Marketingsherpa Blog

One benefit of being a MarketingSherpa reporter is I get to interview marketers from companies of all sizes and business sectors, and marketing industry experts for the case studies and how-to articles we publish in our newsletters.

This means I get to hear firsthand about what is working, and sometimes not working, from your marketing peers, and gain insight into some of the many topics that surround the marketing world. And I probably don’t need to tell you, there’s a lot of exciting things to learn about.

These interviews always have a specific purpose based on a story idea, but sometimes, like most interesting conversations, they veer off into areas that can’t be used for the story, but are just too interesting or valuable to not share with all of our readers.

A few mobile predictions for the next year

For instance, I recently spoke with Andrew Martin, Vice President, Metia, a digital marketing agency with multiple international offices, for an upcoming consumer marketing article. At one point, we took a little detour into what is going on in the mobile space and what marketers should be thinking about over the next year.

“I think mobile is obviously moving at a critical pace,” says Martin. “And it can often be daunting to try and keep up.”

He mentions one issue in the simple sheer number of mobile applications out there.

“I think the Apple App Store has over 400,000 applications. That makes it more and more difficult to differentiate yourself,” Martin explains.

And it’s not just applications.

Martin says, “A number of years ago, Nokia became the biggest camera manufacturer in the world, and that was an indication of where mobile would be going.”

He says this spread of cameras on phones served as one indication of how mobile devices are changing how people interact with everyday items, creating new marketing opportunities, and how “that convenience is a huge opportunity for brands and people.”

Martin adds that marketers should pay attention to technological changes with mobile, such as HTML5 and the attempt to get more consistency across different browsers and devices. He says many of his clients are interested in how these new mobile technologies can help them and are closely watching how Apple handles this push for more technology standardization.

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Sales, marketing and customer services teams can each have slightly different views of customers. In large organizations, differences in perception can coexist within the same department.

For example, a search marketing team can perceive customers’ interests differently than an email marketing team. A customer service team can perceive customers’ needs differently than the sales team. In both cases, the two teams connect with customers through different platforms and analyze their behavior through different data.

“Siloed” departments that have teams separated from one another can prevent organizations from understanding and communicating with customers effectively, says Dave Lewis, CMO, Message Systems, a messaging management solutions vendor.

As the number of marketing channels continues to expand with the growth of mobile and social media marketing, Lewis sees opportunities, but also the potential for additional channels to deepen the problem.

“You’re only furthering the fragmentation that gets in the way of understanding your customers on a holistic basis and being able to communicate with them on that basis,” Lewis says

That’s why Lewis says more teams need to pursue marketing integration (Lisa Arthur, CMO, Aprimo, expressed a similar sentiment in our post last week). By having a central platform from which to communicate with customers and monitor their behavior, teams can get a more well-rounded understanding of their customers and how best to reach them.

Several months ago, Lewis’ team launched a new solution called Mobile Momentum, to help marketers avoid further fragmenting their customer data and messaging. The software combines email and SMS messaging into a single platform that can track customers’ delivery preferences and provide reports on the channels’ performance jointly and separately.

Lewis anticipates incorporating more messaging services into the platform, such as MMS and social media. His team started by combining email and SMS because of the tremendous volume of SMS messages consumers send per day, and because more marketers can benefit from SMS than are currently, he says.

“My view is that the overlooked opportunity associated with text (messaging) is in using it to strengthen the customer relationship over time,” Lewis says.

By offering a platform that combines email and SMS, Lewis’ team is helping marketers better understand their audiences, better meet their needs and provide a better experience. Marketers who feel pulled in too many directions should take note that combining several marketing channels into a single platform may provide more insight into how best to reach customers.

Offline ads are likely to get a refreshing breath of relevance as 2D barcode technology becomes more prevalent in mobile phones. The pixelated images can be added to magazine and billboard ads, for example, and scanned by mobiles phones to pull up various media, such as a product videos or landing pages.

Smartphone users who have the technology or who download and install the software simply have to point their phone’s camera and at one of the barcodes. The software then communicates with a server to send the user to a registration page, video, app download, or whatever the desired media may be.

Although less efficient, feature-phone users can take a picture of a code and send it via MMS to a specified phone number to load the desired media.

“There’s really nothing the end-user needs to know other than how to turn on their camera for this to work,” says Mike Wehrs, CEO, Scanbuy.

Scanbuy creates technology to enable cell phones to read barcodes, and also runs a backend system for renting 2D codes to businesses. Marketers can purchase one or a handful of codes and a set number of “scans,” or impressions. Then it’s as simple as defining what you want a phone to load after scanning a barcode, and adding the code to marketing materials.

“Done appropriately with the right kind of support and end-user prompting, you can get enormous positive results from the inclusion of a barcode,” Wehrs says.

Wehrs cites his team’s work with Verizon. Advertisements in Verizon stores encouraged new Android smartphone owners to scan 2D barcodes to instantly download new apps (samples of the ads). The team achieved 175,000 app downloads in the first month, Wehrs says.

Wehrs can rattle off many marketing opportunities the codes present. The codes, for example, can have the media they load changed over time. Products can have codes permanently applied to them, and when scanned, offer a new piece of media every month, creating on-going customer engagement.

There are many 2D barcode standards. Google has embraced the QR standard, which Scanbuy’s technology supports along with several other popular ones, Wehrs says. Take a look if you think your offline ads could benefit from offering mobile consumers deeper interaction.

Many marketers have yet to explore mobile webpages as a marketing opportunity. If you are putting off tests because you think they are too complicated, take a look at this case study on mobile page testing we published today.

Mike Brown, VP, Internet Optimization, Vegas.com, and his team tested if catering to a mobile audience could improve site performance. The team showed mobile visitors a homepage and category pages designed for their devices. The test was a proof-of-concept on whether to invest in an end-to-end mobile experience for Vegas.com.

The tests successfully improved site metrics such as bounce rate and conversion rate (see the case study for details), and Brown’s team plans to rollout more mobile pages this fall.

Brown said these tests were easier than his team anticipated. From our conversation, I understood two criteria the team met to successfully run them:

- Mobile traffic present

Testing mobile pages only makes sense if your website receives mobile traffic. The team looked at its site analytics and noticed mobile visitors accounted for 7% of traffic, and growing rapidly.

- Testing and page design expertise

The team had extensive testing experience with Brown as the head of Internet Optimization. Also, the team used SiteSpect‘s multivariate and A/B testing tool to run tests. SiteSpect team members helped Brown’s team learn to create mobile pages, which Brown noted was surprisingly easy.

So if your team has capable developers, some mobile traffic and good testing experience, there should be little preventing you from running similar tests. And remember: you don’t have to dive in with a full investment. Brown’s team only dipped its toe and is now comfortably moving forward.

As the mobile Internet steadily gains in popularity, the future of mobile commerce in the U.S. is anybody’s guess. However, countries with widespread mobile Web access might provide some clues.

“Japan had a more-advanced mobile market,” says Matthew Snyder, CEO, ADObjects, a mobile strategy consultancy and agency. “It’s debatable whether it is more advanced or not these days.”

Snyder has worked in mobile and consumer electronics for over two decades. He spent much of that time in Japan, where access to the mobile Web is above 90%, he says. In the U.S., 31.9% of mobile subscribers used a mobile Web browser in a three-month average ending in May 2010, according to comScore.

Widespread mobile Web adoption has created a variety of opportunities for Japanese businesses to reach consumers, and also a variety of opportunities for consumers to interact with businesses.

For example, “every single McDonalds in Japan is equipped with mobile payments,” Snyder says. “It started about two years ago. As of this summer, every single McDonald’s was equipped.”

Tools such as mobile wallets have not caught on in the U.S., due in part to our comparatively limited mobile Web adoption — but change may be on the horizon.

“Even though the analysts have said it’s going to take a few years before we see 50% mobile Internet penetration, my gut tells me that we’ll be in 70% to 80% over the next couple of years very rapidly,” Snyder says.

Even if the U.S. market adopts some characteristics of the Japanese and other well-developed mobile markets, the U.S. is likely to be unique in some respects due to the strong presence of branded apps.

“In terms of mobile usage and mobile marketing, Japan is much more advanced. In terms of what we’ve seen in engagement, rich media, applications, and brand penetration into the space, we’re seeing a lot more in North America through the iPhone and the Android,” Snyder says.

I spoke with Snyder for an up-coming article on tactics for testing mobile marketing as part of a team’s overall marketing strategy — not as a one-off, tack-on tactic. Keep an eye on our newsletters to learn more.

As the mobile market continues to grow, mobile advertising opportunities are growing right along with it. The capabilities of the ads, too, are quickly expanding.

This week the Mobile Marketing Association released a Rich Media Mobile Advertising whitepaper. You can take a look at the free six-page guide to get a quick introduction to the types of rich mobile ads in the market (not including apps or games).

While mobile display advertising mimics some aspects of online display advertising, there is one key difference I noticed from the whitepaper’s examples. Mobile ads are more likely to expand into a full-screen experience—which is not a common feature in online display ads.

“As highly interactive and feature-rich smartphones continue to dominate new mobile device sales, rich media mobile ad units will comprise an ever-growing portion of the mobile advertisement display market in the U.S. and around the world,” according to the MMA’s whitepaper.

In the fourth quarter of 2009, an average of 19% of mobile advertisers used rich media mobile ad units, according to the whitepaper. These ads include:
o Ads with video, sound or interactive features
o Expandable ads
o Animated ads
o Floating ads

Take a look at the report for great examples from promotions involving The Weather Channel, Alice in Wonderland and Lincoln. The examples include high-quality screenshots and brief descriptions of the ads’ functionality.

If you’re interested in rich mobile advertising, the report can give you a few examples for inspiration, and a few guidelines around sizing, functionality, and why you should give users “close” and “skip” buttons in the ads.

Are you buying these types of ads? If so, let us know what you think of them in the comments…

Two of the latest marketing trends–social networking and SMS messaging–are becoming routine for some marketers, and their roles are becoming more clearly defined.

Chad Hallert, Director, Ecommerce, Eldorado Hotel Casino, and his team have experimented with building and promoting to a list of SMS subscribers since early 2009. In some ways, the team uses SMS similarly to how they use Facebook and Twitter. However, they’ve found SMS messages attract more immediate attention to promotions.

The team’s tried sending channel-specific promotions to SMS subscribers and social followers, but without fantastic results, Hallert says.

“We tried stand alone offers with mobile, social and email…when you break them up to pieces, nothing really competes with email, and the other two don’t look as valuable as they are.”

Instead, the real value of SMS and social are their ability to improve the results of an integrated campaign, Hallert says. He’s seen results improved by 5% to 8% by adding an SMS alert and Facebook updates to campaigns that already included website, paid search and email promotion.

This is due in part, Hallert says, to customers subscribing to more than one promotional outlet. A person who receives a text message and email about an offer is more likely to convert than a person who receives only one of the two.

The marketing power of the team’s SMS subscribers and social followers is likely to improve as the lists grow in size in relation to the team’s email subscribers. Currently, their SMS list is about 10% of their email list in size, Hallert says.

For now, the team is seeing social and mobile marketing add more value to integrated campaigns than the channels could generate by themselves. Watch our consumer marketing newsletter for a case study describing how Hallert’s team leveraged the immediacy of SMS to take advantage of the weather’s impact on hotel bookings.

Marketers have increased response by segmenting online consumers by location, especially with paid search marketing. These strategies often use IP addresses to target online ads to visitors from specific regions or cities.

Now GPS is being added to mobile devices. The coordinates are accurate within a matter of feet, rather than miles. This is opening an opportunity for much sharper location-based advertising.

GPS-based location-driven ads have the potential to be very effective, according to a survey by Marketing Research Services Inc., on behalf of NAVTEQ. NAVTEQ provides digital mapping services to companies including Garmin and BMW.

MRSI sampled 757 users of NAVTEQ ad-enabled GPS devices who were 18 and older with an average household income over $50,000. They found:

o 72% viewed the ads as acceptable to the navigation experience

o At least 50% of respondents recalled seeing an ad for each of the advertised brands (aided and unaided)

o 19% of people who recalled seeing a specific ad clicked through for more information

o Up to 6% visited a business location because of seeing an ad on their navigation device

The release describing the survey lacks some important details, such as what the ads look like, if they included offers and what “up to 6%” really means. However, I do not dispute the validity of the data. I expect that GPS-targeted ads will become very popular and effective in the mobile advertising world.

Getting your target audience to have a positive experience with your brand is, of course, beneficial. However, not enough marketers are providing real value to their audiences, says Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights, Edelman Digital. More marketers should strive to create a positive and useful experience in a branded context, he says.

Rubel is responsible for keeping Edelman Digital and its clients “ahead of the curve” with the latest ways to effectively manage public relations and marketing. He is also the author of the popular Micro Persuasion blog and maintains a personal Twitter feed with over 27,000 followers. Edelman is the largest independent PR firm in the world with 3,300 employees in 50 offices worldwide, Rubel says.

Rubel cited two companies that are providing useful, branded experiences via the iPhone:

1. Kraft’s iFood Assistant – this app sells for $0.99 in Apple’s iPhone store. It has the following features:
o Recipe browsing
o Recipe of the day
o Shopping lists
o Directions to nearby markets
o How-to cooking videos

2. Tylenol PM’s Sleep Tracker – this app is free and has the following features:
o Log your sleep hours and moods
o View your sleep and mood history over time
o Create a sleep journal
o Get tips for better sleeping

Of course, the iPhone is not the only channel for providing a valuable, branded experience. I am currently working on a Sherpa article that describes how marketers for a cable television channel created a series of SMS alerts that provided valuable, relevant tips alongside a reminder to tune in to a weekly show. The team was able to take a weekly reminder and make it more attractive by adding useful information.

Billing Revolution released some results today from a survey it commissioned on consumers’ mobile shopping preferences. Harris Interactive conducted the survey and queried 2,029 US adults, ages 18 and older, from April 29 to May 1 of this year.

Of adults who receive bills from cell phone and credit card companies, 57% said they trust card companies more than cell phone companies for accurate billing. Here’s a pie chart with more results (you can click it for a larger version):

Of mobile users, more younger users (59%; ages 18 to 34) thought it was at least somewhat safe to purchase through a mobile phone than older users (34%; ages 55+). More male mobile users thought it was at least somewhat safe (50%) than female users (39%).

Of those willing to make purchases:
o 75% would be willing to buy entertainment items, such as:
- Event/movie tickets (58%)
- Music (41%)
- Games (34%)
- Mobile video or TV content (24%)

o 68% would be willing to purchase food or drink items, such as:
- Pizza (59%)
- Fast food (42%)
- Coffee (25%)

o 43% would be willing to purchase hotel rooms
o 40% would be willing to purchase travel tickets