Chapter 5: Delivering Valuable Mobile Content

In This Chapter

Developing and distributing mobile content

Adding value with mobile applications, enhancements, and games

Setting up a mobile Internet site

Customers are looking for value — that is, they want to acquire content, goods, and services, as well as engage in experiences that they find to be genuinely useful, informative, educational, enriching, delightful, or entertaining when they interact with you. The mobile channel is an ideal medium for value exchange.

Perhaps you want to send content produced by your business, use content as a promotional offer to create awareness for your business, or offer points and coupons that can be redeemed for content, experiences, or products and services. Or maybe you want to generate brand utility by offering store locators, nutrition or financial calculators, shopping-comparison widgets, and similar services. If so, you’ve come to the right chapter.

When you’re done with this chapter, you’ll understand what it takes to create, manage, and deliver content to mobile subscribers via mobile marketing services: alerts, installed applications, websites, the mobile Internet, loyalty programs, and so on.

Sourcing Your Mobile Content

You can create your own content, or you can license it from third-party content providers and/or content aggregators. For details on working with content providers, see Chapter 4 in this minibook.

Before you use content created by someone else as the basis of your own mobile content, be sure to check with the content rights holder about any licensing or use restrictions. Don’t get yourself into trouble by using someone else’s content without all the necessary rights and licenses. Just because the content is out on the web doesn’t mean that you have the right to use it or create a derivative work from it (change and/or rebrand someone else’s content for your own purposes).

The safest, but not necessarily easiest, way to obtain mobile content is to create it yourself or contract someone to do it for you.

Here are some tips to remember before you create your content or prepare to use someone’s third-party content:

• Get permission. You must always have permission (also referred to as expressed or prior consent) from mobile subscribers before you can send them a text message. See Chapter 1 in this minibook for details on industry best practices and regulations.

• Be relevant. Send your audience members only information that is relevant to them. The mobile phone is a very personal device. If customers find that you’re abusing their trust — such as sending them messages about some new hot product when the subscribers didn’t opt in for that information — they’re likely to perceive your message as irrelevant at best or spam at worst and to opt out of your program faster than you can text stop.

Relevance involves many factors. Don’t look just at audience demographics, but also look at subscriber preferences, the times when messages are sent, subscribers’ locations when receiving messages, and so on. Relevance is about taking the time to understand your customers and their needs and wants.

Sending Content via Messaging

Using the messaging paths, including Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and e-mail, can be a very effective means of delivering content. The following sections describe how you can use text-messaging alert services to send content.

Sending messaging alerts

Mobile text alerts are very common content programs, broadcasting SMS or MMS text messages to people who have given the marketer permission to send those messages. (For details about these technologies, see Chapter 1 in this minibook.) You can send the same content to an entire group or a tailored message to each person.

Sourcing text content

To send text alerts as content, you need to create or acquire your text content and ensure that it’s formatted properly for text messaging.

Creating text content is easy. All you need are a text editor (such as Notepad or Microsoft Word), your computer keyboard, and some creativity to create compelling messages of no more than 160 characters — the maximum number you can use in a single text message. Remember that spaces and carriage returns count as characters.

You can try to spread your alerts across multiple text messages, but don’t exceed two or three messages; otherwise, you’ll simply annoy your audience.

Make sure that you have the right compliance language, you don’t use special characters, the content is encoded properly in your messages, and you maintain alignment with the best practices and regulations of each country you’ll be delivering messages to. Ask your application provider for help with this.

Setting up the service

After you amass the ingredients of your messaging campaign, the next step is setting up your messaging service. Figure 5-1 shows the application interface of the mobile messaging platform from iLoop Mobile (www.iloop mobile.com). You can use this application to set up and configure your text-messaging alert service, including the opt-in, opt-out, help, and privacy elements. (If you’re not doing the work yourself, your agency or partner will use an application like this one to run your messaging campaign.)

To set up your program, simply fill out the form and click Save. Then you’re ready to start promoting your program in traditional media and messaging the subscribers who have opted in to your programs. See Chapter 2 in this minibook for information on gathering opt-ins. For details on setting up communication-program user flows, refer to Chapter 3 in this minibook.

Sending the content

You typically have two ways to send a message to your opt-in list:

• Manually: To publish your message(s) manually, log in to your mobile marketing application and select the groups to which you want to send the message. Filter the selected groups, if you want, by age, location, carrier, preferences, or other criteria and then enter the message.

You can send the message immediately or schedule it so that the mobile marketing application sends it later. (Figure 5-2 shows an alert message being scheduled in the iLoop Mobile platform.) You can schedule messages hours, days, weeks, or months in advance. If you have a horoscope service, for example, you can queue up six months’ worth of horoscope messages before they’re due to be sent.

• Via an automated data feed: Instead of, or in addition to, sending or scheduling messages manually, you may want to have messages sent to your audience automatically on a regular basis. Typically, you work with a content provider (such as a news vendor or weather service) and your mobile marketing application provider to set up and schedule automatic alert programs. Then you set up a messaging alert schedule. When the content management system is ready to publish a message, it simply pushes the message to the mobile marketing application, which sends the message.

Be sure to test content feeds coming from a content management system before launching your service commercially. You need to check the feeds to make sure that the messages are within the character limit specified by your service (135 to 160 characters per text message, depending on carrier and country) and that the feeds don’t contain special characters or encoding that won’t display properly on mobile phones.

Sending personalized text alerts

You may want to deliver a tailored message to an individual customer. You may want to remind him that his car payment is due or that he has a dentist appointment tomorrow, for example, or to provide a coupon tailored to him.

To send personalized text alerts, you use all the systems and processes listed in the section “Sending messaging alerts,” earlier in this chapter. The only difference is that instead of messaging a large group of people, you’re messaging a single person. You can message the person manually, schedule message delivery, or have your content management system prepare a personalized message and send it to that person’s phone number.

E-mailing informative messages

E-mail can be an effective way to deliver information to consumers, and it is increasingly becoming a mass market solution. At this writing, 40 percent of consumers access their personal e-mail, and 20 percent their work e-mail, in any given month (this is up from only about 10 percent of consumers in 2008). The main driver of this is the adoption of smartphones. Today in the United States, 50 percent of consumers have a smartphone, and the number is climbing.

For mobile marketing purposes, e-mail isn’t always reliable; however, it is getting better. You have little control of how your content is viewed. E-mail services often reformat content to optimize its readability on mobile phones, and much of your message can be lost in translation. Also, many e-mail clients for mobile phones don’t support attachments, and many types of data files are difficult to render on mobile phones, so e-mail attachments are unreliable means of broadcasting your marketing content to a mass audience.

You can use either of two methods to deliver e-mail to a phone (but keep in mind that they’re not viable for mobile marketing):

• Traditional e-mail: The traditional e-mail route is simple. You send a message to an e-mail address (such as [email protected]) just as you would in any traditional e-mail marketing program. Alternatively, you may want to consider using a service such as Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) or mobileStorm (www.mobilestorm.com). If your mobile subscribers have access to e-mail on their phones, and if they’ve opted in to your campaign, they’ll get the message.

• Mobile-phone e-mail: This method uses the e-mail channels provided by mobile carriers (such as 555-555-5555@t-mobile) to send short bursts of text, similar to text messaging. This system is designed for personal use, not for commercial use, and shouldn’t be used for commercial mobile marketing. You can find a list of restricted mobile e-mail domains at www.fcc.gov/cgb/policy/DomainNameDownload.html.

You can reach out to a number of mobile e-mail solution providers for help, including ExactTarget (www.exacttarget.com), mobileStorm (www.mobilestorm.com), CheetahMail (www.cheetahmail.com), and others.

Providing Mobile Enhancements and Applications

Mobile enhancements (also referred to as personalization content) are extremely common types of mobile content, as are mobile games and a host of other applications. The following sections review various content-distribution strategies for your branded mobile content.

If you lack artistic talent and can’t create compelling wallpapers, screen savers, or ringtones on your own, you can hire someone else to create the content or tap your friends and family members to do it. Outsourcing content development to a third party is common and needn’t cost much. A professional marketing agency can help you and probably will provide great service, but you can also go to a local art school college or high school — or even an elementary school — and ask a student to produce your artwork. You can find a lot of talented people out there!

Providing branded wallpapers and screen savers

Mobile wallpapers and screen savers are wonderful ways to personalize mobile phones and are conceptually identical to personal-computer wallpapers and screen savers.

A mobile wallpaper is the still image displayed on a mobile phone’s main screen, and a mobile screen saver is the still and/or animated image that’s displayed on the mobile phone’s screen when the phone is idle. The image you use for wallpapers and screen savers can be your company’s logo or any other image that represents your business or the objectives of your marketing campaign: a character, artistic scene, cityscape, landscape, and so on.

Delivering ringtones and other system sounds

The term ringtone refers to the sound a mobile phone makes when it is being called. Ringtones are immensely popular with all consumer segments and can be a great way to offer value to customers. Your subscribers can get ringtones from many places, including their mobile carriers, sounds built into their phones, and third parties like you.

Ringtones help personalize a user’s phone. Unlike wallpapers, however, ringtones are public, because everyone around can hear them when the phone rings. Therefore, ringtones are a great way for a mobile subscriber to demonstrate affinity for a brand, campaign, or cause.

Making Mobile Games and Applications

Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, mobile applications (especially games) have become an increasingly important element with mobile marketing. Over 1 million applications are circulating in the marketplace, roughly 400,000 on the Google Play Store (http://play.google.com), 550,000 in the Apple App Store, and hundreds of thousands of apps for the other leading mobile operating systems and connected devices like the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook.

You need to make a lot of decisions before you can even start building a mobile application because apps are so customizable. You can develop apps for specific functions, specific phones, and for an almost unlimited variety of tasks. The next sections show you how to think through your mobile app strategy so you have all the information you need to get started building your app.

Deciding whether a mobile app is the best choice

Mobile apps are cool. You can have so many unique and interactive experiences with them. For example, you can create exciting and fun games, entertainment services, social media and community experiences, financial services programs (for example, find the nearest ATM, transfer money, or even deposit checks through Chase’s iPhone app), retail storefronts, picture galleries, broadcast media portals (like those offered by CNN), and so much more.

An app can be a very powerful consumer engagement medium. However, before you start building a mobile application, it’s a good idea to consider that mobile apps are not necessarily the right choice for every business or business need. Before you jump into the world of mobile app development just because it seems like everyone else is, ask yourself the following questions about your business and your goals:

• Are you trying to reach the most people possible? If you’re trying to reach as many people as possible, a mobile application may not be the right choice. For example, today in the U.S. market, about 50 percent of consumers have a smartphone. It is less than 10 percent worldwide, so the reach of a mobile app is limited to that audience.

• Do you need a mobile app or mobile website? For the most part, if your customers need to use the native device functions (for example, a device’s camera, address book, location-detection capabilities, motion sensors, and so on) of the mobile device to accomplish whatever task you want them to accomplish, a mobile app is the right choice. If you just want to deliver content to your customers, a mobile website is probably a better choice. You can read more about building mobile websites in the later section “Serving Up Mobile Websites.”

• Do you have the time to do the care and feeding of a mobile app? Successful apps, like popular websites, require care and feeding. If you struggle to find time to update your business website, you will likely encounter the same challenge in keeping your app fresh and exciting.

• What phones do your customers use? Different smartphones and related tablets like the Apple iPad require different development, have differing screen sizes, and in some instances, require completely unique development for each. If your customers use a wide variety of phones, you need to develop a variety of apps, or you need to justify the fact that you’ll only be reaching a portion of your customer base by developing a single app.

• How will you develop your app? Unless you’re a programmer, or you have a team of app developers who work at your company, go with an expert app development company to build your apps. Whether you use your own programmers or hire an outside developer, be sure you budget for the entire app lifecycle: concept and design, development and iteration, quality assurance and user experience testing, and distribution and promotion. Work with your development teams to scope out a complete budget. Remember, it will take longer than you may think to do it right.

You must develop several versions of each app to work with the various operating systems on your customers’ mobile phones (the iPhone, the Android, and so on), or you need to realize that you’ll only be reaching a portion of your customer base if you develop a single app.

Distributing mobile apps

The most popular route for distributing applications is via the app stores of the various smart device companies. Although you have other means to distribute apps, think of the app stores as the swankiest department store in the mall with a big neon sign. They typically carry the endorsement, if not the name, of the smart device manufacturer and enjoy a high level of trust on the part of the device user.

In addition to offering easy, immediate distribution, app stores provide billing flexibility. You can choose to distribute an application for free, a one-time premium charge, or a recurring or subscription-based charge.

Alas, nothing in life is truly free. Although most device app stores allow free apps to be made available at no cost (about 80 percent of all apps are offered for free), they keep a share of any premium charges if and when the application is sold. Known as a revenue share, the retail fee of the application kept by the smart device company is generally around 30 percent. So, even though the app store will help you distribute the application, you get to keep only about 70 cents of every dollar charged to your users. Keep in mind, whether your application is sold or offered for free, you can also make money with your application through mobile advertising (see Chapter 4 in this minibook) and through mobile commerce (see Chapter 6 in this minibook) strategies.

Which app store you choose depends on two key qualifiers:

• What environment you developed your app for: You can’t distribute an app to an app store not built for it. BlackBerry App World doesn’t take apps built for Android, for example.

• Which store provides your app the greatest visibility: You can determine this in a number of ways, including the number of apps in the app store or how many downloads the app store enjoys.

App stores require that you submit your application via a clearance process before an app is posted to the catalog. Some of these approval processes can take months to be completed, so don’t go printing flyers with your launch date on them until you know an app has been approved.

Check out the app store websites for more information:

• Google Play (for Google Android devices): https://play.google.com/apps/publish/signup

• BlackBerry App World: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ developers/resources

• iPhone Developer Program (for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad): http://developer.apple.com/programs/iphone. To get your app into the App Store, you must go the route of the developer program.

• Windows Phone App Hub: http://create.msdn.com/de-DE

For a fairly complete list of application stores and application resources. see the Wireless Industry Partnership website at www.wipconnector.com/appstores.

Serving Up Mobile Websites

The mobile web implies an intimate one-to-one experience, often with a user who is on the go or visiting your website for a specific purpose (like checking sports scores and the weather forecast or looking to buy a specific item). The mobile web is a completely different animal than the traditional Internet, which was and is developed for stationary consumption.

When building your mobile site, put yourself in the user’s mind-set. People on the go or with a specific agenda in mind have little time to dig through menus, scroll left or right, or wait for pages to load. They’re frequently multitasking — walking down the street or drinking a cup of coffee with one hand while browsing with the other. Keep in mind that about 90 percent of the population is right-handed, so you may want to optimize one-hand use with the idea that the right thumb can reach the primary features. See Figure 5-3 for a mobile app that puts its navigation at the bottom of the screen. It’s critical that you think through what people will want to do on your site and make sure that your site lets them perform these actions quickly and easily.

One common mistake is trying to give mobile web visitors quick access to your entire broadband website experience. A more prudent plan is to develop a simple, clean homepage that loads quickly on a mobile device over the wide range of mobile networks and puts key information a click or two away. Simplifying makes sense. Creating a short, descriptive page title, using simple language, and providing order to the content you present are all great ways to stay on track. It is also a good idea to put a link on the bottom of the page to your full website so that visitors can go there if they choose.

Considering the purpose of your mobile site

A traditional website is usually the destination for all your company’s information, including everything from products for sale to job postings. Mobile sites need to be established with a specific purpose in mind because people who view mobile sites aren’t going to dig through hundreds of links to find the task-oriented information they need.

The next sections help you to establish a purpose for your mobile site so that you can serve your customers and prospects with only the most relevant information.

Identifying the needs of your mobile audience

Establishing a purpose for your mobile website should take the needs of your prospective visitors into account, not the needs of your company. Answering the following key questions can ultimately help lead to a solution that works for you and your customers:

• What are your customers most likely trying to accomplish with your site? Make a list of all the tasks that your customers need to accomplish on the go. Examples include finding your phone number or directions to your store, looking up in-stock availability of an item, or making a reservation.

• What functionality do you need to give customers on your site? You can serve up content like text, images, videos, and audio, or you can give them interactive functions such as chatting with customer support.

• Will your audience be buying things through your mobile site? If so, make sure that your site can accommodate payment gateways and security. If not, your site can act as a source of information for making purchases through another means, such as on a computer or in a store. Remember that people can phone in a purchase too. After all, it’s still a phone!

• Will social media be a consideration? Social media interaction on mobile devices is getting a lot more popular and familiar to mobile users. Make sure to build social media into your site if you have social media users among your customers and prospects.

These are just a few of the questions you should ask and answer for yourself. You know your business best, so think through them all.

Choosing from three types of mobile Internet sites

Before you head off to design and develop your mobile website, consider that many different types of sites exist, all of which have their uses. Among the many permutations, you need to be aware of three basic types of mobile websites:

• Basic landing page: This is generally a simple, one-page site built to deliver basic information fast. Traffic frequently comes from online ads. Restaurants, small retailers, and service companies are often well served by this type of site. Populate the basic site with

• Key contact information

• Operating hours

• Map/locator

• Special events

• Any other information important to people on the go

• Promotional site: Promotional sites are built around a specific product, event, or limited-time promotion. For example, a music festival would likely build a promotional site to provide festivalgoers with the lineup/schedule, sponsorship information, maps, special events, and links to local happenings and restaurants. After the event is over, the site may go away.

• Persistent site: Persistent sites are permanent, evolving sites designed to meet the ongoing needs of mobile website visitors. Businesses expecting constant customer traffic — from airlines and banks to social media and on-the-go information portals — build persistent sites to provide easy access to information that mobile web visitors constantly need. An airline company, for example, may create such a site to make it easy for visitors to check departure and arrival status, view reservations, and check in online.

Your mobile web marketing strategy may involve building and maintaining more than one type of mobile site at a time. To avoid confusing your audience as to which site to visit, choose a domain name strategy that differentiates your mobile sites.

Designing and building your mobile site

Websites designed to be viewed by PCs are developed in a number of different programming languages, including HTML, Flash, XML, Ajax, PHP, and more. Your browser is designed to read and understand the instructions written in these languages, as well as to learn new languages. The same concept holds for your mobile Internet browser. Languages have been developed to improve your experience when viewing the mobile web — including WAP, XHTML, cHTML, and KHTML — but they are all device and operator dependent, meaning that they don’t work on all phones or networks. Because fewer than 1 percent of websites today can be viewed properly on a mobile phone, the mobile web is far from a finished product.

One strategic decision that’s sure to have ramifications for how you build your mobile site is what types of handsets you plan to support. Because handsets are not standardized, you need to determine which type of site to build:

• A default site that renders the same on all mobile devices: A default site should be designed for the lowest common denominator, to render the same on practically all mobile handsets. A default site is generally a basic, low-effort text site free of bells and whistles that gives visitors easy access to key information on your site using simple HTML, CSS, and semantic markup. When designing a default site

• Choose a readable font and size

• Use a single-column format

• Minimize scrolling

• A medium site that increases functionality and design possibilities: If a basic default site isn’t enough, the next step up is a site designed to provide more functionality and a richer user experience. Using style sheets, forms, and map integration, for example, you can ensure that visitors can access a professional-looking site to get the information they need and take advantage of advanced handset capabilities. For more details on style sheets, forms, and maps, see Mobile Web Design For Dummies, by Janine Warner (published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

When designing this type of site, determine what specific phone capabilities you want to take advantage of or enable before you get started. Testing is very important, as even the same handsets react differently depending on the network.

• A high-end site that provides an optimal experience for people on feature-rich devices: This type of site gives users access to videos, forms, maps, and other features and functionality enabled by iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Windows Mobile phones, among others. If you want to ensure an optimal experience for customers on smartphones, this is the way to go. Although it takes more effort to build your site, it also provides considerably more benefit and improves usability for more sophisticated mobile users.

Take a good look at your audience. Who is coming to your site and what do they need to do on it? Site analytics can give you a very clear idea of what type of handsets access your site and what kind of site might be your best bet.

Choosing tools to build your mobile site

Building a simple mobile version of a website isn’t difficult. Building a mobile site that looks good on multiple mobile-phone models and browsers is an entirely different story. Your options depend on your site’s complexity, your expertise, and your budget. You have four primary options:

• Working with an agency: If you have a budget, high expectations, a demanding timeline, and little expertise in mobile site building, working with an agency to develop a mobile website is a smart approach. Working with an agency offers many advantages, including brand consistency, ease of maintenance, and a single and trusted point of contact for updates. An agency can help you identify and answer all the key issues involved in your mobile site build. Check to be sure that the agency you choose has the specific skills you need, plus broad expertise in the mobile space, website design, and development, as well as the content development, database, and back-end IT capacity you require.

• Using automatic transcoders: Automatic transcoders are software tools that look at the HTML code in an existing website and translate the code into a mobile-friendly version on the fly or to produce a static mobile site. Transcoders work well for simple HTML websites. Buyer beware, however. Although they’re a nice, simple solution, they are far from perfect. Pages are rendered based on templates, which can lead to a far less visually appealing site. dotMobi, the leading mobile domain registrar, offers a great free transcoder with the purchase of a .mobi domain. Usablenet offers high-end transcoding of existing sites at www.usablenet.com.

• Using visual editors (see Figure 5-4): If you are creating a mobile site from scratch, or maybe just using assets from an existing wired site, a visual editor tool is a good choice. Visual editors are usually web-based, drag-and-drop or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) site-building tools. They make it fairly simple to create a basic site. You can upload images and create and format pages simply. Some visual editors even have advanced features, such as the ability to pull in dynamic content from an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed and populate databases with user information (RSS is the industry standard for converting web content into data feeds, like news stories, so that the content can be easily shared across the Internet).

Visual editors are a great choice if you want to build a basic site that renders correctly on almost all phones and includes some complex features (RSS feeds and so on), but don’t want to bother with designer or developer expenses. However, use caution. Aside from a few templates, visual editors give you little freedom to customize your site. Most sites created with a visual editor will be menu driven, with copy and links stacked on top of each other. Many visual editors don’t have the ability to arrange links horizontally, for example, and type, image, and color options are limited. Some of the leading providers include iLoop Mobile (www.iloop mobile.com), Mad Mobile (www.madmobile.com), DudaMobile (www.dudamobile.com), and Siteminis (www.siteminis.com).

Courtesy of DudaMobile

• Using code editors: If you understand web software coding and development, a code editor may make the most sense for you. Code editors allow you to upload your own code into a tool that ensures that your site renders correctly on a mobile device. A code editor can solve some of the issues with customization that often arise when using a visual editor. Many visual-editing tools have a code editor feature. If you have a large organization and multiple developers with different mobile skill levels, you should probably license a tool that has both a code and visual editor. Because many editors let you switch back and forth between code and visual editors, the visual editor/code editor combination can serve as a learning aid as your developers get comfortable with mobile development.

See Google’s GoMo (www.howtogomo.com) site for additional resource and testing tools to help you build your mobile presence.