaints (customer support/care): Make people happier by addressing their questions, issues, and problems in a cost-effective, low-stress, timely manner.
Stimulating social media engagement world-of-mouth/viral marketing activities (social media engagement): Get your audience talking positively about you, evangelizing your service with the market and offering support.
Note
These are not simply mobile marketing objectives, but marketing objectives. Remember, mobile marketing is simply a tool to help you deliver value to your customer, to help you market and achieve your company's objectives.
The following sections explain the key resources you need to get your mobile marketing plan under way with your overall objectives in mind.
To build a successful mobile marketing plan, draw upon the following:
Industry experience: Industry experience, both yours and your partner's, pertains to your specific industry, such as retail, to the overall mobile marketing industry, and to the way mobile marketing can be used in your industry. You can also accelerate your expertise and experiences by joining a trade association like the Mobile Marketing Association (
www.mmaglobal.com) and an association that caters to your business (likeShop.orgfor retail).Historical customer data, trends, and predictions: Gather as much data as you can (research analyst reports, case studies both from your industry and others, your past customer transactions, and so on). You can find this data in your own company databases, in industry news articles, at industry trade associations, in industry analyst reports, on sites like Slideshare (
www.slideshare.com), Marketing Charts (www.markeingcharts.com), Pew Internet Research (www.pewinternet.com), and countless other sources. Data is everywhere. See the section, "Including Customer Analysis in Your Strategy" later in this chapter for more.Competitive analysis: Conduct a competitive analysis and evaluate the competition. Understand what they're doing, think about what they might do, and consider the way these actions will affect your response to them and the market. You must be a chess player, thinking several moves ahead. Great sources of competitive analysis include reviewing your competitor's Web site, reading their press releases, and listening to them speak at conferences.
Industry best practices and rules: As noted in Chapter 3, make sure you understand the industry best practices and regulations
Gathering all this information and experience takes time. Moreover, sifting through it all and generating insights that help you make decisions also takes time. So don't wait. Get started now and, over time, you'll become an expert!
Your marketing objectives, and all the information you collect to support your plan, should be written down and included in a plan that provides a complete 360 degree view of your mobile marketing efforts. Your plan should cover the following seven key components:
Your target audience: The plan should specifically call out who you want to reach — your prospects, customers, partners, society at large, and so on.
Your offerings: The plan should detail exactly what you offer and the value your customers will get from the offers; in other words, how will your offers fulfill their needs, alleviate their pains, and meet their demands. In addition, you should think about how your offerings will change as your customer moves through the journey — a marketing concept that refers to the stages of customer engagement. See the next section, "Managing the Customer Journey."
Your quantified objectives: You should detail what it is you want to accomplish, such as increase brand awareness, improve sales in a particular region by X percent, become the number one player in your market within Y years by holding Z percentage of the market share, and so on.
Resources: Your plan should detail all the resources (people, partners, money, technology, services, and so on) you need to accomplish your objectives.
The communication efforts: Your plan should be very specific as to what you want to say to the market, and the channels, including mobile, you use to communicate your message to the market. Also be specific about how this message and your communications will change through every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Delivery channels: Your plan should detail how you plan to get your offerings out to the market.
Exchange: Finally, your plan needs to be specific regarding how you'll conduct your business and exchange value with your audience.
For your marketing to be successful, you must understand your customer's journey. The journey, in this sense, includes all the engagements you have with your customers from the time they first start thinking about taking an action, for example, buying a house, to the point they stop. To understand your customer's journey, you should consider both the customer lifecycle — that is, the stages of engagement with your customers — as well as the specific thought processes your customers take when they're considering buying a good or a service. When you understand this thought process, you can then find ways to augment this journey through mobile marketing practices using all the tools and techniques discussed throughout this book.
The customer lifecycle is a concept you can use to develop a broad understanding of how you interact with and engage your customers. In the lifecycle, shown in Figure 2-1, all customers go through a few "windows" of engagement as they interact with you:
Transaction window: This marks the first time you communicate or engage with a customer regarding your product or service offerings. The objective in the transaction window is to "acquire" the customer — that is, have them buy something from you or use your product or service.
Relationship window: After you've successfully acquired a customer, you have started a relationship with her. In the relationship window, you look to nurture the relationship and have her buy more from you over time.
Support and care window: In the event that some aspect of your relationship or transaction with the customer isn't working — the customer doesn't understand your product, say, or your product breaks in shipping — your customer may contact you for help and support. When she does so, she's entered the support and care window. The objective in this window is to solve the customer's problem or answer her question in a satisfactory, cost-effective way so that the customer may re-enter the relationship window.
Evangelism window: The evangelism window refers to using social media sites like Facebook (
www.facebook.com), Twitter (www.twitter.com), or Foursquare (www.foursquare.com) to encourage your customers to share their positive experiences about your products and services with their personal networks.
Within this customer lifecycle, consider your interactions with customers at a more granular level; that is, as a series of interactions that may occur within any one of the above lifecycle windows. We call this exercise customer journey analysis. Performing a customer journey analysis is a good way for you to begin to understand your customer's behavior in great detail. It also helps you understand how mobile marketing can improve your customer's overall experience with you. The customer journey specifically refers to all the actions a customer takes from the initial stage of wanting to do something, such as buying a house, to the conclusion of the activity, that is, buying or not buying the house.
Angel Evan from Dark Matter (www.the-dark-matter.com), a leading mobile marketing strategic agency, has provided the example of a customer journey analysis shown in Figure 2-2. In this example, a customer moves through the process of buying a home. From a mobile prospective, note that different stages in the customer journey offer many possible points of mobile interaction. For example, when a customer decides to buy a home, she may start by visiting your Web site, where a link allows her to sign up for text messaging alerts about houses that meet her profile. (See Chapter 5 for more about text alerts.)
Mobile devices today are more than simple telephones: They're rich computing platforms that come in various shapes and sizes, running off of a myriad of networks and on numerous operating systems that support a wide range of variant capabilities. In fact, as noted in Chapter 1, they may not even be phones.
Creating the best mobile experience for your customers starts with usability of the mobile experience you want to build. Your marketing plan needs to take into account the following challenges with mobile devices in order to be effective:
The screens vary and are typically smaller than most computer screens.
Navigation is limited on a mobile device. You're dealing with a different keyboard and no mouse, and up and down and side to side navigation varies. See Figure 2-3.
Mobile devices have no or limited printer access.
Bandwidth may be restricted, although this is becoming less of an issue with smartphones and the latest networks.
Data connections often cost money (in some cases, a lot of money).
Tip
Don't get discouraged. The positive features of newer smartphones outweigh the challenges. Your mobile marketing solution can still use rich methods of information exchange. Here are some of the things that mobile devices excel at:
Taking, displaying, and exchanging pictures
Taking, playing, and exchanging videos
Recording, playing, and exchanging music
Sending messages via SMS, MMS, or e-mail
Telling you where they are (GPS-based features)
Facilitating commerce (transaction ability built-in)
Browsing the Internet
Oh, yeah, and making calls, too
There are the four basic approaches to choose from when executing a mobile marketing strategy or campaign:
Do-it-yourself: With this approach, you go it alone: You develop your own strategies, create and execute your own programs, and build all your own technology. This takes a massive commitment and investment – think things through before taking on this approach.
Agency: With an agency approach, you contract with one or more marketing agencies or specialized mobile agencies or service providers to handle everything for you.
Platform: With the platform approach, you handle the strategic, creative, and tactical execution of programs yourself, and you use a mobile service provider's licensed software application or platform for your technology.
Hybrid: With the hybrid approach, you choose elements of each of the two aforementioned approaches. For example, you may outsource creative work to a mobile service provider or agency and keep strategy for yourself, or license a platform for one part of a campaign.
Tip
Which approach you select depends on how much of the overall mobile marketing process you want to personally take on and what pieces you see as being critical to your company's competitive advantage and core business offerings.
Mobile marketing isn't something you should plan to do all alone. In order to get your mobile marketing done, you need to include other service providers from the mobile marketing industry.
The companies that enable mobile marketing to happen on a technical and professional level are called mobile service providers. Mobile service providers are people, companies, business practices, and marketers all ready and willing to help you leverage the myriad of mobile paths so that you can engage your customers with compelling mobile and mobile marketing programs. Mobile service providers are a part of the entire strategic mobile marketing ecosystem (shown in Figure 2-4).
In order to successfully launch a mobile marketing campaign, you should consider working with one or more of the following mobile service providers:
Traditional media providers: When you use mobile to connect with customers, you have to follow certain rules and regulations designed to offer the consumer a certain amount of control. Traditional media providers are well versed on these regulations and guidelines and are good for those not willing or able to research the laws. Traditional media players include television, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, retail and point-of-sales displays, e-mail, Internet, billboard providers, and other out-of-home promotional media players. For example, most aspects of mobile marketing legally require consumers to explicitly opt-in to receive your messages. Unless your customers and prospects already know how to contact you and take the initiative themselves, you must obtain a mobile subscriber's consent via a medium other than mobile, as shown in Figure 2-5. You can read more about opt-in in Chapters 3 and 4.
Wireless carriers: Wireless carriers (also commonly referred to as mobile operators, wireless networks, or wireless operators) provide the piping, towers, billing systems, support, outlets, and more so that you can engage your customers via the mobile channel. You may be surprised to discover that there are literally hundreds of wireless carriers around the world. The United States has about 50, but the market is dominated by the big four national carriers: AT&T Mobility, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. These four companies account for about 93 percent of all the mobile subscribers in the country.
Connection aggregators: You aren't likely to work directly with a wireless carrier, unless you work for a very large brand. Instead, you will work with a connection aggregator. Connection aggregators are companies that contract with and, well, "aggregate," messaging (including SMS, MMS, content, and billing services) across multiple wireless carriers both locally and throughout the rest of the world. Aggregators are the bridge between you, the wireless carriers, and other service providers. You can work with one connection aggregator and gain access to literally hundreds of wireless carrier networks around the world. Aggregators help make the market more efficient because application providers and wireless carriers don't need to enter into hundreds or thousands of independent contracts to reach their customers. The majority of marketers do not need to work directly with wireless carriers or aggregators; instead, your application provider will take care of these relationships for you. The leading aggregators include Mobile Messenger (
www.mobilemessenger.com), Syniverse (www.syniverse.com), OpenMarket (www.openmarket.com), mBlox (www.mblox.com), Sybase 365 (www.sybase.com), MX Telecom (www.mxtelecom.com), Ericsson (www.ericsson.com), Netsize (www.netsize.com), Clickatel (www.clickatel.com), and Motricity (www.motricity.com).Warning
Many aggregators specialize in one or more countries, so if you're going global, you may need to work with a few aggregators and/or your application provider (see below) will.
For a thorough list of connection aggregators, visit the connection aggregator section at US Short Codes Administration at
www.usshortcodes.com/csc_aggregators.html.Application providers: Application providers provide the software and support services necessary to deliver mobile marketing campaigns to your customers and prospects. These companies are called application providers because they provide the applications that power the customer experience. For example, if you're planning an SMS campaign, you need an SMS application to create and send the text messages. Table 2-1 shows a list of some of the most prominent application providers.
Table 2-1. Mobile Marketing Application Providers
Text messaging | iLoop Mobile ( |
Multimedia messaging (MMS) | Mogreet ( |
Constant Contact ( | |
BLIP Systems ( | |
Voice and integrated response | CommerceTel ( |
Mobile Internet | iLoop Mobile ( |
Installed applications | Nellymoser ( |
SendMe ( |
Tip
If you're going to do a lot of mobile marketing across a wide range of mobile media paths, you may consider working with a mobile application and services platform provider (also referred to as platform provider). The platform provider is a company that combines multiple mobile marketing capabilities into one solution. Some of the leading platform providers include Velti (www.velti.com), 2ergo (www.2ergo.com), iLoop Mobile (www.iloopmobile.com), Tagga Media (www.tagga.com), MIG (www.migcan.com), and others.
Content owners and publishers: Content owners are individuals and organizations that produce, hold the rights to, and sell content. For example, if you want to build a mobile application, you may need to get a license from a content owner or publisher to use its documents, presentations, images, audio, and other forms of static and rich, interactive, media. When a content owner controls the media channel that is used to deliver content to your customer, the content owner is considered a publisher. This is an important distinction when it comes to mobile advertising. Flip ahead to Chapter 10 for the details on mobile advertising.
Marketing and advertising agencies: Marketing and advertising agencies are the companies that help organizations, content owners, and publishers market and promote their goods and services to customers. They provide marketing strategy, creative, branding, public relations, and other communication and marketing services to you and similar organizations. They help you develop and execute your overall marketing and specific mobile marketing programs.
Media providers: Media providers give you access to traditional print, television, radio, outdoor media, packaging, point-of-sales, telephone, mobile, in-store, and other media where you can place a mobile call to action.
Enablers: Enablers include trade associations, governments, standards bodies, and mobile device manufactures. Enablers are a critical, and often overlooked, part of the mobile marketing ecosystem. Including enablers helps you to stick to best-practices and avoid violating government regulations.
Registrars: Registrars are the organizations that manage the numbers we use to send text messages and the domains for the Internet. Neustar (
www.neustar.com) manages the Common Short Code registry in the United States (www.usshortcodes.com), whereas dotMobi (www.dotmobi.mobi/) is the top-level domain registrar for mobile Internet domains. (They also offer a number of developer tools and training programs.)Governments: Governments play a big part in the industry since they help define the laws that we all must adhere and help establish oversight for the industry. For more information on government regulations, see Chapter 3.
Note
You should recognize that you may actually play many of the preceding roles during the course of executing a given strategy. Sometimes you're a customer; other times you're the marketer, content owner, brand, publisher, or even the application provider. This perspective helps you think about achieving your goals more broadly.
Mobile marketing has up-front and variable costs that you need to be aware of before you execute your strategy. Planning for the costs of executing your plan allows you to determine how much money you'll make or how much money you're willing to risk to achieve a particular goal. This section explains what costs you need to include in your plan.
Some costs for mobile marketing happen before you even begin a campaign. The following lists upfront costs and gives typical estimates so you can make sure to include them in your mobile marketing plan:
Strategy and resources: You want to estimate the costs for your team, their training, and the development and maintenance of your strategy.
Mobile marking application fees: These are the fees you pay to obtain the application logic that powers your mobile marketing programs. On average, depending on the functionality you license and the geography you're in, mobile marketing application fees range anywhere from $500-$15,000 per month.
In addition to monthly fees, you should plan on paying initial account setup and training fees when you sign up with an application provider or connection aggregator. Fees may be higher if you're getting something very specialized. If you try to build the mobile marketing applications yourself, who knows? It could be quite expensive.
Connection aggregator fees: These fees apply if you decide to go it alone and build out your own application logic. You need to bind your application to a connect aggregator, which costs you between $1,000 and $5,000 per month, depending on who you go with and the regions you want to cover. The connection aggregator fees are typically included in the mobile marketing application provider fees, which is another benefit of working with them. You can read more about connection aggregators above.
Common short code leases: A common short code is a phone number that is only four to six digits long. If you're going to run any text messaging mobile marketing programs, you must lease a common short code. In the United States, short code leases cost anywhere from $500-$1,000 per month and they are billed quarterly. You may be able to rent a short code from your application provider or connection aggregator, but they'll probably charge you a similar fee. You can read more about short codes in Chapter 4.
Depending on who you're working with, you may be quoted a single number for your entire mobile marketing program, for example, $25,000 plus the traditional media and retail promotion fees, or you may get a breakdown of the costs. The following is a list of the variable costs in the typical mobile marketing program:
Program strategy development: These can include all the activities needed to conceive of your campaign and lay out the plan.
Creative concept development: These are all the design activities associated with your campaign.
Content licensing and creation: These include licensing fees or design fees for any content you may use for the campaign, for example, images, ringtones, videos, news feeds, and so on.
Mobile marketing application: These are the fees you pay for hosting and reporting on your campaign during the entire period of your campaign (that is, if you're not already licensing a platform or haven't built it yourself).
Tactical execution of program: This includes creative, program certifications (as needed), technical implementation on mobile marketing application platform providers, legal costs (if you're running a sweepstakes program, for example), and any custom non-recurring software development that may be needed to tailor the application(s) to your specific campaign requirements.
Transactional items: These include messaging traffic (SMS, MMS, e-mail), Internet and mobile Internet page views, advertising page views/click-throughs, content downloads, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) minutes, content royalties, images recognized, and so on.
Traditional media and retail channels: These are the fees for promoting the program in any traditional media channels.
Tip
You can often reuse portions of your marketing strategy, marketing and campaign creative, and any custom software and content development for future programs. If you keep this in mind, you can save yourself quite a bit of money and time down the road.
Mobile reach refers to how many people you can possibly engage through a particular mobile pathway. For example, compare Internet users to mobile phone users.
The potential reach of the Internet is measured by the 1.4 billion people who have access to a computer and an Internet connection. Although the potential reach for mobile phones is three times greater than the potential reach of Internet users — there are 3.1 billion unique mobile users (4.6 billion mobile subscriptions) at the time of this writing — the sheer number of mobile users out there doesn't tell you everything you need to know about your reach. Several technical and behavioral factors limit mobile reach, and failing to consider them could mean one or more of your goals are actually impossible to achieve.
Note
If you're looking for mass market reach, you need to use the mobile pathways that have the technical ability to engage the largest audience, such as text messaging, voice, mobile Internet, and some multimedia services. On the other hand, if you're looking to reach a small niche market, you need only to consider the reach in a small sub-segment of the market, such as iPhone users, for example. The following sections show you the factors that affect your reach so you can be sure your objectives match up with your potential reach.
Interoperability refers to whether a particular mobile path or capability, such as SMS or camera functions, can work across a mobile network and whether the particular capability is supported across the wide array of mobile enabled devices.
For example, SMS is supported on nearly 90% of all phones. Therefore, it is interoperable across nearly all major mobile operator networks. In contrast, Bluetooth is not installed on the majority of mobile devices. Its use as a marketing tool, while growing, is also hampered by differences in technical implementation and what is supported by a particular network or phone. For example, many BlackBerrys won't accept a content download initiated from a Bluetooth alert.
Interoperability is important, because in many cases you may not know what mobile carrier or network your audience is using and, especially for mass market marketing programs, you don't want to miss out on a big portion of the market because your program does not work on one or more mobile phones and devices or mobile carriers or networks your typical customer carries.
Standards consist of industry technical and business policies that have been established to ensure the reliability, repeatability, supportability and sustainability of a particular mobile channel, feature, or function you're looking to leverage. You need to work within two types of standards to build your mobile strategy:
Industry regulations and best practices: Government regulations and industry best practices often lag behind what is technically possible. Chapter 3 provides detail on industry regulations and best practices.
Technology standards: With certain mobile capabilities, like SMS, the technical standards are well understood, but with others, such as application development, they are not. Make sure you share a high-level view of your plans with your application providers to make sure the standards associated with the technology you leverage match the standards in your plan.
When you're developing mobile marketing programs, you should keep in mind that there are thousands of phones on the market, all with different capabilities. For example, if you build a mobile application, but your customers have phones that support only text messaging, your programs are sure to fail. Your provider can also help you understand the types of phones your target market uses. They can also help detect the phones your customers are using in real time as your customer interacts with your campaign, and they can then tailor the mobile experience to the unique capability of your customer's device.
Figure 2-6 shows a list of the top mobile phones in the United States as of December 2009.
Before you decide to target people with a specific phone, you want to be sure your audience is broad enough to achieve your goals. For example, based on all the media attention, you may get the impression that everyone on the planet has an iPhone, or that they've replaced their iPhones with Google Androids, or similar smartphones. The reality is, however, that most people do not have smartphones.
Note
The iPhone accounts for only 5% of the mobile phone market in the United States at the time of this writing, and its market share is significantly lower worldwide. If you bet your entire mobile marketing strategy on the fact that your customers have an iPhone, you miss 95% of the market. However, that 5% represents a niche market that can generate a lot of money for you and value for your customers, so you may want to target that audience specifically in your plan if the demographics of iPhone users make sense for your business.
The average consumer changes his phone about every 18-36 months, so assuming that every new phone released has some new capability, it will still take years for that capability to propagate through the market for it to even be considered a mass-market medium for marketers. Make sure your plans aren't ahead of the customer innovation adoption cycle.
Just because someone has the hottest, most capable new phone in existence, with the fastest Internet connection, doesn't mean that he knows how to or chooses to use all its features. If you've ever had a Swiss Army knife, think about how often you use the micro-saw. It's a cool thing to have, but you rarely, if ever use it.
Mobile phones are the same way. As of this writing, the majority of phones, about 90%, support text messaging, but only 60% of mobile subscribers on average use it. Nearly 75% of phones support the mobile Internet, but only 20% – 30% of us, on average, use it (in the U.S.).
Warning
Mobile device feature adoption varies significantly by geographic region. In most developing markets, very little rich media is used; consumers primarily use text messaging.
The moral of the story is that you need to consider mobile feature adoption into your plans as well. You can build a mobile marketing program on the hottest capability, and your market may have the right phone, but it may still not engage in the program for any number of reasons.
Ecosystem efficiency is not always the most obvious factor to consider when it comes to mobile reach, but it is an important one. Ecosystem efficiencies refer to all the players within the value chain being responsible for and playing a part in the delivery of a mobile program and being able to efficiently perform their duties in an ongoing and sustainable fashion. By sustainable, we mean they can repeatedly and reliably deliver their services on time with high quality and can make payments on time to ensure each player can stay in business.
Warning
For mature programs like SMS, the market is relatively efficient, but for emerging capabilities, this is not always the case. In other words, if you're trying a new and emerging mobile capability, plan on something breaking and develop contingencies, with your partners, for how to handle it.
Certain consumer profile factors significantly affect consumers' interest and ability to participate in mobile marketing programs. These factors include age, gender, ethnicity, household income, education, and the types of phones they use, to name just a handful of factors. Young people tend to text message more than older people, but this is leveling out. Leading research firms like comScore (www.comscore.com), Nielsen (www.nielsen.com), Insight Express (www.insightexress.com) and Dynamic Logic (www.dynamiclogic.com) can help you better understand the various ways to segment user profiles. See the next section for more details on this point. You can also find out some great consumer behavior and profiling research (for free) at Pew Internet (www.pewinternet.com).
Geography is a big mobile reach factor because not all mobile capabilities are uniformly available in each region around the world, nor will each mobile player be effective in every region around the world. Moreover, even if mobile capabilities are uniformly available, the execution process may be different, the business models may be different, the technical standards may be different, the laws may be different, and so on.
Take SMS, for example. Common short codes do not work across international borders. You need a different code for every country you want to conduct text messaging programs in. In some countries, you can lease a code. In others, you can only lease keywords (see Chapter 4 for more on SMS, common short codes, and keywords). They are also priced differently around the world. Luckily, however, the technology implementation is similar enough to generally be considered standard. Moreover, in developed countries like the United States, all the mobile media paths are increasingly being adopted by mobile consumers across various consumer profiles (refer to the section, "Profiling your customer," earlier in this chapter). However, in countries like Brazil, China, and Russia, SMS usage is high (70-80%), whereas mobile video usage is low (1%-4%), as is the usage of other rich media mobile media paths like mobile Internet and applications.
Note
Pay attention to the geography you want to run your programs in and work with you application providers and partners to ensure that you understand all the intricacies of each country you want to run a program in.
Taking into account all the variables we discuss in the previous sections, we can rate the mass-market applicability of each mobile path. Table 2-2 scores each mobile channel at a macro level and how it rates against the mass-marketing applicability criteria.
Figure 2-7 depicts channel marketing applicability visually and shows that voice, SMS, and mobile Internet channel are the most applicable for mass-market programs, whereas all other channels are appropriate for niche marketing programs or simple experimentation at this point.
Tip
Just because a particular mobile path is not applicable for mass market use does not mean that you should ignore it. Some channels, like the mobile Internet and video, are perfect for niche markets — that is, markets where you can be fairly assured that consumers have mobile devices capable of accessing the mobile Internet, have data plans (they're paying their wireless carriers to be able to use data services like mobile Internet on their phones), and know how to use the features. For instance, business market segments, iPhone users, and high-end niche consumer markets are perfectly suited for rich mobile experience, whereas the anonymous mass-market is not. You should rely on voice and text messaging until you better understand what your target market has in its hands and whether it knows how to use it.
Note
Consider the mobile marketing mantra: Global reach, regional relevance. The mobile channel has become the world's most ubiquitous media channel, meaning that with mobile, your marketing programs can have global reach. However, what really matters for mobile marketing success is that you consider how all the factors discussed in this book differ within each region around the world. Every country and region around the world, even different regions within a country (like U.S. west coast versus east coast) has different consumer mobile adoption profiles. Even the processes and technologies for launching programs may differ. In other words, you must keep in mind that it is important for you to tailor your efforts in every region to run mobile marketing programs that are regionally relevant.
The technical ability for your customers to engage in your mobile marketing campaign isn't the only consideration you have to think about when determining your reach. You also need to consider whether your customers are even willing to engage. For example, younger audiences may be more willing to engage with your marketing if you include a mobile game or ringtone download in your campaign. The key factors to evaluate customer preferences are
The following sections show you which factors are most likely to affect your strategy so you can give them careful consideration when building a plan and setting goals.
Demographic factors consist of the data points that detail a population's inherent characteristics. Keeping track of demographic factors is very important because demographic factors are often the greatest determinants of behavior. For example, targeting African-American or Hispanic customers isn't about tracking their heritage or skin color. Rather, you need to know things like the fact that customers from these ethnic groups tend to index higher in the use of all mobile services over other ethnicities, or that the types of phones they use are different from other ethnicities. The following is a list of demographic factors to consider:
Age: Birth date or age range (such as 14-24)
Gender: Male or female
Race/ethnicity: Caucasian, African-American, Asian, Hispanic, biracial, multicultural, and so on
Marital status: Single, married, divorced, domestic partnership, and so on
Number of children: Zero, one, two, three, and so on
Level of education: None, high school, some college, college graduate, doctorate, life experience, and so on
Occupation: Too many options to list individually (isn't that great?)
Income: Monetary range (such as $50,000-$75,000 per year)
Nationality: American, French, British, Chinese, and so on
Geography: Residence, place of work (if you're a road warrior, American Airlines, seat B17, for example), and so on
Psychographic factors include the qualitative factors that measure aspects of a customer's life. They also influence a customer's willingness to participate in mobile marketing. You need to analyze the following factors to ensure that your promotional strategies appeal to the segments of the market you're targeting:
Lifestyle: Frequent traveler, parent with young children, empty-nester, and so on
Attitudes: Political and other views
Interests: Hobbies and pastimes (such as music)
Purchasing motives: Purchasing for self or as a gift, for entertainment, for utility, and so on
Frequency of product use: Daily, weekly, as needed, and so on
Preferences are data volunteered by customers regarding their likes and dislikes, such as favorite food or least favorite music. Preference criteria you should consider include
Days of the week and times when the customer will allow you to message or call him
How many times the customer will allow you to contact him within a particular time frame (perhaps ten times a month, but no more than three times a week, for example)
The customer's preferred mode of communication (mobile, e-mail, voice, instant messaging, and so on)
The customer's preferred mobile device
By collecting information on a person's preferences and using it appropriately, you'll have a much better chance of meeting that customer's needs.
Mobile is personal, and nothing is more personal than your customer's situational context. Situational context refers to someone's location and what's going on around him at the time. For example, is it hot or cold outside? Did his favorite sports team just win or lose? Is he moving? If so, at what speed? Is he on a hill, going up or down? Near home, or far away? Are friends nearby? Is he near his favorite restaurant? Is the stock market up or down? What is he reading, watching, or viewing? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg.
Increasingly, a number of mobile marketing solutions, with a customer's permission of course, are able to gather and use situational information, such as the customer's location, activity, the weather, and so on. With this info you can tailor the user interaction in real time to fit the context. Ask your application provider about this. Companies like Bookit (www.bookit.com) and iLoop Mobile (www.iloopmobile.com) with its SmartSMS service are able to support this.
Tip
If you'd like to find out more about the differences in mobile behavior between different customer segments, you should check out the Carlson Marketing article "Bringing Mobile Segmentation to Life: Applying Customer Strategy to Build Stronger Relationships via Mobile Devices," which can be downloaded for free at
http://carlsonmarketing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=55&item=151
In the article, Doug Rozen, Jeff Anulewicz, and Tom Senn identify eight mobile usage personas (Cord Hoards, Strictly Speaking, Utoolitarian, Lifeliners, Mobile Moths, Duty Callers, Funccessorizers, and Mavericks) and map the level to which each persona uses the mobile capabilities of talking, messaging, browsing, and downloading. This article provides a useful framework you can use to categorize your customers and to think about the types of mobile media they may use.