Mobile Changed Your Personal Life, But How Does It Change Your Job?

One-to-one personalised communication is the future, but many marketers still struggle with where to position mobile marketing in their strategy and operational planning.

There is an 80% chance you are reading this article on your mobile device. Although this is a business article it’s likely you will read it at home, at lunch, on holiday, or commuting.

Actually, it is more likely you will read this article on a mobile device on a Sunday morning than on your office desktop on a Tuesday afternoon.

Mobile has changed how and when you consume media. It has also changed your job as a marketer.

As the CEO of a marketing technology company I have the privilege to talk to many top marketers about how mobile is rapidly impacting their organisations. We also see how content is used and how budgets are spent. The opportunities and impact of mobile are much bigger than most marketers anticipate. It is my strong belief that the current transition to mobile is as big as the transition to the Internet 20 years ago. Mobile is NOT just web on your telephone—just as web was not just your brochure on a website. It has its own dynamic and opportunities.

I’d like to share the challenges top marketers are facing and how a mobile strategy will help them to overcome these hurdles. Here are my key take-aways from my CMO discussions.

CMOs Face The Following Challenges:

• The costs of paid media are rising: As your audience shifts en masse to digital channels, so do your competitors and their budgets. Just look back at your experiences with Google Ad Word campaigns or Facebook campaigns to see how media costs have been rising.
• The effect of paid media is going down: The average conversion rates on content are declining. As a result you are paying increasingly higher prices for less effective access to your audience.
• The amount of competitive content is growing: With an estimated 3.5million new blog posts every day, it’s increasingly tough to stand out and to be noticed. It’s crowded out there.
• It’s hard to get personal in a noisy space: With all this content being produced it’s hard to keep the attention of the customer for a message which goes deeper and is more detailed than a catchy one-liner.

Go Beyond Paid And Earned Media

CMOs recognise that one-to-one personalised communication is the future. Customer engagement needs to go beyond paid and earned attention. But the ongoing digitalisation of marketing, going towards mobile marketing, is non-trivial and can be daunting. Many marketers still struggle with where to position mobile marketing in their strategy and their operational planning.

Working towards a mobile strategy starts with the acknowledgement that:

• Digital and mobile is not hype; it’s irreversible and you have to do it right.
• As a marketer you eventually need to think in conversations and not in campaigns.
• You need to know where the conversation takes place and be there to contribute with a relevant story.
• You have to secure your presence in these relevant places with help of a central platform.
• The more relevant the story, the more willing the customer will be to engage with you within the “walled garden” of a branded mobile app.

Strengthen Your Mobile Presence

With these acknowledgements as the basis, you can continue to work on strengthening your mobile presence and to open up a heap of unique opportunities. The discussions we have with marketers on how to position mobile marketing within their bigger marketing picture all follow more or less the same path.

• Build paid media campaigns with the objective of converting them into a conversation.
• Motivate customers to interact with your content via their mobile device, with the aim of having them accept your branded app to watch exclusive and personalised content.
• Gradually start building a customer content profile, understanding their media behaviour better to be able to offer better content.
• Continue the conversation within the walled garden of your mobile platform until your insights reach a threshold which justifies the next step towards a promotion or product offer.
• Tweak ongoing customer insights to be able to offer the best proposition and to outsmart the competition.

Marketers Need To Catch Up

If we look at mobile from a customer perspective, then it is not only the fastest-growing channel for media consumption, it is also the biggest. 2014 was the year when mobile took over from the desktop in terms of users and usage. 2015 was the year that Google sent an SEO alarm and started “punishing” sites which were not mobile-friendly.

Marketers still need to catch up. If we look at mobile from a marketer’s perspective, then mobile is also experiencing accelerating attention. The mobile marketing budget is expected to triple in the next three years, following the path described.

With mobile the customer literally holds your message in their hands and your brand in their pocket. How personal can it get?

If you are reading this on a Sunday morning … I wish you a great weekend.