The Interview Continues - Mobile Marketing

Part two - An interview with Deepak Kanakaraju and published on DigitalDeepak.com.  Due to the length, I will post the interview over a series of blog articles.

What are the top 3 things to look out for when it comes to mobile marketing?

Bonus time!  Here are five points to consider when marketing through mobile devices.

Mobile marketing will be the most important marketing trend over the next three to five years for a variety of reasons.  The biggest reason is that consumers are in control of the process.  Below is a graph that tells you how important mobile marketing is today.  PC sales peaked in 2011 at 350 million units worldwide after 29 years of sales (since 1983).  Seven years after launch, smartphones and tablets have sold more than 1.2 billion.

If you are not focused on mobile, you need to start now.  Next to the fact that everyone has a mobile device today, the biggest factors in mobile marketing are:

• You must have a mobile website.  Websites designed for a width of 1920 pixels will not display on a smartphone, which on average has 320 pixels.  Or it will and be so small that the web site is useless.  Recently I did an analysis of 22 websites comparing the bounce rates of responsive versus non-responsive websites in the YMCA.  On average, the bounce rates for responsive (mobile friendly) websites were 14% lower than non-responsive web sites.
• Develop specific mobile landing pages for your offer.  Mobile marketing is no different than traditional website marketing.  You must deliver the sales prospect to the information/product/service they are looking for in as few clicks as possible.  “Looking for X?  Click here.  Hello X!”
• You must profile and target the right consumer.  Mobile targeting is rapidly becoming as efficient as desktop targeting, even without the use of cookies, using contextual targeting (based on matching the consumer’s interest with the website’s content) and geo-targeting (based on the physical proximity of the consumer to the business).
• It costs more, but Location Based Mobile Advertising is worth it.  Also known as geo-fencing or geo-targeting, it gives the advertiser the ability to use the GPS functionality of today’s smart phones to target consumers.  Smartphones track where you go.  Own a restaurant?  You can erect an invisible, digital fence around your restaurant and advertise within a one mile radius of your location.  “Save $1 on any sandwich today!”  Or erect a fence around your competition.  Or target the football stadium for the after the game crowd.  Smartphones even keep a list of where you have been over the previous 60 days.  I have worked with new car dealers who target consumers who have visited two or more dealerships in the previous 60 days.  They know these individuals are in the market for a new car.
• Finally - It’s a phone.  Smartphone. Take advantage of Click to Call.  Show an ad.  Take the prospect to a mobile landing page and tell them - press this button to talk now.  One of the smartest campaigns I have worked on was for a university, targeting high school students.  The landing page said “My name is Jeff.  I am your enrollment counselor.  Press here to talk to me.  Click here to send me an email.”  Three weeks into the campaign they had to add more counselors to handle the call volume.

When reporting on the increase in the consumer’s time spent with digital media, eMarketer reported, “The most significant growth area is on mobile. Adults will spend an average of 2 hours and 21 minutes per day on non voice mobile activities, including mobile internet usage on phones and tablets - longer than they will spend online on desktop and laptop computers, and nearly an hour more than they spent on mobile last year.”