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I was interviewed last week by Brian Prows of Mobile Beyond for his excellent mobile marketing podcast. He interviews a lot of great people in mobile, like Michael Becker and Mickey Alam Khan, and I was glad to do the interview when he asked.
Brian asked a lot of great questions and we covered a lot of ground in the interview titled Practical Mobile Marketing Advice for SMBs with Kim Dushinski. Enjoy!
I am so honored to be included on Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch List for 2010. It is so exciting to be listed with other “achievers who have already left their stamp on mobile marketing.”
There are some seriously awesome women on this list, like Laura Marriott, who is the Former President of the Mobile Marketing Association, and Tamara Gruber of Crisp Wireless who is one of my long-time mobile women friends and super smart marketer. I’ll let you read the entire list on your own, but want to leave with a couple of the quotes I especially liked:
“In mobile, you need to keep an eye on the future and a foot grounded in the present”
ALLISON MOONEY
Vice president of emerging trends, Omnicom’s MobileBehavior
“We need to connect with women in other industries who want to be where the action really is today in marketing”
LYNN TORNABENE
Chief marketing officer, Quattro Wireless
“Currently 0.8 percent of email newsletters are optimized for mobile, yet 20 to 30 percent of folks are checking their email
on mobile devices”
DEBORAH HALL
CEO, Web2Mobile
See the Mobile Woman to Watch 2010 list at Mobile Marketer.
Tomi Ahonen wrote an excellent piece called What happens to mobile advertising when economy comes back? that combined with a MediaPost article by Sarah Mahoney about retailers’ Black Friday plans has got me thinking about the future of mobile marketing.
Ahonen’s point is that once the economy comes back to full swing advertisers will look to add new engagement marketing techniques to their plans instead of just beefing back up their budgets on the old technology. Mahoney’s article got me thinking about how retailers could use mobile campaigns during Black Friday.
As I commented on the Media Post article, what if retailers created text message campaigns specifically for Black Friday. They could drive sign ups via their advertisements in the Thanksgiving Day newspaper – “Text STORE to 12345 for special discounts only available via text message.” Combine that with mobile commerce and shoppers could be buying from multiple stores via the power of mobile. The really smart folks would sign up for the campaign and stay home and shop from the couch.
It is time for marketers to start thinking about campaigns like this. The old marketing techniques will only take us so far. It’s time for really smart and engaging mobile campaigns.
The Mobile Marketing Association redefined “mobile marketing” this week at the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles. Here’s the new official definition:
“Mobile marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.”
I love the MMA’s new definition because it encompasses all the different tools of mobile marketing that are available today and those that will become available. Also, it brings up two very important concepts: communication and engagement. After all, if a mobile phone isn’t about communication we’ve really missed the boat.
But my favorite part is the word RELEVANT because unless mobile marketing is relevant to the end user it will not work. No one wants to be marketed to, but everyone likes to have relevant information available to them.
But this definition still begs the question, what is mobile marketing … exactly? What tools are available to businesses today who want to reach their customers via mobile?
Top Four Tools of Mobile Marketing
1.
Text Messaging / SMS
This is probably the most obvious tool of mobile marketing because so many people are doing text messaging – 123 million of us in the US and 3 billion of us worldwide. It is only natural that this type of communication would attract marketers.
The most common format of text messaging as a marketing tool is mobile couponing. Offering a discount or special offer via text message. But text messaging can and should be so much more than just coupons.
Alerts, text clubs, product/service information, sending mobile site links, interactive voting, contests, text-to-donate are just a sampling of the many uses of text messaging.
2.
Mobile-Friendly Websites
Over 50 million people in the US are going online with their phones and they are expecting to get websites that work on their phone. They want to find what they need quickly and easily and get back to whatever it is they were doing. The mobile web experience is not about “browsing” it is about “finding.”
If you are not sure if your company site is mobile friendly, just go to it on your mobile phone. Preferably access it from more than one type of phone so you can see how differently it works for different people based on the phone they are using.
3.
Mobile Advertising
Much the same as there is banner advertising on the desktop version of the Internet, there are also banner ads on mobile sites. Google made news recently by buying AdMob, one of the leading mobile display ad networks, and it is safe to say that mobile display (or banner) advertising will be a much more used tool in marketing now.
Additionally there is pay per click advertising which is aligned with mobile search. A consumer searching for something their phone will see search results ads showing along with the organic listings they find. Naturally, Google is a huge player in this space as well with their Google Mobile Adwords program.
4.
Mobile Email
Each day millions of people check their email on their phone. Whether the businesses sending emails to these people intended to be mobile marketing or not, they most certainly are. Once a person is communicating and engaging with you on their mobile device you are doing mobile marketing.
Every email that is sent must be easily readable on a mobile device or become so within one click. People are deluged by email and it is not likely that they will look at your email twice. If the first opportunity to see it comes on their mobile, it darn well better work because you will not get a second chance when they are on their desktop later.
If you need help with any of these mobile marketing tools I am here to help you. Check out my Mobile Marketing QuickStart, Text Messaging Module, Mobile Web Module and/or my Strategic Thought Session.
There are a couple of Upcoming Mobile Events that I thought you might want to know about. I’m sure there are a TON more mobile events worthy of note as well. Feel free to tell me about them in the comments =:)
CTIA Wireless 2010
March 23-25, 2010
Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV.
www.ctiawireless.com
Ad:tech San Francisco (MobileMix)
April 19-21, 2010
www.ad-tech.com/sf/adtech_san_francisco.aspx
FIND AN EVENT NEAR YOU:
Mobile Monday
www.mobilemonday.net/about
Go to the bottom and look for a city near you.
Qittle presents:
Social/Mobile Media at its Best “Live The Dream”
This is a really fun idea. Town by town Qittle is covering America with informative talks about mobile. Love it!
See entire schedule here:
http://qittle.eventbrite.com/
WHERE TO LOOK FOR EVENTS (and List Yours):
www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/general/104.html
I caught a bit of the Kim Komando radio show this weekend and she was talking about a new board game by Hasbro that includes text messaging as part of the game. Turns out it is an old board game with a new twist. CLUE: Secrets and Spies Edition
During the course of the game players use their own cell phone to receive text messages that give them intelligence (aka clues) to accomplish top secret spy missions in the game.
How totally cool is that? I love this idea. The messages are standard rate, so there is no additional cost to play with the SMS feature. (As long as you have a good text messaging plan. Which you do, don’t you?)
You may be wondering what this has to do with mobile marketing. It is an indication of how integrated mobile is becoming in our daily lives. The more aspects of daily life that are intertwined with mobile the more open consumers will be to communicating with businesses via mobile. It will just be completely normal to use your phone to interact with websites, companies, appliances, games, TV, radio and print media. And businesses that don’t have some sort of mobile interaction will feel old fashioned and get left behind in marketing. Just like any business now that doesn’t have a website feels positively ancient and out dated.
SIDE NOTE:
Be sure to also see my YouTube video about Woman’s Day Interactive – an example of a mobile interactive magazine.
I will let you know soon how much fun using text messaging with CLUE is. Don’t tell my daughter but this will be one of her birthday gifts this weekend. I will also let you know if there is a marketing aspect to it as well. I am hoping for a double opt in opportunity to stay on an SMS list for additional value. Fingers crossed. Oh and I also hope I complete the most missions before being discovered by Agent Black. My Palm Pre and I are ready.
Disclosure: The links to CLUE on Amazon are affiliate links. If you decide to purchase CLUE from Amazon using these links it will add a small amount to my affiliate commission from Amazon which I use to buy books from Amazon.
Chitika’s Study of Mobile Ad Click Through Rate
Dreadfully Draws the Wrong Conclusion
Last week Chitika, an online advertising network, released a study of mobile vs. non-mobile click through rates on their advertising units. You can read their press release about the study here.
Based on 92 million ads shown (1.3 million of them seen with mobile browsers) they reported that the desktop ads got a click through rate of 0.83%, while the “mobile ads” as a whole pulled a mere 0.48%.
I added the quotes on the words “mobile ads” because these were not mobile ads at all. Rather these were the exact same ads that were built for desktop computers but shown on mobile devices.
The conclusion drawn by Chitika and dozens of bloggers and writers who covered the story is that mobile ads don’t get the same click through response as desktop ads.
Here’s the flaw in the logic of this…
The Chitika study actually reveals that mobile users are not likely to click on desktop ads shown on their mobile device. That is an entirely different thing than saying that mobile users are not clicking on mobile ads.
These are different devices and require different strategies. You cannot simply force desktop ads onto mobile devices and then cry out that no one is clicking on them. It doesn’t make sense.
That would be like airing an audio only ad created for radio on TV and then claiming that radio ads don’t work as well as television commercials. Or like running a black and white ad designed for newspaper in a four color glossy magazine and stating that newspaper ads don’t work as well as magazine ads.
Mobile and desktop Internet use is completely different. Mobile advertising is not just desktop advertising made smaller. Mobile advertising is a different media channel than Internet advertising.
What the Chitika study really taught us is not that mobile users don’t click on ads, but that mobile users require ads specifically created for mobile use in order to click on them.
If you are looking for mobile marketing case studies you can examine to find out what is going on in mobile marketing, check out the links below. Check back often too. I’ll keep updating this list.
Mobile Marketing Association
www.mmaglobal.com/resources/case-studies
Mobile Marketer
www.mobilemarketer.com
Not exactly case studies, but they have great coverage of mobile marketing.
Text Messaging by Ez Texting
www.eztexting.com/case_studies.html
Text to Screen
www.locamoda.com/partners/case_studies/
Smart Reply
www.smartreply.com/Pages.aspx/Case-Studies
Do you have case studies that you would like listed?
Please send me the link and I’ll get them listed.
Welcome to my Wiffiti message board. It is titled Mobile Marketing Live because it is a live message board that displays text messages sent to it, displays tweets about mobile marketing and my book, The Mobile Marketing Handbook. Check it out. Below the board I will show you how to send a message to it.
Ready to see your message here?
It’s super easy. Just Text @wif6414 + your message to 87884.
Or you can tweet and include the words “mobile marketing” in your update and it will show up here as well. (Keep it G rated or it will not show up.)
If you want your actual name to show up, you will need to set up an account, edit your profile and link your phone to your profile. Otherwise you will show up as something random like GoldenPoodle1, which is what happened to me before I figured out the profile trick.
Want your own text message board?
Also super easy. Head over to Wiffiti, sign up and create a board. It is free. Enjoy!
The biggest misconception around mobile marketing lies in the idea that a business builds a database of mobile phone numbers and then dives into a mobile marketing campaign using these numbers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that in order to build a database of opt-in mobile numbers you have to do a mobile marketing campaign. Here’s why.
Text messaging is a mandatory opt-in marketing channel. It is never smart or ethical to send text messages that are not explicitly requested. And in many places around the world it is illegal to do so. This explicit permission is not granted simply by being a customer or giving a business a cell phone number for other purposes.
Opting in has very specific criteria. You have to get someone to text in to opt in, sign up online with using a fill in the blank form or reply “Yes” when you have gotten verbal permission to add them to your mobile list. None of these can be done without having a mobile marketing campaign going.
The good news is that everybody starts at zero. Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike all start with no one in their mobile marketing database.
Even better news is that it only takes a smart marketing strategy and powerful marketing implementation to get people opting in like crazy. Give people a good reason to sign up and make sure they know all about it and your campaign is underway. Your text message database is being built.
Waiting to start mobile marketing until you have a mobile database is impossible. You cannot build a mobile marketing database without doing mobile marketing.
Shout out to my friend Chris Torbit with SmartReply who coined the phrase “everybody starts at zero.”
Mobile Business Information
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Mobile Marketing Tools
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IMMBN
IMMBN
International Mobile Marketing Business Network
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BOOK
HANDBOOK
The Mobile Marketing Handbook by Kim Dushinski
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SMS BUSINESS
TEXT MSG BUSINESS
How to Start and Grow an SMS Text Messaging Business
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MOBILE WEB BIZ
MOBILE WEB
How to Start and Build a Mobile Website Building Business
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SPEAKING
SPEAKING
Invite Kim Dushinski to speak about mobile marketing