Mobile should be the driver for Cross Channel Marketing

Mar­keters need to address a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing chan­nels and the mobile aspect should real­ly be the dri­ver for a Cross Chan­nel mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, where the goal is to give con­sumers a con­sis­tent and rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence across all devices and media. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, only less than one out of ten com­pa­nies have Mobile as their top priority.

We’ve all been hear­ing it for years. Mobile is the new black. Terms like Mobile first and Mobile Only have become stan­dard buzz words in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­ver­sa­tions over the years and no one can deny the impor­tance of focus­ing on mobile as the arguably most impor­tant mar­ket­ing chan­nel today.

So you would think that today, almost a decade after “The Year Of the Mobile” (year 2007), all mar­keters would have Mobile as a top pri­or­i­ty with­in their organ­i­sa­tion. Yet accord­ing to our Dig­i­tal Trends Report for 2016, the num­bers show that only 9% of com­pa­nies have Mobile as the top pri­or­i­ty in their organ­i­sa­tion. And only about half of the respon­dents have it as a top three pri­or­i­ty. This num­ber should be much higher.

Fur­ther­more, the focus on mobile, in terms of under­stand­ing mobile users’ buy­er behav­iour and use of dif­fer­ent devices, seem to be declin­ing slight­ly com­pared to last year.

The rea­sons for this can be many. Per­haps mobile is becom­ing busi­ness as usu­al and there­fore com­pa­nies no longer sep­a­rate it out from their gen­er­al dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. There are also vast dif­fer­ences in who owns the mobile strat­e­gy from com­pa­ny to com­pa­ny and there­fore the pri­or­i­ty on mobile could live else­where than the mar­ket­ing depart­ment. Where does it real­ly belong? IT? Mar­ket­ing? Operations?

Collaborate between multiple different departments

The truth is that regard­less of where the own­er­ship is in the organ­i­sa­tion, the mobile strat­e­gy needs to be a col­lab­o­ra­tion between mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent departments.

Busi­ness units out­side of mar­ket­ing need to be involved and be part of the deci­sion mak­ing process around the mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, includ­ing mobile. There need to be a con­sis­ten­cy between design, func­tion­al­i­ty, data col­lec­tion & man­age­ment, deploy­ment and exe­cu­tion of a dig­i­tal cross chan­nel strategy.

Mobile first or mobile only needs to be the dri­ver for cross chan­nel mar­ket­ing. Com­pa­nies need to treat mobile as their absolute most impor­tant chan­nel for dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and let all oth­er chan­nel activ­i­ties come from that. Three things to focus on:

• Under­stand the cus­tomers research and buy­er behaviour
• Know when they change between devices and channels
• Cre­ate and offer the right and rel­e­vant con­tent at the right time through the right channel

Once you under­stand how cus­tomers research and buy prod­ucts and ser­vices via mobile chan­nels and recog­nise where in the process they switch between dif­fer­ent devices and chan­nels, you will be able to give them the con­sis­tent cross chan­nel expe­ri­ence that will help dri­ve growth and cus­tomer loy­al­ty for your company.