December’s roundtable discussed “Mobile Marketing” which i apropos as everyone has budgeted for Mobile Marketing in 2012. The question everyone want to know is, where do we go from here? Anywhere and everywhere, it would seem, but getting there may be another issue. Analysts project nearly a tripling of mobile marketing spend in the next 24 months, but the explosion of mobile devices, usage, technologies and data has created potential for a vast gap between marketing opportunities and marketing success. This roundtable of Mobile Marketing Executives will debate how companies big and small, global and local should jump into the mobile game and which practices will likely differentiate the winners from the losers.
Participants included:
Grapple Mobile: Sean Rosenberg, Managing Director
Xtify: Josh Rochlin, CEO
Xtify: Josh Rochlin, CEO
GroundLink: Seth Lasser, CMO
ScanBuy: David Javitch, VP Marketing
TodaCell: Mark Lehmann, CEO
HipCricket: Paula Murgia, VP Mobile Strategy
HipCricket: Paula Murgia, VP Mobile Strategy
BluTrumpet: Nina Sodhi, CEO
GroundTruth: Evan Neufeld, CMO
QR Media Group: Tammy Lewis, CMO
Snackable Media: Jill Labert, VP Marketing
OfferMobi: Howie Schwartz, Co-founder
Notes taken by: Niamh Bushnell, MarketSolutions
- Device market fragmented within mobile, iPhone versus Android, and there’s also a significant base of people still on feature phones.
- Feature phones still of interest to advertisers – Pepsi Xfactor promotion focuses on taking pictures with the phone, targeting all phone users not just smart phones.
- Media on iPhones is very expensive; feature phones are a lot less expensive with similar click through rates of 10%.
- The difference between phones is a conversation about price. Price of the handset and the carrier agreement e.g. with Metro PC, flat rates and no contract.
- What will happen next year? We’ll see real ROI generated from mobile marketing, content accessed via mobile phones will turn into real sales, companies will close the loop and drive ROI.
- Designing consumer apps for mobile? It’s about building for the smallest screen first and building up from that.
- Is this the year of mobile? In the past we were always looking for “the mobile guy” at brands that we could talk to and sell to. Now it’s integrated – we’re looking for the CRM person or the CMO, at agencies its the CRM team.
- ROI in mobile – Its difficult to achieve scale but lots of brands like Staples see ROI in marketing to their own audience.
- Audience and context are key. Message has to be specific and relevant. You can push the coupon at the retail store but how do you get the customer to walk through the door in the first place.
- There are scalability and complexity issues. Mobile campaigns are high touch and only recently do digital agencies have the expertise to set up campaigns that are successful, to ask the right questions about how and why.
- Seeing a lot more multichannel campaigns now where mobile becomes the thread through all channels, through broadcast, POS etc. The question now is how can we use mobile to drive strategy (instead of just being tactical) and how can it start to drive revenue.
- Concern about brands forcing the users to take an action – will we see consumer burnout, should we be concerned about this?
- Marketers are also getting smarter about the cadence at which they are sending out messages. They must be delivering value and the right cadence.
- Multichannel – tools must be chosen carefully and must talk to each other.
- Mobile marketing is so opaque, no cookies to allow you to track people. On the web you can buy an audience, like New York, business people but on mobile it’s untargeted.
- Check out Boston based Fiksu
- The promise of mobile – I am at a store like SAM’s Club and a truck load of new TVs lands into the bay. I immediately launch a flash sale campaign via mobile to broadcast to customers within a 2 mile radius of the store. The campaign is integrated with the backend stock management system.
- Motorola is working on some POS solutions in this area. IBM also so that my storage system is talking to my CRM which is speaking to my mobile app tool and creating geofences that bring people in.
- These mobile marketing tools are allowing brands to think more holistically about the customer and leverage loyalty marketing, POS tool, better. Every tool in the marketing playbook has a role to play.
- Mobile is the ultimate digital tool to address moments in people’s lives.
- Multichannel – Delta, the mobile marketing conversation spans the organization, 14 different groups from technology to marketing to customer service.
- H&M’s mobile marketing tool has 24-language support and allows managers on a store by store basis to manage content. They set it up a 9am, it hits the user by 10am. It’s very expensive to set up but the ROI is so good it makes sense.
- Its hard to figure out how to measure its success – downloads, coupons, but once you’ve got a measurement that works you can justify the bigger budgets.
- Easier to figure this out with retail brands, still hard to do with B2B. Enterprise plays are still a huge untapped market. Novartis just want to use an app for people to get around their campus.
- Coke wanted to geofence their vending machines, because these have the highest margin for them. They wanted to find a way to let people know where the newest machine was and let their franchisees geofence their own locations too.
- Getting people to come back to your app is the most difficult challenge. 55% of app users use them 4 times or less. Need to find reasons to bring them back.
- Knowing the retention level of your usage is crucial. Also knowing what users are doing with it, analytics, are they exiting early, using it incorrectly.
- Microsoft location based game, build up virtual currency allow you to download it from your mobile into a console, that’s powerful.
- The use case for a tablet versus a phone is totally different. Tablet seen more as an in-home device.
- What will be different in the next 6-12 months?
- Expertise in mobile will be far advanced
- Agencies and brands will learn how to close the loop and achieve ROI.
- NFC will fizzle – too few phones, no mass appeal.
- People have to care about Windows 7
- We’ll see a lot more multichannel campaigns.
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