Demystifying Mobile, Part II
Think of mobile marketing as Web marketing 1.0
In the second of a three-part series, Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy at Yahoo!, shows that the best way to keep mobile marketing on-track in to keep it simple. For Part I, click here.
Many advertisershave, to put it simply, over-thought their mobile strategy. One agency pitched us this amazing (but complex) mobile site and app that would generate leads for a financial client. After listening for ten minutes, I asked if the client had a call center. “You know, it is a phone… they can call you, and thereby utilize that massive investment your client has already made, instead of spending hundreds of thousands more.”
Yeah, it’s not sexy. But who cares? It’s quick, cheap and can generate valuable leads. It uses all the tools already available to the marketer—in this case, the call center.
You can’t always get want you want (via mobile), but you can get what you need
Don’t try to get all your prospects’ data on mobile in one fell swoop. Try to get just what you need for the follow up, such as an email address. You don’t have to get your customers to fill out a long registration through mobile alone. Use all the channels. Do “acquisition light” (just an email address, for example) and then follow up via email with the registration, offer details, a brochure, whatever.
Agencies should be looking to maximize the lessons they develop for their clients. The smartest agencies I see out there are able to talk to clients about the average duration of visits users make to a mobile site, the number of pages consumed each visit, the cost per unique visitor and so forth.
Mobile and the retro Web
Try thinking of mobile today as the 1996 Web all over again. What were we doing then? We had a simple test matrix that mapped offers and placement. You “ran broad” at the start, evaluated performance using the rudimentary analytics solutions of the day, and then you optimized—and learned very quickly worked and what didn’t.
If I were an agency working on a campaign in the mobile space, I would design a test matrix like this:
1. Full registration in mobile: Target 25 percent of impressions to smart phones with “qwerty” keyboards. Although I strongly doubt at this point that many people will “form fill” in mobile, it’s important to test and get your baseline for comparison.
2. “Smart” email grab: Target 25 percent against smart phones, but this time the landing page should just be an email grab. Measure the engagement in mobile, and also the final completion via email. How does mobile registration compare to follow-up registration via email?
3. “Dumb” email grab—Target 25 percent against “non-smart” phones. What is the response rate from users who have to “triple tap” info into a device?
4. Call center—Target your last 25 percent at “non-smart” phone users who you think will use the call center to connect with you. (Actually, you should also target your smart phone users the same way smart phones for data consistency. You get the idea).
That might not be very cool and sexy, but it is very insightful, and you can layer different forms of device, demo, geo and behavioral targeting targeting on later stages, once you have defined broad benchmarks.
In short, keep the ideas simple, run simple test matrixes and accumulate as much knowledge as you can.
—Paul Cushman, Director of Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo!
Next up: Paul talks about the importance of good measurement in mobile, and channels Douglas Adams.
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