May 26, 2011

How to Create a Mobile Strategy for Your Business

 

How to Create a Mobile Strategy for Your Business: Monetize Mobile Apps

Consider offering a free version of your app and then let users decide whether or not they are willing invest in a premium version with more features and content. Take for example the widely popular Angry Birds iPhone game. Its ongoing promotion was to offer a free version, while paid subscribers were given access to more challenging levels and other free add-ons.

Dig Deeper: Study: A Third of Small Businesses Need Mobile Apps to Survive

How to Create a Mobile Strategy for Your Business: Mobile Coupons

A growing number of companies deliver coupons via mobile devices in an effort to appeal to consumers, many of whom would never think of clipping or carrying coupons. Sign up for Target's mobile coupons and you'll get money-saving offers on items delivered via text message to your Web-enabled phone with a link to a barcode and discount offers. To redeem, simply show your coupon bar codes to the cashier, who will scan them like a regular coupon. Bath and Body Works, Sephora, JCPenney, Kohl's, and Olive Garden also offer mobile coupons.

Smaller businesses from pizza shops to spas are using services like MobileCoupons.com. Merchants can create coupons and offer them to their customers both online and on mobile phones. The service is completely free for consumers to search, geo-locate and navigate. Users have the option of printing a coupon using their computer or sharing and saving a coupon to their mobile phones to be presented for redemption at a local merchant. The service is free to set up but businesses who want to track consumer coupon usage including impressions, coupon clips, and redemptions will have to pay for such premium service.

Location based shopping coupons using mobile devices are gaining popularity. As mobile users become more acclimated to sharing their whereabouts via mobile devices, they're also are becoming more open to receiving ads and mobile coupons relevant to where they are at the moment, according to findings from JiWire's Mobile Audience Insights Report. In fact, more than 50 percent of respondents indicated that they wanted to receive location-specific advertising, with mobile coupons a more appealing incentive than check-ins. GPS and applications such as Google Maps ranked highest followed by Yelp, Facebook and Foursquare.

Dig Deeper: How Does Technology Fit Into Your Strategy

How to Create a Mobile Strategy for Your Business: Mobile Campaigns and Ads

Mobile marketing presents a distinct and unique way to create interactive dialogues with customers. Mobile marketing requires matching the creative to the device's smaller screen size; designing messages that are short, instantly understood, and effective; and creating a call for action with minimal steps.

Research indicates that mobile ads perform about five times better than Internet ads. The most common mobile ads are simple text links and display adds that are sold based on cost per clicks, cost per acquisition and cost per thousand. These ads are much like the paid search campaigns on Google, Bing or Yahoo!

Mobile marketing is not about your convenience, meaning your ability to reach consumers anywhere at anytime, says Gail Z. Martin, author of 30 Days To Social Media Success. The benefits of receiving the information or discount via a mobile device must be valuable enough to the recipient. For example, says Martin, "if you are a restaurant and you use mobile phone advertising to communicate say around 4 p.m. on a Friday a great dinner special. That may be viewed as helpful. But if your company isn't time dependent, why are you choosing to send information on someone's phone versus just sending them an e-mail. It has to make sense to the recipient as a benefit and not seen as an intrusion."

Use mobile marketing solutions to drive participation at exhibitions or to drive traffic to retail environments. If you have two seats left for a workshop or an event, you can send a message offering a discount. But as a computer company do you really need to send an announcement about a discount or promotion on a laptop via mobile phone.

Make offers that are in tuned with the buying habits of the recipient. You have to sync your messaging with your customers' purchase history or favorites. As a pet shop, texting deals on dog food and dog treats to cat or bird owners will not do them much good, as an example. "If you are sophisticated enough to delve into mobile advertising, I would hope you would be sophisticated enough to have consumer buying records to know what individuals need and want," Martin says.

"You can even Tweet and asks customers what they want to receive and then show them you listened by making those same offers." This goes back to the social media piece of creating a dialogue rather than a monologue. You really need to be strategic about what content you send out using mobile media, cautions Martin.

Maintaining content is an ongoing challenge for businesses looking to foster long-term engagement through mobile channels. According to Forrester Research, create your content in the context for which it is being delivered. Simply transferring media messages from one format to another will ultimately trip up a user's experience and undermine any sort of integrity you are trying to build.

A key consideration is what are the benefits to the consumer of signing up for your mobile coupon, mobile site, mobile text message, or mobile app? Your mobile strategy has to be integrated into your overall marketing campaign, says Martin. You have to communicate all those benefits through all other marketing and social media channels.

Dig Deeper: Time for a New Cell Phone Plan?
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