hypnoticmedia

Mobile Marketing, The Big Picture

Years from now, when the mobile phone really is the remote control for life, historians will best be in position to gauge the 2007-09 contributions of Steve Jobs and Apple’s iPhone.

One may argue that the iPhone did more for the advancement of mobile marketing than any other piece of hardware.

According to a recent survey from Crowd Science, 38 percent of smart phone owners who don’t own an Apple iPhone would “probably” or “definitely” switch when making their next purchase. That article isn’t looking to demystify the iPhone, but it does aim to highlight an important point: Despite the unbounded enthusiasm for the device and the mania surrounding its mobile applications, the iPhone represents only a small fraction of today’s opportunity for marketers.

As of the end of second-quarter 2009, Apple had sold “only” 26 million iPhones, according to Apple (I agree the number is incredibly impressive, but let me finish). What this means is that there are approximately 244 million mobile phone subscribers in the U.S. who are not using the iPhone, according to statistics provided by CTIA.

Translation: If you are dedicating a significant amount of your marketing budget and effort to targeting just 9 percent of your potential audience, you’re selling yourself short.

The reality is that mobile marketing is not a one-hit wonder, but rather a robust pyramid comprised of several layers that individually and collectively can elevate a brand’s awareness and drive positive consumer action. At the bottom is SMS. According to CTIA, more than 160 million people in the U.S. are on a text plan and the average age of a “texter” is 38. Taking these numbers into account it should surprise no one to discover that SMS gives brands the greatest reach and taps into the behaviors and interests of hundreds of millions, all through a simple 160-character message. SMS is a proven mobile-marketing weapon that is driving brand awareness right now.

As you move up the pyramid, the next layer introduces mobile Web/WAP sites. According to the Kelsey Group, there are 54.5 million mobile Internet users on a regular basis. Add to that the fact that more than 172 million phones are capable of browsing the Web and it’s easy to the see the value these sites can bring to a brand.

Moving up the pyramid, you come to the social networking tier. Did you know that in January alone, comScore reports more than 27 million people accessed a social networking site from their mobile phone? Furthermore, experts from CCS Insight recently released the results of “Report on Mobile Internet Usage, 2009,” which found that a third of young adults are regularly accessing Facebook and Twitter from their mobile phones. By creating a branded Facebook page, companies can connect with this audience, giving them a chance to engage with the brands they care about as well as other brand devotees, all from their mobile phone.

On the next tier of our pyramid resides the mobile banner ad. The banner has been a core component of online advertising campaigns for years and now is making its mark in the mobile world. One example is Wiley Publishing. As part of its mobile marketing campaign, the makers of the For Dummies series launched a series of banners ads that in about three months delivered more than 1.3 million impressions and produced a 1.4 percent click-through rate, which is four times that of the more traditional online component, according to Wiley. This superior click-through rate agrees with findings from Verizon Wireless, which at the 2009 Mobile Advertising Degree conference shared its experiences. Specifically, Verizon found its mobile banner ad click-though rates to be 2 percent, compared to the .3 percent achieved from the online counterparts.

The final layer of the mobile-marketing pyramid ironically brings us right back to where we started — the mobile application. While it’s true that the number of iPhone users pales in comparison to the total number of mobile users, the fact is that adoption is growing and the power and influence of these applications will undoubtedly follow suit. Add to that the emergence of the BlackBerry App Store, the Google Android Application Store and the upcoming releases of the Windows Marketplace for Mobile (the new application store for Windows Mobile) and it’s easy to see how mobile applications will become more pervasive and influential. In fact, Jupiter reports that revenues from mobile applications will top $25 billion by 2014.

The mobile phone may fit nicely into your pocket, but mobile marketing’s limits reach much farther. Whether your brand taps into one layer or all layers, the opportunities exist to drive your brand to new heights, and the iPhone is just part of the equation.

Which Websites Widened Your World

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, at least when speaking about the fast paced growth of the Web.

The first web page, ever,was published by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990. The server on which it was hosted has long gone the way of obsolete computers. For those of us who did not know it was Berners-Lee who launched the first version of the World Wide Web…not Al Gore.

His first page…yikes!


In thinking about web sites that changed our world, you can go to the wonderful Wayback Machine, the site of Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive project, to see what’s still visible from the early Web.

Since the archive project only got rolling in 1995, there’s little (if anything) from the early days. The first Amazon page that was archived is from 1999, for example; the first eBay page is dated June 14, 1997.

What’s striking about early web pages is how naive and under-designed they are by today’s standards. Not so surprising perhaps, but that was because in those days, websites were the province of techies, not designers. And bandwidth was scarce, so the graphics-intensive pages that we now take for granted were viewed as bad form because they stretched users’ dial-up links.

Another thing that is striking about my list is that the overwhelming majority are US-based. Friends Reunited is the only British representative. This isn’t really surprising it reflects a deep cultural divide. Americans tend to be early adopters of most things technological, 

Anyway, 15 years on, we’ve a wide world of pages to choose from for the most influential sites to date.
Top of my list is,
eBay.com - the auction and shopping site
wikipedia.com - online community encyclopedia
napster.com - the music file sharing website
youtube.com - the video-sharing network
blogger.com – weblog publishing system

The next five rounding out my top ten are friendsreunited.com,drudgereport.com, myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, salon.com, craigslist.org, google.com, yahoo.com

Pay for your Big Mac with your phone.

Visitors to fast food outlets in Japan are able to pay for their burgers with their mobile phones. Dial “F” for fat! Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo has teamed up with McDonalds to offer electronic payments and special promotions for mobile users.

Some comments from the public reveal the consumers are certainly ready for this, “I’m excited that my phone company not only knows where I am at all time, they know that I like to super size my Big Mac!”

“度も有賀と五歳増す McDonalds!”

“This is so much easier than money!”

“バカイェン!”

Five marketing trends that will emerge from the recession.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to tell you: We’re in a recession.

The doom has advertisers pinching every penny and ad agencies continue to face facts and figures like these, from Forrester’s 2009 Global CMO Recession Survey: 71% of marketing budgets have been reduced this year, and more than half reported reductions greater than 20%.

But I have a unique take on the situation…well at least an optimistic take on it.

I think this might be the best thing that has happened to our industry in decades. Yes, you read this correctly. While I have empathy for those that have lost jobs and the extra pressure many of us are facing, it’s also forced us to innovate, reinvent ourselves, think more strategically, and most importantly bring a level of sophistication and maturity that has been desperately missing from digital advertising throughout most of the industry.

There are five trends I believe are reshaping the face of marketing.

1) We’re moving away from short-sighted, highly sales-driven marketing campaigns in favor of long-term brand platforms that use evergreen content to add value to your day. 

Examples include Nike+, whose latest effort serves as an enabler of self-discovery and health and delivers a sense of community within the running world. 

Bank of America’s Small Business Online Community is also a great example in that it helps business owners to share knowledge. 

A final example is Kraft’s iFood Assistant iPhone app, which adds convenience to recipe planning.

All these initiatives gave something while asking for little or nothing in return. But they’ll ultimately help foster a relationship with the consumer that builds brand value, loyalty and engagement for less money than the cost of repetitive ad campaigns.

2) Distributed Content moves us more in line to the modern digital ecosystem. It’s fragmented and complex, with consumers interacting through many devices and sites. Modern digital marketers have recognized that in terms of the consumer, the center is everywhere. As a result, digital content is now designed to be syndicated, re-skinned and reformatted while still remaining relevant. 

This evolution is pushing advertisers away from building million-dollar micro-sites and toward smart, tactical ideas that revolve around specific needs or even communities. 

Now consumers can access similar content across primary websites, partner sites, widgets, applications, social presences, blogs and mobile devices. They can even enjoy entire rich experiences without ever visiting a primary brand site.

3) Customer service as marketing. While a great product or service backed up with great customer support or service remains your biggest asset in achieving success, never before has the vehicle of customer service become one your best methods for connecting with consumers in a social-media-driven web. 

Big business is taking notice, with brands like Comcast and Dell changing consumer sentiment around their brands and engaging them in the communities in which they reside. Better yet, they are doing so in a way that feels natural and adds value to the conversation, all while driving additional sales, boosting loyalty, and lowering operational and marketing costs.

4) The increased us of next-generation listening and targeting. As the way people spend their time becomes increasingly fragmented and marketers continue to face growing pressures to demonstrate the value of our services, the tools we are using to do so have undergone a significant evolution. 

More than 100 technology firms are offering variants of social-media-monitoring tools that measure not only references to key search terms but also the sentiment of the messaging around them. In doing so, these tools not only provide insight into customer behavior that extends miles beyond surveys and focus groups, they help to inform media strategies that include both media buying and influencer marketing.

5) As an industry we have moved beyond basic web and campaign analytics. Marketing firms are now able to monitor the entire customer life cycle with significantly more accuracy and then track the correlation between traditional, digital and commerce channels and customer conversion.

Metrics with deeper analytics and tracking are enabling meaningful insight. As a result, in its ongoing path to full maturity, digital marketing is finally adopting meaningful metrics that we can equate back to real business value. Now marketers are moving beyond digital-campaign measurement standards such as traffic and are instead mapping key performance indicators back to metrics and ultimately the conversation funnel, which includes the different levels of engagement — awareness, consideration, purchase intent, purchase and loyalty.

A massive recession is never a good thing, but it’s safe to say that someday we will find that some good came from it.

Ford Launches New Car on Facebook and Twitter?

Ford Motor has high hopes for Fiesta, a popular model abroad launching in the U.S. next year.

So how does it introduce the subcompact car to Americans? A massive ad blitz on TV? In-house promotions at dealers nationwide?

Nope.


In April, Ford tapped 100 top bloggers and gave them a Fiesta for six months. The catch: Once a month, they’re required to upload a video on YouTube about the car, and they’re encouraged to talk — no holds barred — about the Fiesta on their blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

“It’s extremely important to this company’s history,” says Scott Monty, whose job as head of social media at Ford was created about a year ago to take advantage of the growing social-networking wave. “It’s about culture change and adapting to this ongoing way of communicating. The bloggers are fully free to say what they want.”

Social-media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and countless other websites, have had a profound effect on how millions of Americans — especially those under 35 — interact with others (or don’t), shop and view brands. It’s a real-time digital lifestyle, powered by smartphones and netbooks, that often colors what products they purchase, how they view brands and where they spend most of their waking hours.

Marketers have noticed. Social-networking services increasingly are indispensable business tools, says Forrester Research. According to its survey of 1,217 business decision makers worldwide late last year, 95% use social networks to some extent.

And 53% of more than 300 marketers planned to increase social-media marketing spending this year, according to Forrester.

Clicks to Bricks

The economy is ripe for integration. Brick-and-click integration, that is.

Experts did not really predict it to happen quite this soon, and consumers did not seem willing to cooperate immediately, but all indications are that the various shopping channels are finally beginning to integrate.

Catalog users are leaning more heavily toward online shopping. Web retailers are beginning to understand the necessity of having a “real world” presence. And the public is increasingly flexible about where it is willing to shop.

A new report from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings offers the encouraging news that consumer online spending has increased 34 percent since the beginning of last November.

According to other analysts, consumers will spend US$10.25 billion online in this quarter, up 12 percent from one year ago.

In contrast, the word from brick-and-mortar retailers is that retail business is down when compared to this time last year. 

All of the data adds up to the fact that American consumers are starting to make the online shopping channel part of their lives.

Mainstream retail operations are reporting surprisingly strong online sales. Williams Sonoma for example, reports its online sales are three times higher than a year ago.

Why? According to Bob Pittman, who recently was tapped to become the sole chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, it is because Internet access has reached a “critical mass,” with two-thirds of American homes now online.

Speaking at a recent industry conference, Pittman said that “the Internet revolution is in full force,” and that despite a sluggish economy, online shopping is steady. Still, e-tail sales continue to make up just 1% of total retail sales, based on figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The key to pumping up that figure could be more aggressive attempts at integrating all channels, a process that is moving at a snail’s pace.

For example, a survey conducted by The E-Tailing Group, a Chicago-based Internet strategies consulting firm, revealed only 12 percent of e-tail sites allow consumers to pick up their purchases at brick-and-mortar locations.

On the plus side, 65 percent of the sites surveyed do offer Internet buyers the opportunity to return merchandise at stores, instead of through the mail or shipping companies.

In addition to making things easier for the consumer, merchants could benefit from more aggressive integration by using their already high-traffic offline operations to drive consumers online.

So far, although retailers are willing to publish the address of their Web site in ads and on shopping bags, they rarely feature Web promotions that would aggressively drive consumers to the site.

Additionally, those brick-and-click retailers that do manage to encourage shoppers to sign on could make the consumers feel more comfortable if the Web site looked more like the store. Familiarity helps.

The E-Tailing Group suggests retailers should promote features that the Web site offers that other channels, such as mail-order catalogs, cannot offer. For example, why not play up the advantages of online real-time inventory and instant checking of order status? Most Web sites now have these capabilities.

It appears a number of retailers are still hesitant to over-promote their Web sites, fearing they might kill the cash cow that fuels the rest of the machine. That probably stems from a traditional self-contained profit-center mindset. 

Perhaps if their channels were more effectively integrated, retailers might capture a greater market share and generate increases in all profit centers.

Companies that have taken this type of approach are already seeing results. Land’s End for example, a company that has done an above-average job in integrating its channels, reports that nearly 20 percent of its sales now come from the Internet.

Lands’ End may emerge as one of the poster children for successful online selling, and its achievements will likely be the result of the power of integration.

What do you think? Let’s talk about it.