Applying customer strategy to build stronger relationships via mobile devices
“We need an iPhone app.”
It is arguably the beginning and end of most mobile marketing strategies. For many companies, an iPhone app might be an essential part of its mobile marketing campaign. But those five words also belie a superficial and unfortunately common view of a successful approach for capitalizing on the exponentially growing mobile customer base. Mobile marketing is much deeper than a cool app or a simple SMS blast. Mobile marketing is as deep and different as every customer.
That depth and differentiation is overlooked in favor of the typical “bright shiny object” obsession so often found in digital marketing. Smart companies don’t market to gadgets, platforms, or award judges.
We’ve created “mobile-graphics” to begin to illustrate what marketers need to know about changing consumer behaviors. They also highlight the importance of mobile segmentation. Knowing that 6 percent of all consumers will download coupons could alter a CPG’s mobile strategy. But how will it know which customers to target? Certainly it would not apply this strategy to the entire customer base.
Today, successful mobile marketing requires a keen understanding of customer behaviors and attitudes. It comes down to the differences in how customers use their devices. Marketers that overlook customer differentiation may be wasting money and time and could be impairing their brand equity on an increasingly important channel.
At Carlson Marketing, we recently completed an initiative that goes beyond high-level usage patterns and distribution statistics, aiming to gain attitudinal insight into the mindset of an increasingly varied mobile audience. Our approach was to determine consumer mobile usage and technology adoption, substantiated with data from Forrester, comScore and MRI. We also conducted a series of week-long ethnographic research panels; all leading to the creation of behaviorally driven mobile consumer personas. Finally, we developed specific audience profiles to illustrate how to maximize the effectiveness of mobile strategies and tactics, as well as to demonstrate the importance of new data streams from mobile channels.