Discovering mobile marketing and its key elements
Exploring the myriad of mobile devices and networks
Finding out about the three forms of mobile marketing
Reviewing the many capabilities of mobile devices
We've become a mobile society, worldwide. People around the world are on the go, and nearly everyone has a mobile phone or a mobile device of some kind to help them connect with people, information, and businesses from anywhere. Sure, people are still making and receiving phone calls with their mobile phones, but increasingly, they're also texting, searching theWeb, downloading applications, consuming content, responding to ads, spending money, and generating value for themselves and marketers, not just with phones but a wide range of devices as explained below.
The mobile device is increasingly becoming a cornerstone of our mobilized society. In fact, for many people around the globe, a mobile device has become their primary communication and commerce tool. Whenever our world changes, so must the practice of marketing. This book is all about showing you how to embrace this change. We show you how to embrace the emerging practice of mobile marketing and engage your customers through and with the mobile devices they use.
In this chapter, we get you started. We provide you with a detailed definition of mobile marketing and review its key elements. And because the mobile device is the cornerstone of any mobile marketing practice, we review in detail the three categories of mobile devices, the networks that enable them, and the eight mobile media paths that are the backbone of mobile marketing. When you're done reading this chapter, you'll have the foundation you need to understand everything else you find in this book.
Mobile marketing, according to the Mobile Marketing Association (www.mmaglobal.com), is "a set of practices that enable organizations tocommunicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network." That definition contains just 26 words, but it packs in a lot of meaningful terminology.
In the following sections, and through this entire book, we discuss what these 26 words really mean and how they can be used to engage your customer in a manner that generates meaningful results that are mutually beneficial for both you, your business, your customers, and potential customers — essentially, everyone!
Take a look at that definition again and then check out the following bullet points, which pull out and refine the five key elements of the definition of mobile marketing:
Organizations: Organizations are commercial entities — brands, agencies, marketers, non-profits, enterprises (including individuals), and so on — with products, services, and offerings they wish to deliver to the market. In other words, organizations are you and your companies. Mobile marketing works for any type of business.
Practices: Practices consist of the many faces and facets of marketing activities, institutional processes, industry player partnerships, standards making, advertising and media placing and buying, direct response managing, promotional engagements, relationship management, customer services, loyalty management, and social media stewardship. In other words, practices include all the things that you want to oversee and do to engage your customers. All types of marketing practices can be applied to mobile marketing.
Engagement: This is the process by which you and your customers interact in a two-way (push and pull) dialogue to build awareness, conduct transactions, support, and nurture each other. Mobile marketing is one of the most engaging forms of marketing because it's done through and with such a personal device.
Relevancy: Mobile interactions can provide information (for example, a user's location, the time of day, activity, and so on). You can use this information to understand the context of your customer's current environment in order to tailor and to create an appropriate experiencethat is closely linked (dare I say relevant) to his current context. For example, if someone in New York is doing a search on the mobile Internet for pizza, you want to show them listings for pizza shops nearby and not send them to Lima, Ohio, to get their pizza. Mobile marketing is highly relevant.
Mobile devicesand networks: These terms refer to any wireless-enabled deviceregardless of form factor or network. Although certain types of devices have their limitations, you can execute some type of marketing campaign onevery type of mobile device.
Take a moment to think about the impact that the Internet and the personal computer have had on our society and the world. Yet, as of this writing only 25% of the global population uses the Internet, and there areonly about 1 billion personal computers.
Now consider the potential impact of mobile devices. Worldwide, 4.6billion people subscribe to mobile services, and that number will likely increase to 5.5 billion by the end of 2010. Given that there are 6.8 billion people around the world, we're talking about nearly everyone on the planet. (About 2 billion or so people still don't have a mobile device, but you can sure do a lot of marketing with the other 5 billion!)
In the United States, comScore (www.comscore.com) reports that around 234 million people subscribe to mobile phone services. In fact, the mobile phone is becoming their primary phone. According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 25% of the U.S. population has shut off their landline phones and are mobile-only. (Another 15% of the U.S. has a landline phone, but really don't use it.) In addition, many of these people have multiple mobile devices. There are more than 280 million mobile subscriptions in the U.S. (including wireless cards for computers, e-readers, and so on).
Tip
The reach of the mobile device is staggering. Nearly everyone on the planet can be engaged with a mobile device. In developing countries, itmay be the only way to engage someone digitally.
Your customer is mobile and you should be too. Consumers send trillions of text messages around the world each year, view and download billions of mobile Web pages and applications, and increasingly use their mobile devices not just for personal communication, but also for leisure, entertainment, work, and shopping.
A number of factors play a role in a consumer effectively responding to mobile programs, including her age, gender, ethnicity, location, the type of phone or mobile device she has, her employment levels, education, and more. We can't go into all the details here, but take it from us: mobile media is not a channel just for the youth of the world; nearly everyone is using one or more of the various mobile media paths discussed throughout this book in one way, shape, or form. In fact, according to a Microsoft Advertising Mobile Consumer Usage study, the mobile device is the third-most-used media, coming just behind television and computers.
When most people think about mobile marketing, the first thing that comes to their mind is a mobile phone. It's easy to look at a mobile phone and think, "It's just a phone," and minimize all the rich capabilitiesthat today's mobile phones have. It's also easy to disregard the other mobile devices (like the Apple iPad or iTouch, PlayStation Portable game terminals, e-books, and GPS devices) that people carry with them as not being pertinent for mobile marketing.
Note
The device in your hand isn't really just a phone anymore. Sure, you can make voice calls with it, but that function is just the tip of the iceberg. Today's mobile devices are also newspapers, maps, cameras, radios, stores, game consoles, video music players, calculators, calendars, address books, stereos, TVs, movie theaters, and concert halls.
For the purposes of mobile marketing, and the content of this book, you should be familiar with three categories of devices:
The feature phone: The feature phone (see Figure 1-1) is the most common phone out in the market. As of June 2010, about75% of the phones carried in the U.S. are feature phones. These phones run a real-time operating system (RTOS), which is a closed operating system — one in which you can't make modifications such as adding functionality to a mobile browser or changing the user experience on the phone. There are two common RTOSs: a home-grown Nucleus OS created by the mobile phone's manufacturer, and Qualcomm's Brew (which is predominantly used by Verizon Wireless in the UnitedStates). Understanding the capability of the feature phone is important to you because it means you willbe limited to engaging these consumers with SMS, MMS, voice, and limited mobile Internet.
The smartphone: The smartphone (see Figure 1-2) is a mobile device that integrates mobile phone capabilities with the more common features typically associated with a personal computer, including Internet, applications, e-mail, entertainment, and rich media services. Moreover, smartphones increasingly include location, motion and related sensors, touchscreens, and full keyboards. Smartphones are categorized by the operating system they use. The top smartphone operating systems (OS) are the Apple iPhone, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone, Research in Motion BlackBerry, HP Palm, Samsung Baba, Nokia Symbian, and Linux-based operating systems such as the MeeGo, which is used in Nokia high-end phones. Smartphones account for approximately 25% of the U.S. market today. Nielsen expects that by the end of 2011, nearly 50% of consumers will be carrying a smartphone. More and more people will have smartphones and be able to surf the Internet, use e-mail, and download applications, but even by the end of 2011, a significant portion of consumers will still becarrying feature phones, so you'll want to cater to their needs and phone capabilities too.
Note
Keep in mind that it's really easy to get caught up in the hype of a particular manufacturer's marketing. For example, for all the attentionit attracts, the iPhone accounts for only 5% of the U.S. market. (See Table 1-1.)
Connected device: The connected device category is the industry catch-all term for all non-phone, mobile-enabled devices. In other words, it's a device that leverages mobile networks, but is primarily not aphone. This includes tablet computers (Apple iPad, Cisco Cius, HP Slate), e-readers (Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook), portable gaming devices(PlayStation Portable), and so on.
Table 1-1. Smartphone Devicem Penetration in the United States (comScore, 2010)
Percentage of Smart Phone Market | Percentage of Total Market | Users (in Millions) | |
|---|---|---|---|
Research in Motion BlackBerry | 42 | 8 | 9 |
Apple | 25 | 5 | 11 |
Microsoft | 15 | 3 | 7 |
Palm | 5 | 1 | 2 |
9 | 2 | 4 |
Note
Throughout this book, we interchangeably use the terms mobile phone, mobile device, and phone. Keep in mind that we're covering all the device categories no matter what term we use.
The basic premise of mobile marketing is that you're engaging the consumer over mobile networks. There are three basic mobile networks:
Mobile carrier network: The mobile carrier network (also referred to as the operator network) consists of a series of radio towers (so-called cell towers) that transmit and receive radio signals that talk with a mobile device. All kinds of technologies and acronyms go into making all this work: CMDA, TDMA, GSM, LTE, EDGE, and so on, but you really don't need to know anything about these. You'll also hear terms like 2G, 3G, and 4G, with the higher numbers referring to faster data speeds over the network. A 4G network is pretty close to broadband Internet speeds over mobile carrier networks (for example, its speed enables things like real-time, interactive video conferencing and social media). Again, you don't need to know much about this, other than to understand that 4G is just starting to get released in the United States and only about 30%-40% of consumers use 3G now. Most consumers are on 2G. This means that a lot of 2G text messaging goes on with very little 4G real-time video streaming. This makes more sense when you read the rest of this book and understand all that you can do with mobile marketing.
Wi-Fi and WiMAX: Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, more commonly referred to as a wireless local area network, is a wireless network powered by a small terminal connected to an Internet connection. You see them most often in homes, coffee shops, airports — actually, you see and hear about them all over the place. WiMAX is a Wi-Fi network on steroids. A WiMAX network is a Wi-Fi network that is broadcast over miles rather than a few hundred feet like Wi-Fi. Why should you care about this? Most new phones, that is, smartphones and connected devices, by definition can connect to Wi-Fi and WiMAX networks to access the Internet. In fact, if you try to download really large files, like applications or videos, on devices like the iPhone, the mobile carrier may require you to either switch to a Wi-Fi network or connect to a personal computer to download the content because they'd prefer to restrict these larger data files from being downloaded over the carrier network. A huge amount of mobile marketing (ad serving, application downloading, and mobile Internet browsing) happens over these networks.
Local frequency: Finally, a number of low frequency channels can be used to exchange data and interact with the mobile device, like Bluetooth, radio frequency identification (RFID), and Near Field Communication (NFC). Bluetooth is a low-bandwidth radio spectrum that has a reach of about 1 to 109 yards, depending on the power of the device. RFID and NFC systems are similar in concept to Bluetooth in that they're both short-range communication systems, but they have unique identification and commerce capabilities.
Here are three basic approaches you should consider when integrating mobile marketing into your marketing strategy (you can read more about actually creating your strategy in Chapter 2):
The next sections give you an overview of all three approaches so you can decide which approach is going to fit your business best.
One of the really special things about mobile marketing is that it provides you with the opportunity to interact directly with a person — not a household address, or a post office, or a television network —because mobile devices are personal to a single person.
Direct mobile marketing involves sending messages directly to a consumer or receiving messages directly from a consumer. The mobile channel provides you with two basic forms of direct mobile messages to engage your customer, and there's really no middle man:
Marketer-initiated communication: This occurs when the marketer starts the engagement with the consumer — for example, sends a message, places a call, or pushes an application alert. It is sometimes referred to as push marketing.
Consumer-initiated communication: This occurs when the consumer starts the engagement with the marketer — for example, visits a mobile Web site, places a call, downloads an application, and so on. It is sometimes referred to as pull marketing.
Mobile marketing is an extremely effective direct marketing practice. Marketers consistently see response rates of 8-14% to their initiated communication (compared to less than 1% for most direct marketing channels).
Note
With all forms of direct mobile marketing, you must first get a consumer's explicit permission prior to sending him a text message, making a call, or initiating a communication. Because you need permission, you can't engage in direct mobile marketing without combining your campaigns with other forms of marketing to gain the permission in the first place. You can read about gaining permission in Chapters 3 and 4
Mobile-enabled traditional and digital media mobile marketing refers to the practice of mobile-enhancing your traditional and new-media programs (TV, radio, print, outdoor media, Internet, e-mail, voice, and so on) and inviting individual members of your audience to pull out a phone or connected device and respond to your mobile call to action, as shown in Figure 1-3.
On television, for example, your call to action may askviewers to text a keyword to a short code to cast avote. Or, you may ask them to fill out a form on the Web or mobile Internet, including their mobile phone number, to participate in the program. See Chapter 2 for more on adding mobile marketing to your traditional marketingstrategy.
Increasingly, companies are turning to mobile devices and networks to deliver their products and services. For example, banks have launched mobile Web sites and applications so that you can access your bank account to check your balance, transfer money, and find the nearest ATM. Media companies like CNN or ESPN use mobile media as a new media for delivering their content.
A lot of companies are integrating mobile services like text messaging as a way of enhancing the experience with their products. For example, Hasbro recently added text messaging to their last version of the game Clue. Players can receive text messages that influence the flow of the game while they're playing. We explain more about mobile-enabled products and services in Parts II and III of this book.
Mobile devices today are increasingly chock-full of really exciting capabilities that you should know about. The capabilities described in the following sections help you determine the user context, which means knowing where someone is and what he's doing when he interacts with one of your marketing campaigns so that you can tailor your marketing engaging for optimal results.
Tip
Not every mobile device supports all the capabilities described in this section, and not every operating system allows you to access them. You can find out more about what most mobile devices are capable of by visitingthe Web site for DeviceAtlas at www.deviceatlas.com.
Dialing and pressing is all about using the voice channel of the mobile phone. You can encourage people to call a phone number by asking them to dial 1-800-XXX-XXXX to experience the sounds of the movie or call 408-XXX-XXXX to listen in on the game, for example.
Tip
You don't have to answer the calls yourself; you can use an interactive voice response (IVR) system, which is used to automate phone calls with customers and more commonly for customer support. With an IVR system, when someone calls you, the automated system picks up and asks the caller to make selections such as "Press 1 to receive a ringtone," "Press 2 to get your last five transactions," or "Press 3 to get the movie listings sent to your phone." You can read more later in this chapter about how IVR can humanize your approach. For more background on IVR, see Chapter 11.
Texting simply means sending and replying to text messages. You can place the call to action in traditional, new, and mobile media by saying something like "text win to 12345to enter the sweepstakes." You can also obtain a mobile subscriber's opt-in via texting. (For more detail on opt-in management, see Chapter 3 for regulations, Chapter 4 for setting up your programs, or Chapter 5 for examples.)
Warning
Mobile marketing programs and any other programs that use text messaging (such as IVR, Internet, or mobileInternet) must use a common short code (CSC) to address and route the message traffic. For details on CSCs, read Chapter 4.
The camera is a wonderful tool for interacting with your customers. You can instruct audience members to take a picture of a specific object or graphic and then instruct them to e-mail or text (via MMS) the picture toyour mobile marketing program. When your program receives a picture, it processes the picture and then opts themobile subscriber in to the program. The process is also enhanced with services like 2d bar codes. See Chapter 5 for more on these emerging technologies.
Two companies lead the pack in this field: SnapTell (www.snaptell.com), based in Palo Alto, California, and Los Angeles-based LinkMeMobile (www.linkmemobile.com).
Another great way to invite someone into your mobile marketing program is to present her a form on an Internet page or a mobile Internet page, or in an installed application. A customer can opt in to receive text alerts.
Two companies — Zoove (www.zoove.com) and Singletouch (www.singletouch.com) — have developed two alternative opt-in channels using symbol keys on your phone for single-button interaction. If, for example, a mobile subscriber on the Sprint network presses **267 — that is, **AOL — and the Send/Talk button on his phone (typically, the green button), in return, an AOL promotional mobile Internetsite is sent to hisphone. We delve into this feature more in Chapter 5. Both services are still limited in their deployment across wireless carrier networks.
Location is a very powerful tool and one of the unique features of mobile marketing. When mobile subscribers are out and about, they usually know where they are, but their phones always know. Location information can make your programs more contextually relevant to a user's location.
You can identify a mobile subscriber's location in several ways:
User-provided information: The consumer can provide the ZIP code, address, or phone number of his current location. (If he provides a landline number, you can look up the address in a publicly accessible database.)
CellID triangulation: Every cellular tower is in a fixed location (big steel towers tend not to move around a lot), and each tower has an identification number, commonly referred to as CellID (cellular tower ID). If you know the IDs of the towers that a mobile phone has in range, you can triangulate the mobile subscriber's location with reasonable accuracy. (This system is how Google Maps works.) High-end phones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia- and Microsoft-powered smartphones can tellyour application the CellIDs of the towers they're connected to. Then your mobile application provider can look up the towers' Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates in publicly accessible databases such as OpenCellID (
www.opencellid.org).GPS: The Global Positioning System relies on a constellation of satellites surrounding the planet. The location of a mobile phone equipped with GPS can be determined down to a few yards anywhere on the planet. If the wireless carrier and phone permit this function, an application provider can access the phone's GPS data to enhance the application you're offering.
A-GPS: Some phones are equipped with Assisted GPS (A-GPS), which combines GPS, CellID, and other enhanced network capabilities to refine the location of the mobile subscriber.
Local access points: Low-bandwidth transmitter/receivers, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, can be used to approximate a mobile subscriber's location because the access-point transmitters are in fixed locations. When a mobile phone connects to an access point, you can approximate the mobile subscriber's location.
Fem2Cells: The emerging minitower cellphone technology called Fem2Cells has no practical marketing use today, but I'm noting it here because some applications shouldbe available soon, given all the creative minds out there.
With location, you can create context-sensitive experiences. When a consumer opts in to your mobile marketing campaign, you can send a location-relevant coupon, not just some generic discount for a store halfway aroundthe country from where the consumer is currently located, or you can serve up advertising that's relevant to a nearby establishment.
Tip
Many companies such as Yahoo! use search terms and proximity access point data to determine a user's location. The main purpose of this type of location detection is serving location-relevant advertising.
Although location-enabled services are great ideas, we still have some time to wait before location services are ready for use by the average consumer.
Note
Many marketers try to build location services in which the location is the primary value proposition. Location by itself has little value, however; location is an enabling feature that gives value to other services, such as mapping, search, and advertising.
Although the technologies are far from mainstream at this point, some phones are being equipped with RFIDand NFC chips. These let you do a lot of really cool things, like device tracking and contactless payment.
In Germany, for example, NFC-enabled phones are used to purchase train tickets. A user simply swipes the phone past an NFC reader, and the reader charges her linked billing account (a credit card) for the purchase of the ticket.
No commercialized version of RFID has been developed yet. But RFID chips can be used to identify you and can even personalize signs as you walk by. (Did you see the scene in Minority Report in which Tom Cruise walks by a sign and the sign talks to him? That's what we're talking about.)
Marketing paths are the combination of the tools, technologies, and media we use to communicate our messages and reach consumers. For example, advertising on a billboard is often referred to as outdoor advertising, which is one type of marketing path. When it comes to mobile, many different types of marketing paths can be used to reach consumers (see Figure 1-4).
The next sections give you an overview of the different paths so that you are familiar with all the ways you can engage consumers with your messages through mobile marketing.
Note
Although each of the mobile paths can work all by themselves, they are more effective when combined together. For example, a text message can deliver a mobile Web site link, which when clicked may include a phone number link. When that phone number link is clicked, it places a call. The call may present a prompt for the user to say or press 1. When the 1 key is pressed, an application or content download may begin. Granted, this string oflinkages would present a terrible user experience, but hopefully it demonstrates that all the paths can work together.
Short message service (SMS), commonly referred to as text messaging or just text, is an incredibly versatile path to nearly all mobile phones on the planet. An SMS is a 160-character alphanumeric digital message that can be sent to and from a mobile phone — that is, it consists of letters (A, B, C, D, a, b, c, d ...) and numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, !, @, #, $ ...) that can be exchanged among mobile phones.
Tip
Keep in mind the 160-character limit includes spaces. You'll need to get creative with abbreviations to get the most out of your message. There are some pretty standard word abbreviations common in popular culture that you can think about using; just be sure to know your audience to determine their adoption level of these abbreviations. Not everybody will LOL(laugh out loud) if they don't understand the message.
Text messaging is an extremely popular service that caught on in the United States via TV shows that askedpeople to text in to cast votes or win prizes. From these basic roots, text messaging has blossomed into a rich interactive medium. In the United States, billions of text messages are sent every day. In fact, text messaging has become the primary mobile communications medium. Collectively, we're sending more than 2 billion text messages a day in the United States alone!
More than just a person-to-person channel, text messaging is now the cornerstone of mobile marketing. In addition to offering voting services, you can launch trivia programs, provide search capability, send information and text alerts, trigger interactive calls, deliver content, operate coupon programs (see Figure 1-5), and even charge people for content and services consumed on the phone (such as ringtones and television subscriptions).
See Chapters 4 and 5 for details on what you can do with SMS in the context of mobile marketing.
Note
Text messaging may also be used as a billing medium for content to be consumed on the phone (such as games, applications, ringtones, and images) as well as for charitable donations billed to the mobile subscriber's phone bill. When used in this context, text messaging is referred to as Premium SMS, or PSMS. See Chapter 13 for more on this topic.
Leading text messaging application providers include iLoop Mobile (www.iloopmobile.com), Waterfall Mobile (www.waterfallmobile.com), Vibes Media (www.vibes.com), Velti (www.velti.com), 2ergo (www.2ergo.com), Mobile Interactive Group (www.migcan.com), and others.
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is sometimes referred to as picture messaging or video messaging to help differentiate it from SMS, which is text-only messaging. MMS is delivered almost the same way as text messaging, but can include multimedia objects (images, audio, video, or rich text), often in a slideshow format, meaning that the multimedia objectives are sequenced andplayed per the publisher's established script and timing. Because MMS supports more than text — and because a picture is worth a thousand words — with MMS, you can
Tell a story with captivating images, sound and full motion video to delight, entertain, inform, and engage
Embed links to mobile Web sites in the message to IVR call services, application storefronts, and more so that your viewers can get more information
Offer compelling coupons with pictures, sound, and even video
You need to use a mobile marketing application provider that specializes in MMS to power your MMS programs. We show you a number of ways to use MMS in Chapter 6.
An e-mail message can be originated and delivered from any standard e-mail system or through mobile carrier networks. E-mail can be an effective means of delivering messages to a mobile phone or mobile-enabled terminal. Messages are accessed on the phone via the mobile Internet browser or via an e-mail application installed on the phone.
Mobile e-mail is most popular on a class of mobile phones referred to as smartphones, including Research In Motion's BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone, and phones running Google's Android software or Symbian and/or Microsoft mobile operating systems. E-mail is rarely used specifically with mobile marketing in mind; controlling the user experience is difficult, and many technical hurdles and legal land mines still need to be overcome. See Chapter 7 for more details on mobile e-mail marketing.
Leading companies that specialize in e-mail marketing services include Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com), mobileStorm (www.mobilestorm.com), CheetahMail (www.cheetahmail.com), Trumpia (www.trumpia.com), and Silverpop (www.silverpop.com).
The voice path refers to your phone's standard telephone capability — the means by which you make and receive phone calls, in addition to talking with a live person. Another option? Remember the tip we gave you earlier in this chapter? Use an interactive voice response (IVR) system commonly used in automated customer support. When you call most businesses today, you reach an automated prompt that tells you to say or press 1 to get this, or to say or press 2 to get that.
IVR can be a power mechanism for marketing activities beyond support. An example of using voice for mobile marketing is streaming audio via the voice channel. National Public Radio (NPR) uses the voice channel to stream live and recorded radio broadcasts via the voice channel of mobile phones. You can dial a toll-free number and listen to an NPR show. Alternatively, you can send a text message or click a link on a mobile Web site, and suddenly your phone rings. When you pick up, you hear the live or recorded broadcast piping through the phone. For more on engaging your customers with voice, see Chapter 11.
Note
Be sure to leave enough time to beta test your IVR program; nothing will frustrate your customers more than feeling like they are locked into talking to a computer without getting the answers they need. IVR done wellis mobile efficiency at work; IVR done badly is a great way to alienate your customers and possibly lose a fewtofrustration.
Leading IVR mobile services providers include Angel.com (www.angel.com), CommerceTel (www.commercetel.com), and SmartReply (www.smartreply.com).
The term mobile Internet is used primarily to refer to browsing Web sites on a mobile device. The Internet connection on a mobile device, however, can also be used to power the data connection for applications (see Chapter 9). For the purposes of this book, when we refer to the mobile Internet, we're referring primarily to mobile browsing.
With the mobile Internet, you can create rich and compelling mobile experiences filled with text, colors, and images. You don't need to create an entire Web site for a mobile campaign, though. You can create a microsite or landing page — a smaller version of a mobile Internet site. The difference between a microsite and a mobile Internet site is that the mobile Internet site is designed to bepersistent — to hang around for a while — whereas a microsite or landing page tends to be designed for a specific marketing promotion. A site of this sort may hang around for a few months, but at the end of the promotion, the marketer turns it off. Also, unlike persistent mobile sites, microsites tend to have very few pages, with content limited strictly to the promotion. Figure 1-6 shows some examples of promotional microsites.
Leading mobile Internet service providers include iLoop Mobile (www.iloopmobile.com), Starcut (www.starcut.com), MAXX Wireless (www.maxxwireless.tv), Netbiscuits (www.netbiscuits.com), Velti (www.velti.com), Madmobile (www.madmobile.com), July Systems (www.julysystems.com), iconmobile (www.iconmobile.com), Wapple (www.wapple.net), 2ergo (www.2ergo.com), Mobile Interactive Group (www.migcan.com), Siteminis (www.siteminis.com), UNITY Mobile (www.unitymobile.com), and others.
Tip
When looking for a service provider to design your mobile site or microsite, look for one that knows and understands the challenges involved with the browsing interface on a mobile phone, including up-and-down scrolling, breadcrumb-based navigation, and the difficulty of adding visual interest without using mobile browser killers like Adobe Flash artwork (leading method of distributing video on traditional Web sites) or badly formatted video.
Installed applications such as games, social networking, news and weather, navigation, banking, entertainment, messaging (SMS, MMS, e-mail, instant messaging, or picture messaging), audio and video players, and browsers may be preinstalled on the mobile phone by the manufacturer or wireless carrier. Alternatively, they may be installed by mobile subscribers who download them via the mobile Internet; embedded links in received text messages; from an application store; or a process called side loading, in which the phone is connected to a computer and the applications are sent from the computer to the phone.
Applications can provide a rich interactive experience beyond the limitations of the mobile browser. Special applications can be installed on a phone to serve streaming video (TV) and audio (radio), social networking services, and a wide range of other services.
Warning
Not all phones support installable applications, and some wireless carriers don't allow these applicationsto connect to the Internet after they've been installed. However, as more people adopt smartphones, this will change. Applications are a huge and growing part of the mobile marketing marketplace.
Tip
Mobile applications (often just called apps) are growing in number exponentially. With this trend comes competition. If you want consumers to download your app, make sure it has lots of usable functionality and lots of relevance to your consumer's needs. App development can be costly, so do your homework on consumers' interest in an app first. With thousands of apps to choose from, many apps are developed at great expense and then ignored by consumers because they didn't offer anything consumers couldn't live without.
The proximity paths, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, may be used to engage consumers in what is referred to as proximity marketing, or the localized distribution of content to a mobile device. The Bluetooth path refers to the use of the Bluetooth communication channel on the phone.
That little blue icon on your phone represents Bluetooth capability. If you use Bluetooth, you probably use it to pair your phone with a peripheral device such as a wireless headset or hands-free car kit. You also may use it to sync your phone with your laptop computer or to send pictures from your phone to your printer. Wi-Fi is the channel that connects your phone to the Internet via a Wi-Fi access point.
In addition to working with peripheral devices, both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can be used for mobile marketing — a practice called Bluecasting. A marketer places Bluetooth access points and a Bluetooth transmitter in a public area (such as a mall, airport lounge, bus stop, or movie theater) or at a live event. When a consumer walks by the access point, if his phone is set to receive Bluetooth requests automatically, his phone beeps, and he's asked to accept a pairing request from the Bluetooth access point. If he accepts the request, the Bluetooth access point sends an image, ringtone, game, or other communication to his phone.
Leading Bluecasting providers include BLIP Systems (www.blipsystems.com), Ace Marketing (www.acemarketing.net), AURA (www.aura.net.au/), Proximity Media (www.proximitymedia.com), and others.
Warning
Make sure you are clear with your Bluecasting permission statements. Pushing content to consumers' phones without the consumers' solicitation or consent is a modern-day discourtesy sometimes termed Bluejacking. Make sure you look into standards and the code of ethics here to ensure you are helping your customers, not annoying them. Also, never, never, ever engage in Bluesnarfing, which is the unauthorized access of information from a wireless device through a Bluetooth connection. Bluesnarfing is illegal in many countries due to privacy issues involved with unauthorized access to personal information such as contacts and calendars.
As you research different ways to engage your customer through and with the mobile channel, you may come across the terms on-deck or off-deck or carrier portal. On-deck and carrier portal refer to the same thing: They are the default mobile Web and application portals set by the carrier on mobile phones running on their networks. The carrier portal is prime real estate to engage consumers; for example, more applications are still downloaded fromthe carrier portals combined than from popular application stores like Apple iTunes.
Apple iTunes, or any non-carrier applications like iTunes or Getjar (www.getjar.com), illustrates the concept of off-deck. Off-deck refersto any non-carrier-controlled mobile presence. Increasingly, as consumers adopt smartphones, download applications in the billions, and are more and more mobile, more traffic will move off the carrier deck and into the hands of the market.
Although not necessarily a stand-alone path or channel, mobile advertising is also an effective means of engaging prospective customers. Mobile advertising is the practice of placing a paid sponsor or promotional messaging within one of the various mobile media paths listed previously. With mobile advertising, you can
Build your brand
Acquire new customers and generate sales
Monetize your mobile media paths and portals
You can accomplish so much with mobile advertising. See Chapter 8 for more details. Leading players include AdMob, recently acquired by Google (www.admob.com), Millennial Media (www.millennialmedia.com), Crisp Wireless (www.crispwireless.com), JumpTap (www.jumptap.com), Smaato (www.smaato.com), Microsoft Advertising (http://advertising.microsoft.com), and others.
Tip
Having a hard time with consumers catching on to your brand's mobile presence? Go where you know the mobile users are — place mobile advertising on related mobile sites and apps that you know your consumers frequent. Use these popular sites to crowd source for you.
Mobile commerce, as defined by the Mobile Marketing Association (www.mmaglobal.com), is the one- or two-way exchange of value facilitated by a mobile consumer electronic device (for example, a mobile handset) enabled by wireless technologies and communication networks. This may sound a bit complicated, but it's really not. It means that billions of dollars are exchanged every day from transactions occurring via the mobile media paths we discuss in this chapter. People buy content (applications, ringtones, and images), purchase physical goods and services, make donations, and even buy virtual goods (like virtual furniture for their online house or clothes for their game avatar). For more on mobile commerce, see Chapter 13.