In our previous article on Mobile Mania, Marketing’s Gold Rush to Mobile: Tips and Trends, we uncovered some strategic insights about the future of mobile marketing. In this article our experts talk tactics, pointing directly at concerns and offering possible solutions for marketers who want to collect Mobile treasure but avoid sinking the company’s ship trying to get it.
Martina Dodić, Marketing Manager at Infobip:
Our role is specific here, as we are a technology company. We facilitate the implementation of mobile engagement strategies for companies, by building globally reliable and easily applicable cloud-based mobile communication channels. On top of that, we constantly add new ingredients and opportunities for optimisation of mobile engagement strategies – location, context-based insight, and database cleaning.
There are a lot of discussions about mobile engagement going on, but there is no magic formula that could guide companies through this major shift to mobile. The matter of turning the huge potential of mobile into tangible business gains is all but easy. It requires careful planning and what works for one business doesn’t necessarily work for another.
Joe Luthy, Marketing Director at LogiGear Corporation:
We don’t innovate as quickly as I’d like to see but that’s due to resource limitations. What we’ll be doing next year is making better utilization of the technology to serve our customers with what they are looking for in the right format a greater percentage of the time.
Mayank Mehta, VP Product at Capriza:
Our innovation, in the short-term, will be operational – getting access to business-critical data from our phones and managing campaigns from any device. In terms of customer-facing marketing innovations on mobile, we expect to use our very product (the lightweight apps, which we call “zapps”, that you can create with our Designer) as an asset to be shared via SMS, Twitter, Facebook and email on a mobile device. We haven’t yet cracked the code on how to leverage that asset, but we are enjoying the challenge of figuring it out.
We see more and more customers looking for alternatives to traditional mobile application development. Yes, some mobile apps need to be very robust and complex, therefore requiring a highly-skilled iOS and/or Android developer (e.g. 3D product demos, interactive e-books, etc.) but for the transactional, work-specific tasks that burden many marketers like invoices, approvals, vendor/partner management, etc., we see that the market is heading in the direction of lightweight, transactional apps that do one specific workflow. The result will be more productive marketers, which benefits everyone.
Additionally, I see greater adoption of consumer apps for corporate marketing use (e.g. Instagram), which I expect to raise the quality of B2B marketing technologies in the long term as marketers grow even more accustomed to the beautiful, easy-to-use nature of consumer apps.
Martina Dodić:
Relevance is the cornerstone of any success in marketing, and today it’s reach that gives you relevance. Mobile is what gives the greatest – and the most relevant – reach, thanks to a paradigm shift in communications and content consumption. Catching the eye of the consumer is becoming increasingly difficult, but the fine line between immediate and intrusive remains. That’s where a well-known and popular channel comes in.
SMS is seeing a constant upward trend thanks to its immediacy and familiarity, and we give our clients detailed information and best practices on how to harness the potential of SMS in mobile marketing, in addition to world-leading connection quality and coverage.
Joe Luthy:
The majority of app developers are focused solely on the device without going to the next step and assuring a completely separate experience from the traditional desktop. Our app development business is built around delivering what the customer wants, but we coach them on taking a longer view and helping them go beyond just the mobile app.
Zhen Wu, President & Chief Operating Officer at Flashtotalk, LLC:
Marketing companies have a tough job since most consumers have multiple screens and multiple OS versions. The key is to create an environment that’s all encompassing to create a captured audience such as Apple, Inc. I see Samsung is starting to do a good job following suit.
As a provisioning company, our goal is to provide consumers the freedom to choose the best wireless carrier with their current device. We provide a solution for our customers to take advantage of lower monthly bills so they can keep their device and switch the carrier.
Satish Shetty, Founder & CEO at Codeproof Technologies Inc:
Business is concerned with corporate data leakage. Due to the BYOD (bring your own devices) trend, employees are accessing corporate applications (emails, specifications, customer data, designs etc.) on his/her personal un-secured mobile devices. Codeproof is focused on solving BYOD security by offering our cloud based mobile security software to businesses.
Mayank Mehta:
To create and monitor many of our most complex marketing campaigns requires that we be able to access web applications from our mobile device. Some systems do offer mobile apps, but often, those apps are insufficient. Thankfully, we “eat our own dog food” and have actually created apps for the marketing team using the Capriza Designer. That being said, there are certain workflows we have yet to mobilize.
Katie Meurin, Director of Marketing at Zco:
Customer loyalty rewards programs are popping up everywhere and with good reason – they are working. Consumers want to feel connected to the brands with which they engage. The problem with customer loyalty programs is that they can be difficult to organize and maintain. We’ve seen it firsthand at Zco – companies lose the initiative because of outdated POS systems or because it requires too much employee bandwidth to maintain – and then they call us. Creating a good loyalty program that allows the consumer to interact with the brand through an app synced with a POS system can and is having enormous benefits for brands. It’s a cool factor that differentiates, makes buying easier and creates buzz about your brand. You want your mobile marketing efforts to be cool. SMS messaging campaigns – not cool, branded reward program apps – cool!
Patrick Denney, Chief Mobile Architect at Headspring Mobile:
I think it’s less about what challenges, and more about what opportunities. With mobile devices we can understand where customers shop, where they live, estimate their socioeconomic status, number of children, what the weather is like where they are, etc. and provide an ideal environment for target marketing. Apps like RetailMeNot have been doing this using GPS location for a while but with the introduction of such technologies as iBeacon I see this being taken to another level altogether. Big brother IS watching, all consumers can do is sit back and enjoy the ride.
Joe Luthy:
From this standpoint our needs are pretty basic, we make sure that the key information from the applications we use on a daily basis are available via a mobile device. That means being able to retrieve information from our CRM systems in a device friendly format with the ability to print reports and docs remotely.
Martina Dodić:
We are using mobile applications to improve the functionality of internal tools, and relevant updates are delivered to these applications through our own push notifications service. Also, our teams are frequently using our global SMS messaging network to increase efficiency and speed up processes in situations when e-mail communication is not enough, and when voice calls would be too expensive.
Mayank Mehta:
Firstly, we’ve tested our own mobile application development technology for optimizing specific workflows. Secondly, we experimented with mobile advertising but found that the conversions were too low quality for us to continue to invest in that channel. Thirdly, we optimize every landing page for use on any mobile device in order to drive as high a conversion rate as possible from all platforms. Finally, we engage in three major social channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) from our mobile devices in order to ensure a quick turn around time.
Katie Meurin:
I really enjoy using Meeting Mapper – its an app that integrates with Salesforce and helps us keep track of the meetings we have – who attends, what stance everyone holds, that sort of thing – but it’s very visual and I can be taking notes on 5 different people from an iPad and the notes will go right into each of their Salesforce records with the push of one button. If I were to go into each record I’d have 25% of the information and it would take me double the time to enter it all.
Patrick Denney:
We have been using tools like LinkedIn’s CardMunch and CardCam to quickly scan in business cards for prospects and drop them into Salesforce.
Patrick Denney:
I’d say market over saturation. When mobile was just for the early adopters it was easy to gain traction, just post an app on the app store and you’re done. Now we see people paying money to be displayed inside of a more popular app to promote their free app! Gaining traction is all about being unique at this stage of the game (or apparently having a photo app, every time I think photo apps are done, another one pops up in the top 10).
Satish Shetty:
A major infrastructure issue in mobility is content. Many enterprise applications and websites are not ready for mobile. There has been drastic improvement in the last few years but not enough. In developing countries Internet is not reliable and this is still a major infrastructure issue for mobility growth since so many cloud based apps rely on Internet availability.
Martina Dodić:
The biggest issue marketers face is not on their end: mobile devices are highly fragmented regarding screen sizes, processor power, but also usage preferences and familiarity with mobile technology. This often calls for extensive research and development of mobile-ready sites and apps, which in the end cannot yield the expected results.
The answer to this is going for a cross-platform solution that offers the same user experience on all devices, all networks and with all demographics. So far there is only one – SMS, and it’s unlikely it will soon be supplanted.
Of course, SMS cannot offer the same rich experience as other mobile channels, but it greatly increases the reach of any marketing effort, as well as adds a mobile dimension to even the most conservatively planned campaigns.
Mayank Mehta:
As I mentioned above, it’s very difficult to access desktop web applications from a mobile device, but we’re working to address that for marketers.
Joe Luthy:
The big issue right now is the platform fragmentation. Developing an app is the simple part, assuring it works as expected for the majority of users is the difficult part. Users aren’t tolerant of apps that seem slow, or freeze. The unfortunate part is that it may be the fault of the device. Avoiding these issues requires thorough testing, and too many app developers don’t test thoroughly enough.
Joe Luthy:
In short, test and analyze everything especially at the campaign level. We’re B2B and recognize that our audience spends a lot of time on the desktop. But is that where they are checking and reading their email? Probably less than we think. I constantly have to reinforce that to my team when they are creating campaigns.
Mayank Mehta:
Capriza has developed a mobility solution that enables non-technical marketers to create mobile apps for various workflows that are typically only done from a desktop. For example, Marketo users can create an app that displays the analytics for a particular set of emails or an app for viewing new lead information. The key is that there’s no coding required to create an app, so either a marketer alone or a marketer and a friend in IT can have an HTML5 app up and running in just minutes.
Katie Meurin:
We’re custom developers – so the credit all goes to our clients. They think it, we build it. That being said, we’ve built several branded apps that aid marketers in driving revenue for their businesses including:
Martina Dodić:
SMS is our primary area of expertise and as we’re acutely aware of its potential in mobile marketing, we’ve developed a specialized solution aimed at marketers looking for a convenient and effective tool. Infobip Campaign Manager offers four different kinds of campaigns that enable greater consumer engagement and insight.
Coupons, Sweepstakes, Broadcast and Polls each have their own target audience, impact and purpose, and between them effectively cover all the corners of SMS marketing. The solution’s tagline, Mobile marketing can be easy, came naturally as that’s just what Campaign Manager brings to the table.
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