Situational Marketing

The iPhone Effect on Mobile Marketing

Have you tried the new iPhone?   Doesn't it appear to make your life a ton easier?  If I am a brand marketer how do I use this device to sell more products and services? 

This is what I term as the iPhone effect.  Marketers desperately trying to figure out how the new iPhone is going to impact their brand.  The iPhone provides an easy to use interface along with powerful software to make interacting with consumers easier than ever before.  SMS is a snap - Real time updates - GPS capabilities - Ability to upload pictures to an application - all very easy with an iPhone.  But isn't there a bigger picture here?  What is the bottom line for marketers when it comes to the iPhone?  Here are my thoughts for marketers feeling the iPhone effect:

1.  The iPhone has raised the bar for mobile marketing.  They have sold over a million new 3G phones since its debut.  It is not the golden ticket for every brand but will give it the kick every brand marketer needs to move forward with a mobile program.

2.  If you have not allotted budget to mobile marketing, I would start now, as your competition probably is.  It is critical to begin to understand how consumers want to interact with your brand over their mobile phone.  This could be as simple as adding a mobile component to your next marketing campaign or identifying how to utilize mobile messaging to enhance the brand experience through integrated messaging.

Even though the iPhone effect for brands is very powerful, it is still the content which is King for mobile users.  Be sure to engage your users with relevant content on a timely basis and they will be loyal mobile advocates for your brand no matter what the device.

Everyone Starts At Zero

I want to interact with my mobile consumers but where do I start?

Having worked with many brands this is the question I get most asked over and over again.   “ I don’t have a list of mobile numbers within my database” “Since we do not have a mobile database, where do we begin?”  “How do we gather preferences on our clients and provide relevant mobile content to them?”

These are all incredible questions which companies should be asking mobile application providers.   But please understand, Everyone starts at zero. I have said this line many times to help brand managers understand that every brand starts with zero mobile participants.  Do you remember when you started with no email addresses?  (There was a time when this was the case) What did you do?  How did the brand attempt to gather this information?  Once your brand got an email address what did you do with it?   Here are some tips on my philosophy of creating a successful mobile presence with your brand:

• Decide to move forward with a long-term mobile marketing strategy and earmark budget for it.
• Create mobile campaigns which coincide with your marketing calendar.
• Use these campaigns to begin to build a long-term mobile database.
• Have multiple avenues to allow participants to opt-in.
• These tools should gather preferences and mobile opt-in information.
• Have a post campaign plan to provide relevant weekly/monthly content to mobile users (True success of a long-term mobile strategy!)

Successful brands who are utilizing mobile marketing within their marketing mix are committed to a long-term strategy.   Yes – every brand starts with zero mobile numbers!  Mentally please get beyond it!  Create a plan to build your mobile database which provides content to users which provides value.  Think like a marathon runner and you too will be successful in this channel.   

What Do Mobile Customers Really Want?

It seems to be a question keeping a lot of us up at night:

Ewan takes some thoughts down from actual normobs (normal mobile users).

One of his commenters says it's predictability (I agree with that)

Kim lays it out in her blog series, and says it's location.

This is the no-brainer category of information to provide for your customers via mobile. Location-specific knowledge is the number one reason that people access the mobile web for mobile search.

That's true today - but I was at the Apple Store thinking about the upcoming uses for mobile phones.

I felt pretty cool, but now that we have smart phones and the iPhone and web access with cheap data plans, the possibility of doing live shopping without the help of someone at home is really going to take off. In addition to shopping at retail stores, we can comparison shop with friends, setting location against location, and pitting both against online versions.

Hosting Carnival Of The Mobilists Monday

We've got the Monday, March 24th Carnival of the Mobilists, so be sure to send in your entries to mobilists@gmail.com before Sunday at 5:00

Carnival Of The Mobilists #114

Carnival of the Mobilists #114 Is up at Always on Real Time Access.

Russell Buckley discusses the uniqueness of the mobile channel as multi-medium.   

But where I think mobile is different, is that it can be a medium which people use, while consuming other media simultaneously. For instance, you might use the mobile while watching TV, or as you read the newspaper. While not entirely unique in old media (perhaps people did read the paper while idly keeping an eye on the TV screen), we can say that it probably wasn’t normal behaviour and certainly no one would have been fully engaged in more than one medium simultaneously.

It reminds me of those television commercials urging viewers to log-on while watching television.  There's a there there, but we don't quite yet know how to hit it.

WebClip2Go suggests a free service that allows you to take partial content from a website and drop it into a mobile browser.  I see this as a fantastic tool for an enterprising mobile blogger who wants to be the first mobile phone aggregator for his or her locality.

FasterFuture points to Twitter as a better application for awareness than Facebook.

SituationalMarketing will be hosting the Carnival in two weeks.  To sign up as a host, go the mobilists page.

On Carnivals and Insight Communities

Carnival of the Mobilists #113 is up at ubiquitous thoughts.  They are looking for more hosts, so if you're interested, be sure to go here and register. You have to participate in 3 carnivals to host.

A good post on Native mobile Apps versus web Mobile apps from mobhappy (how did I miss that one), as well as a round up on the mobile price wars (the unlimited version).  This was actually great insight, and I used my thoughts over at the Techdirt Insight Community on what to expect from the unlimited plans and how it will affect mobile marketing.

If you consider yourself an expert, you should consider signing up for the Insight Community.  You get paid to share your ideas (if your submission is ranked as one of the best), and more important, you get to compare yourself against other experts.

Remember - if you're not involved in a community, you're just a lone voice in the wilderness.

The Future Of Mobile Marketing Lies In Unlimited Access

Maybe I'm just an old fart, but when I'm on my cell phone, I have an internal clock that tells me how many minutes I'm using.  My wife and I share 1000 minutes, and that's plenty with our business, but we have gone over on occasion, and I always feel disappointed (and a little angry) at the overage charges.

Sure, we could bump up the minutes, but when you go through several months not getting close to your limit, you'll kick yourself for buying too much.  And if you want to change your plan, you're stuck with the same carrier for another two years.

Why is this important?  Verizon and AT&T are introducing unlimited plans that are reasonable in cost, and they cover voice and text.  As these plans become more common, and continue to drop in price, consumers will feel more comfortable using their phones for commerce.

I think this is one of the big reasons mobile marketing hasn't taken off.  If 20-30% of users (and it's probably higher) feel like I do about minutes and paying for texting, the freedom and relative cost of unlimited plans will wipe away barriers to cell phone use.

All of a sudden, the attitudinal concerns consumers have about text clubs, coupons, and even mobile newsletters will be a question of convenience, and not cost.  Mobile will have caught up to e-mail and the internet as low-cost alternatives to the users.  If I'm already paying for it, I'll use it.  Why do you think people take such long showers in condos (water use is often covered as part of your fees in condo developments)?

Radio Stations And Text Clubs

The very first text campaign I ever participated in was a radio promotion for 97.1 Talk FM.  It was some Christmas contest where you sent in a text message to get a chance at winning some gift basket.  i ws in the car - it was impulse, and it took me just seconds to do.

Contests are the first of many ways to use mobile marketing, and Kim Dushinski gives us a list of ideas for those stations looking to connect to their audiences.  Two of those ideas are below:

Voting
Set up a vote where listeners can choose the next song or discussion topic by text vote. You can combine it with a contest so that the 10th texter gets a prize.

Radio shows with more than one DJ could have some sort of contest where the audience gets to decide who wins a bet between the DJs. Listeners could vote via email, calling in or texting.

Location Alerts
Using a service like dodgeball.com, a radio station could get listeners to sign up to be friends and be alerted when the DJs go on location promotions. This could help them get more people at on-site events.

Think of radio text campaigns as the modern version of "the ninth caller wins."  And then move past to recognize that your advertisers are buying radio spots, but they'll pay a premium for a full campaign.  if you can upsell your advertisers 10% to 15% to use a text campaign, you're captured more of their marketing dollar, and delivered a better promotion.   The best part is that new tools like the Blast Marketing store allow you to manage the campaign on your own.

Would you like to boost ad revenues by 15% next year? 

Does Mobile Video Have A Future?

NewTeeVee is a GigaOm channel that just launched.  Their focus is the world of online video, so they had Stacey HigginBotham report live from Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress.  She doesn't think mobile video is here yet.

M:Metrics calculates the percentage of mobile TV viewers as 5.3 percent of the European subscriber base and 4.5 percent of the U.S. subscriber base, with most of that comprised of families sending video to one another. Less than 1 percent watched carrier broadcast TV, and less than 2 percent watched video via a browser in the U.S. and Europe. Even a pro-mobile TV release from CNN and Ericsson point out that 44 percent of people are poised to use mobile TV, begging the question of how many people don’t care or already have it. Of those that do have it, a scant 24 percent tune in daily.

The problem seems to be a mixture between pushing video among different carriers (all with different standards), and the elemental problem that watching video on a cell phone just isn't that great.  Given the choice, most people seem to wait until they get home or to the office to watch the video the way it's supposed to be seen - in 102" Plasma high definition, or at least on a 15" notebook screen with headphones.

Super! Carnival Of The Mobilists 109 Up At The Wap Review

Carnival of the Mobilists is up at WAP Review, and this time it's a Super Carnival!

In Super Bowl news:

The Superbowl has very interesting applications for mobile users. Twitter and Utterz, too easy-to-use real time mobile applications, let you post one line text, cellphone videos, and pictures directly to your site. Twitter even launched its own promotion to get people to Twitter just their thoughts on SuperBowl Ads.  The goal is simple - connect the world to your life instantly.  By this time next year, expect to see promotions from Major Advertisers using mobile applications to drive traffic and interest.

Tom Brady had a commercial from the United Way focusing on childhood obesity, that asked volunteers to text fitness to a number.  That's the basic version of mobile services, but it still rated a half million dollar ad buy.  Clearly they see value in text messaging to build a list.  I'm left to wonder if they could have had more success spending that $500,000 (and I'm guessing on how much ) in a combination of online and offline activity.