Mobile strategy: best practices : Go beyond the app!

Do you think your mobile strategy must include iPhone apps? Well, think again! You can have a perfect mobile strategy without even having 1 iPhone app and generating ten times more revenue than your competitor. Interested? read on...

The Mobile world has become a reality and I wouldn't call it anymore a trend, it's here, it's even so obvious that most marketing gurus don't even see it anymore. I saw presentations where they question year after year, after year if there would be one day a mobile trend. Well, they all got asleep while the market changed.

Mobile penetration, the driver of mobile marketing, is sufficient enough to be a commodity. In Europe, mobile penetration is above 100% and most countries even above 120% . This means that people have a cell phone and in some cases many more. So if people ask you the question, is mobile here to stay... you bet ya! Look at the details on wikipedia to get an overview by country.

To app or not to app

Do you need an app to be successful? No, not necessary. First focus on the basics:

• Your website: Probably you have invested tons of money in your website and suddenly there is another platform that doesn't show your website as it is. So yes, changing your web presence so it can be accessed by mobile phones is crucial. Most of your mobile traffic will also come from your website being access through a mobile device. So get rid of those websites with heavy images on it. Even with speedy connections, you still need minutes in most cases to "download" a website. Which means that your data limit is killed before you know it or that you have to wait minutes before a website is visible. Wi-fi you say? Well, if you don't live in a large city, the free wi-fi spots are not that common. So a call to all webmasters to place tagging/sniffer on your website that people are redirected to a mobile version of the website. a good example is BBC, who have won already several awards for their way they handle mobile web.  

  
 

• Your e-commerce platform: having a website means having sales online or having leads coming in. You should therefore model your e-commerce platform in such a way that it is adequate for the mobile world. If you have made the right choice, your e-shop could be tweaked to work with mobile platforms. Don't make the mistake to think that the m-commerce platform equals the e-commerce platform. How people use different screens can vary enormously. Mobile is not a type business, but a slide business, so as a company you will have to adapt to this way of searching or browsing. Don't just launch it, test it out on your audience and double check that what you launched is actually working, the best ideas are those that are used by your audience, not the ones that are announced with loud voices in the CEO board room.

We still haven't talked about apps... strange and guess what, the next points are also not talking about apps!

• SMS/MMS/text messaging: ever wonder what people are doing most of the time with their mobile phone, well it's SMS. If there is one killer app out there, it's already embedded into the phone, people send and receive most of the time text messages. Even more than speech! But there is a difference, in developing markets (like India, China,  etc.) we see that people are moving beyond SMS marketing. Have a look at this presentation to get an idea about what mobile text messaging means in numbers:

This means that for Europe and the US, we still have a way to go, so benefit from the fact that people use text messaging as a valid tool. BMW in Germany ran last year (2009) a campaign to push people to change their normal tires for winter tires. This was done through mobile text messaging and this were the results:

Simple ideas can generate large returns! Of course, this couldn't have worked if they hadn't created a mobile platform where people could immediately organise themselves an appointment. So almost no barriers and without huge investments. I can imagine that in your business, you can think about several ways of having a cash return on your text messaging. Having it as a service for your clients can help as well, eg. status of delivery.

• If you have lots of content to share, hook onto existing larger apps. If you can share it with RSS, you can hook onto most platforms that exist already.Don't think that your application will become world dominator. Most of the apps out there are vanishing in a couple months or are empty vessels. You need a critical mass  to survive and how do you get a critical mass? I'll tell about it in the next and final item, the iPhone app
• Create an application. I didn't use the term "iPhone app", for the simple reason iPhone is not the leading device worldwide, however, as most other platforms are under performing in terms of application usage, it could be a strategy to focus on iPhone alone. Of course, the future is beyond iPhone of course. If your application is useful for a larger market, than create one for those platforms that are in use in your country. Don't think that iPhone dominates the market: in the US, since the introduction of the iPhone, the share of all other devices declined, except for 2: RIM (Blackberry) and the Google Android. Just having an application isn't enough, you need the critical mass. This can be obtained by heavy investing in advertising, but you can also play it clever and hook your application onto the social web. Each time a person (who of course logged in through their Facebook Connect) does something, all the friends of this person is seeing it. This is the traditional way of sharing the news and this means that you just need some heavy profiles and off you go!
• Go beyond the app, use augmented reality to drag it into every day's life like Zugara is doing for the clothing industry or use localisation like Gowallais doing for the travel business. Both will become very important in the future and your app will need to cope with both!

 
 

As with most channels, it doesn't exist on its own. Sharing is key and mixing the channels as well. So advertise for your mobile platform in your newsletters, on your website and even in your offline communication. The more you mix the channels, the more it justifies its existence!

Get mobile now, it's there for you to use...