What 10 Years of Mobile Marketing Has Taught Us About the Next 10

There is no such thing as The Year of Mobile. This phrase is used often, but it really has been a process that’s spanned nearly a decade, and is only just beginning. Consider this: in 2010, there was an estimated 62.6 million smartphone users in the United States. That number has risen to 222.9 million in 2017 and is projected to hit 264.3 million by 2021.

In 2015, Salesforce reported that 68 percent of companies integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy.

This is how Jason Spero, Google’s Vice President of Performance Media, looks at mobile’s path to today:

Before and including 2011, sure, you could run mobile ads, build mobile loyalty clubs, and more, but marketers in large numbers were not ready to dive in.

By 2012, mobile marketing efforts led to more sales and deeper engagement. But, in large part, those who were participating were considered early adopters with room in the club for many others.

By 2013, mobile’s value to marketers had been proven. The questions shifted from why to how, with many choices and decisions to make.

By 2014, those who had not done mobile or had just dabbled in it felt a sense of urgency. Not only were competitors often times eating their lunch, customers had moved to mobile devices. The percentage of companies optimizing email for mobile devices saw an increase of 22 percent in 2014 alone.

Beginning in 2015 and continuing today, the mobile user has established expectations—and they’re growing every day. A marketer’s job is to meet and beat those expectations.

Where are we 10 years into the mobile marketing era?

Some are doing it well. Others, not so much.

5 Reasons Marketers Fail

Here are five words to describe the brand marketers that are failing on mobile:

1. Selfish. If you're reaching out to mobile users, you had better be answering their needs and desires, not simply fulfilling your own.

Jonathan Stephen, who drove innovative mobile programs at JetBlue, points to the greed of some brands that seek to needlessly uncover such inconsequential details as how many sweeteners wireless owners put in their coffee and if they use Splenda or Truvia. Unless you are an artificial sweetener company looking to grab more market share, this information is extraneous and prying.

2. Illogical. Common sense deserves more credit than it gets.

For example, why create only an iPhone app if your customers are mostly or completely Android owners? That's just dumb. But it happens. Smart marketers rely solely on their own business's customer insights to power their programs, and to address the specific behaviors exhibited.

3. Timid. Seize the day.

Hank Wasiak has been marketing for more than five decades. He is among the most accomplished in the field, but when he looks in the mirror, he says that he sees someone who has often moved too slowly when change was needed. The ad executive's lesson for mobile marketers? Seize the day and think bigger. "With mobile, you get not only into the pocket of a consumer, you can get into one's heart," he says.

4. Impulsive. Watching, tracking, and responding to consumer trends--these are tools of the patient, humble, and successful marketer.

If your brand is struggling, perhaps those are tools you are not using enough. Sean Lyons, R/GA U.S. president, chides marketers who go to such conferences as South by Southwest seeking to determine which products and services will matter. The better approach? Don’t try to predict. Rather, discover and monitor. Consumers are going to decide what matters, and you need to be ready to rapidly respond as they do.

5. Inattentive. Every interaction—or inaction—can teach you something, if you're paying attention.

Spero calls consumer actions on mobile devices "signals," rich with information that can tell marketers a great deal if they are on the lookout for them.

5 Qualities of a Successful Marketer

Conversely, successful business leaders like Spero offered advice on the kind of relationship-building mobile marketing that is driving their success:

1. Be Pragmatic. Mobile has changed everything about marketing—and yet it's changed nothing.

We still need to sell stuff. It's merely the how that is different. Identify the business results you want and design your efforts to those ends. It's easy to be distracted by the pixie dust and possibilities in the digital arena. Filter the possible through the lens of what's wise.

2. Knock Gently. Mobile users are a lot more open to interactions with brands than many marketers believe—but the efforts need to be respectful.

Just because customers invite you into their homes doesn't mean you get to put your feet on the furniture, or stay all night. This means no 3 a.m. text messages for a dollar off a burger. And no push notifications every three minutes while someone is shopping. Less is more.

3. Simplify Life. Mobile is for action.

A theme that emerged often in conversation with mobile's best thinkers: Mobile should drive action. To do that, eliminate the unwanted. Beyond his or her mom, name one person who wants to read the bio of a company's CFO on a mobile website. List store hours, provide directions to your location, make purchases easy—whatever action your customer needs to take. Forget the rest.

4. Prize the Relationship. Just as you would with a spouse or other loved one, work daily to make the interaction even richer.

Businesses have extensive information available about many of their customers. For instance, purchase data that shows what generated a response from a mobile ad or offer can give a look into the desires of a wireless user. Wise mobile marketers interpret these signals and get even more personal with tailored outreach to individual customers that proves the brand’s value.

5. Get Better. It's called mobile, right? So keep moving.

Your efforts to reach mobile users should always be evolving. You may feel you are performing well today, but you should constantly be seeking new products or technologies that enhance the mobile experience. Maybe it's a better way to tell a traveler that his or her gate has changed, or an easier way for someone to find and save a mobile coupon. We all need to be better tomorrow than we are today. And it’s what mobile users expect and demand.

Without question, the next 10 years will be more important than the last. Marketing Land projects that mobile advertising will represent 72 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending by 2019. It behooves us to take the learnings from the last decade and perform to levels exceeding our users’ expectations.

(article first appeared here - https://www.simplilearn.com/what-mobile-marketing-taught-us-article)

Some Will Be “First” At SXSW, But How Much Does That Matter?

Be it the Internet of Things, the smart home, virtual reality or something else, change is coming.

The next big stage is this week’s SXSW Interactive, where check-in pioneer Foursquare (which has since morphed) and Oculus Rift, a virtual reality gaming headset, were introduced.

It’s also where Meerkat won the day in 2015 only to be forced to change its business model less than a year later when it was overtaken by Twitter/Periscope and Facebook Live.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said that innovation separates leaders from followers. Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis says, “You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there.”

The pace is in dispute, but the need to advance technologies and find new ways to engage with the near always-on user is universal.

But how? And what shape does that take?

“If you (as a marketer) have a real specific need for doing it and you think it's going to solve a problem, being an early adopter (of technology) is great,” longtime marketer Jonathan Stephen told me in an interview for my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book (www.artofmobilepersuasion.com). “You are quick to fail and quick to being successful. There are others out there who think this can be an enhancement to an experience and maybe those are the ones who don't necessarily jump on the early bandwagon but they continue to see as the technology improves itself, that they will adapt over time and a lot of the kinks will have been worked out. Best practice would have been created and they would have followed those guidelines.

“It really depends on the position that you're in. If you've got the capital to do that kind of investment, by all means I always think that being an early adopter is fantastic but you have to be prepared to fail. You're not going to get it right the first time (all the time). No one ever has.”

Sometimes being second, third or later has its advantages.

WhatsApp, built by former Yahoo employees as a text-messaging alternative, is a cross-platform mobile messaging app that allows users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. In 2014, Facebook purchased the company and access to more than 600 million active users for $19 billion.

“I always use the phrase, ‘I may not be early to the party but I always like to make an entrance,’” Stephen said. “Sometimes there are technologies out there and I wasn't the first to get to it but I definitely want to make sure that I get noticed when I launched that technology. It takes a lot of thought. It takes a lot of strategy in terms of what is behind it. It takes a lot of humility to take a step back and realize where you will be successful and where you want there to go.

“There will be a lot of successes and a lot of failures. You learn that over time. But more than anything it goes all the way back to that business strategy.”

Others who I talked to for the book view things in similar ways.

Curtis Kopf has seen – and been part of innovation – in large enterprises including Microsoft, Amazon and Alaska Airlines.

At Amazon, he was part of a hand-picked 14-person team in the U.S., Europe and Asia that scaled and extended “Search Inside the Book,” a discovery tool that searches and displays the full contents of hundreds of thousands of books from domestic and international publishers.

“Every company wrestles with this,” Kopf told me when speaking of innovation.  “We all come from different places whether you are an airline, a bank, or Amazon.com.  I've experienced the spectrum of companies based on their business model and who they are have different comfort levels and appetites.

“Amazon.com is going to be a company that makes really big bets -- things that may not materialize for five years or seven years, even ten years. Other companies won't view the world that way.”

Everyone, Kopf said, has a place.

“There's definitely a continuum of innovation and then there are obviously companies out there that are category creators,” he said. “Clearly a lot of the companies that we think of innovators weren't first. Obviously Google wasn't the first search engine (in fact, 20 were launched earlier, according to Wikipedia). They just did it in a new and better way. Apple definitely wasn't the first to do a smartphone. They just did it in a new and better way.

“Innovation is talked about so much that it is almost become meaningless. Every company on the planet says that they are innovative. It's part of their mission statement. Obviously as consumers we all interact with these brands and the truth is that they are not all innovative.”

 “Being first is great. There are times that being first could be really important. If you can get it an advantage that you can sustain, there's some buzz and credit that you get from customers by introducing something first. But I don't think innovation in and of itself means being first. It could be taking something that someone else started and doing it in a new way.”

What should we expect to see in Austin this week and what should be our SXSW takeaways?

 “South By (Southwest) has an interesting mix of what are perceived to be cutting edge talks or technologies that are really pretty basic,” Sean Bartlett, a former senior Lowe’s executive who is now Worldwide Industry Lead for Retail at Apple, told me.

“There is also the technology itself which is interesting. And then, what I think is most important, with respect to what I've taken away from South By in the few times that I've been there, is more cultural and how you think about things.

“One of the things that I took from a panel a couple of years ago that has actually become a guiding principle of the team is this notion of commitment to craftsmanship. I saw a panel of well-known startup CEOs talking about their products. One of the things that really hit home was how they talked about craftsmanship and quality of the product and the overall experience. It’s a true cultural takeaway that you can bring back and put in effect immediately. You come back from the show and on a Monday you can really start to drive that message home. That's one that always sticks out when I think about that particular show.”

Five Words To Describe Ineffective Mobile Marketers

Google’s Jason Spero refers to consumer actions on mobile devices as signals, rich with information that tells marketers a great deal if they are on the lookout for them.

“I have more marketers that I'm convincing to be curious about those signals than marketers who are overusing those signals to the point of abuse (like invading privacy),” Spero, Google Vice President of Performance Media, told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion.

“My problem isn't that marketers are afraid to use those signals because they over-respect them or think the consumers don't want it. My bigger problem is marketers that still don't know how to action the most basic capabilities in mobile. We have all the signals we need to deliver a great UX (user experience). But we've got a heck of a lot of work to do to get there.”

Beyond inattentive, there are four additional words to slap on ineffective mobile marketers.

Impulsive

Another highly successful marketer on the global stage chides those who go to such conferences as South By Southwest and unilaterally seek to determine which products and services will matter.

 “The consumer is going to decide,” said Sean Lyons, Global Chief Digital Officer at Havas told me. “A lot of these early thoughts about how things will be used are often wrong. And it's not because people aren't intelligent. It's because we haven't really found what the behaviors are yet.

“Just think about how long it took for something like the video phone call which was introduced in the ‘60s to actually come into use. Even now, we're Skyping (and only using a voice capability). Other people might be doing FaceTime. But it's not our main method of communication. What's envisioned is often not what happens. To me that's the fun part, especially for brands.”

So what is a marketer to do?

“Once you realize that you are not going to be expected to have the answer, and you just kind of feel your way through it, the better you will be,” Lyons said. “That's going to allow you to not have the pressure of solving the problem. You should be simply observing.”

Selfish

Much like the ill-advised race in 2007 to build an iPhone app, many marketers have taken on Big Data more to check a box than to get closer to a business outcome.

The wise ones know better.

“There needs to be a specific need that benefits the customer,” Jonathan Stephen, who drove innovative mobile programs at JetBlue, said to me. “We should not be selfish in our endeavors to reach customers. I think we get very greedy with big data.

“If possible, we want to know what our customer had for breakfast. We want to know how many sugars that they put in their coffee and if they used Splenda or Truvia or whatever.  There’s this grasp for data and the funny thing is people (marketers) find out that they don’t even know what to do with that data.”

Timid

Several of the leaders who I spoke to said that sitting back and doing nothing about the migration of customers to mobile devices could be even more harmful to your business than making the wrong choices in these relatively early days.

Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most recognizable, beloved, and successful brands, isn’t being passive. Instead, it is fulfilling its long-established mission in an increasingly-large part through the use of wireless devices.

“Our mobile strategy was really articulated in the 1920s when Robert Woodruff described the role of The Coca-Cola Company as putting our brands within the arm’s reach of desire,” Tom Daly, Group Director, Global Director, Mobile and Search, told me. “The only thing that is different today is that at the end of that arm, between it and desire, is a mobile device.

“To the degree that strategy is a choice, the choice that we are making is to have mobile enable desire. The alternative is to do nothing and have mobile become a barrier. That doesn’t sound smart.”

Illogical

In this mobile era, there are two essential questions to ask and answer. One, would a particular mobile initiative enable me to reach or get closer to my business goal? Two, what is in it for my customer or prospect?

“In determining new capabilities, whether it's technology, design or overall customer experience, we really are look for a customer benefit,” Sean Bartlett, Director of Digital Experience, Product, & Omni-channel Integration for Lowe’s, revealed to me. “We saw this recently with Touch ID (a fingerprint recognition feature designed and released by Apple) where there was a clear customer benefit to allowing people to log into their account using their fingerprint.  Passwords are an archaic way of authenticating, or validating, someone's ID and people still have trouble with them. They use various email addresses.

“We look for clear customer benefit, not a huge technical hurdle, and the value that it could bring to the customer and the business.”

I’ll offer one more word to describe the commonality in the more than dozen business leaders who I interviewed for The Art of Mobile Persuasion. Pragmatic.

Doing anything less will make you ineffective or even out of work.

(article first appeared at http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/5-words-describe-ineffective-mobile-marketers-166097)

Personalization Is Mobile's Big Hurdle and Large Opportunity

Three out of four consumers like it when brands personalize offers and messages, according to the Aberdeen Group. But only 13 percent of companies personalize their mobile experience for users, eConsultancy/Monetate reports.

While that seems like a head-scratch in a time when vegans are still getting meatball sandwich offers, there are reasons why brands aren’t consistently delivering the individualized goods.

“We have to realize how complex that problem is,” Sean Lyons, Global Chief Digital Officer, at international communications firm Havas, told me in an exlusive interview for my new book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion http://www.amazon.com/Art-Mobile-Persuasion-Transforming-Relationship-ebook/dp/B0100RS81K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1434858180&sr=8-1&keywords=art+of+mobile+persuasion.

“Think about how well you know your close friends and how preferences adapt and change over time. Could you predict with great certainty what they may want at a certain moment? Maybe only your closest friends.

“We have really high expectations for the capability to personalize communications but it's a very complicated thing. It's a mix of both a trail of data and also the feeling that I have right now, my mood. That we're not factoring in. There are going to be a lot more mistakes made with personalization, the wrong people targeted. That's part of the evolution of it.”

There is proof that personalization works today. In one of the most significant successes, a major wireless carrier utilizes individualized service to tackle that industry’s deadly disease: churn – the rate at which customers leave a business behind.

A custom welcome video, powered by Seattle mobile marketing and advertising technology firm Vehicle, is the very first point of communication with a new customer.  Sent to mobile devices, this personalized welcome video acknowledges and thanks the unique subscriber for his or her business and summarizes the details of the account and what to expect when the first bill arrives.

As a result, the carrier has seen:

·      Significant reduction in churn (customers leaving in the first 30 days), saving tens of millions of dollars

·      A decrease in calls to customer support

·      The highest recall of any other touch with the customer (over 50 percent measured at 90 days post-video delivery)

·      Significant increase in revenue (ARPU or average revenue per user and lifetime value)

But other brands are flailing in their personalization efforts. Why? One reason is that many marketers are running in double-time to collect data, but aren’t being smart when it comes to using it.

“There needs to be a specific need that benefits the customer,” Jonathan Stephen, who drove innovative mobile programs at JetBlue, told me for The Art of Mobile Persuasion. “We should not be selfish in our endeavors to reach customers. I think we get very greedy with big data.

“If possible, we want to know what our customer had for breakfast. We want to know how many sugars that they put in their coffee and if they used Splenda or Truvia or whatever.  There’s this grasp for data and the funny thing is people (marketers) find out that they don’t even know what to do with that data.”

Some are selling it. But others are using it to nurture relationships that are yielding more loyalty and sales.

The upshot?

Delivering on a more one-to-one basis is both mobile marketing and mobile advertising’s big hurdle and its largest opportunity.

(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2015/06/24/personalization-is-mobile’s-big-hurdle-and-large-opportunity/)