The State Of Mobile Web Marketing

By Author: Eric Hansen
Total Articles: 3698
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Australia and Japan are doing it, so are parts of Europe and the Far East. The United States is getting there, though it has taken some time. I'm talking about mobile marketing - such as a coupon from McDonald's that displays on your mobile phone when you walk past the restaurant. It's also the text message you send to get special ring tones or to vote for the next American Idol. But why isn't the US consumer fully inundated with mobile marketing, and why do other nations seem so advanced compared to North America?

The truth is that in other nations, people have grown up with their mobile phones, to the exclusion of PC usage. That being said, there is still some mobile marketing already happening in the U.S., for example, text messaging.

Now, with the proliferation of smart phones and pocket PC's, the iPhone and the iPhone app store, as well as mobile-optimized applications such as LinkedIn, there are plenty of new and exciting ways for marketers to engage their mobile audience.

My first piece of advice is that when considering mobile campaigns, consider mobile device compatibility. Many mobile marketers ...
... are surprised to learn that great campaigns don't necessarily translate very well to mobile. But why should that be a surprise? After all, there are thousands of different mobile phones, and dozens of browsers. So with this vast array of software and hardware combinations that marketers must consider, what's the lowest common denominator? It could turn out to be a WAP browser that processes WML (Wireless Markup Language). The bottom line? Slim down your mobile campaign. Don't deploy fancy, rich web applications out of the gate. Start simple, and then, in a couple of years of mobile phone technology advances and adoption, we'll be ready to move to more sophisticated content.

So, where to start? It's the just like traditional marketing. You should create the message you want to convey and what you want your audience to do. Is your campaign about brand awareness, transactions, or social networking? Maybe to generate user content? Define what you want to do and include mobile as one of those channels to engage your audience.

While you are doing that, remember context. Context is extremely important! Imagine your mobile audience - they could be out walking on the street, taking the subway, or driving a car. Depending on that context, there are some likely things they'd do with their mobile phones; for example, email, text, update Facebook, Twitter, or make a call, given the context. But it's not likely they'd be at the grocery store looking for vacation destinations from their mobile phone. So it's important to understand what is the context of the user of the mobile device -- are they are work or at home? If you are a e-retailer, you have all sorts of ways to help people buy online that actually might not be appropriate in a mobile context.

One way way to know whether or not you are succeeding is by using measurement and analytics tools. There's a whole new breed of mobile suppliers who have worked around the limitations of the mobile channel. While these products are not as rich in terms of data as traditional web analytics, they do give you information you otherwise wouldn't have. You must have a way to measure the efficacy of mobile campaigns. For example, how many people are engaging in a mobile-specific microsite? What are they viewing and what actions are they taking? It's just as important to analyze mobile content consumption as you would web-based content consumption.

And that's where it gets really interesting because now you are at the point where you want to analyze and fine-tune your offers. As a mobile marketer, a great way to know how you are doing is through testing and experimentation. Come up with promotions and put them out there in a controlled test If you run an A/B or multivariate test campaign using a mobile-capability solutino like SiteSpect, you'll discover what works and resonates versus what does not. Perform tests iteratively and use what you've discovered to fuel your momentum from a new mobile marketer to an experienced mobile marketer who understands what their audience wants.

Lastly, make sure you understand how different channels are interacting and affecting all of your channels and that you aren't operating each one as a silo. It's important to understand how a billboard causes people to interact with another medium, particularly mobile. That way, you'll be able to understand your how many of your visitors voted with their mobile phones after the last American Idol show. You must correlate and aggregate behavior across channels, and there are quite a few available products and techniques out there for doing this. Who knows, maybe you'll be the next marketer engaging with consumers walking past a store that sends out a mobile coupon to their mobile phones. Welcome to the new world of marketing!