Overcoming Obstacles To Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing means Marketing That Uses Mobile Phones. What are the promises of “Using Mobile Phones”? If one thinks for a minute, the discovery is truly amazing: “It is marketing for anyone, anywhere, anytime, not just when a person watches, sits, reads or listens!” And it seems cheap – an SMS is just a few cents, and huge – the global audience is three times larger than the Internet’s.

Indeed, mobile marketing is receiving much attention and money. For instance, a recent first round funding in the amount of $6 million went to a New York-based company Ringleader Digital for designing a mobile advertising system. But, as always, with great promises comes great uncertainty. Let’s start with obstacles to mobile marketing and review what experts have to say about them. Despite seemingly easy-to-trace behavior of a mobile phone user in response to advertisement, much discussion has recently been around measurement, particularly about measuring mobile Internet campaigns when carriers are reluctant to share their data (“UK mobile companies to develop advertising standards”, Financial Times, February 11, 2008).

If measurement is cumbersome for mobile Internet, one should keep in mind that mobile marketing also has other communication channels– SMS, USSD, IVR, or Java – all of which are more controllable. To make things simple, metrics used for Internet advertising can also be applied to mobile marketing if various communication channels are taken into account (we will carefully review different communication channels in later publications).

Another uncertainty comes from undeveloped mobile user experiences. If SMS is something the majority of people know and use, other terms like USSD, Java, or WAP are less known and even much less used. What can be done about that?

The answer is simple: a service should be such that a user does not have to spend time figuring out these abbreviations. A call should be made or an SMS sent, and the rest should be done by a system that sends information or interacts asking for a response which can be given in the form of dialing a number, sending an SMS, or saying a word. Fortunately, such a system exists. But it order to choose this system, one has to choose even more – a technology partner.

To continue the topic, let’s study examples of successful use of mobile marketing to learn about possible obstacles and invented solutions.

I think a very good example of mobile marketing comes from a solution developed by the company I write for, Eyeline Communications, which is founded by Russians with decades of experience in software development. They realized that the GSM technology offers a way of making it easy for users to communicate with the system, by using the so called USSD technology. USSD works as a simple call to a number in a special format, like a usual balance check inquiry in GSM networks – *numbers#, for example *100#. Three (or more) digits with an asterisk prefix and a pound suffix. Because one of the most developed user experiences is a balance check inquiry, why not use it for advertisement by appending a small text message to the end of the balance information? The system they developed for MTS, the largest Russian and the fifth largest international operator, has been in successful operation for over ten years.

The keys to success in this example are the ease of operation (no complicated learning required), established user experience (balance checks are routinely done many times a week), and unobtrusive user initiated textual information (that nonetheless yields substantial advertising effects of 1,000,000 visitors in the best month of the campaign).

US examples are conveniently summarized in “Best Practices” document published by Forrester Research Inc. The author, among others, identifies the following strategies for success:

1) Choose campaigns that fit the mobile medium. A mobile campaign for the book “Cell” by Stephen King is one very good example. Other examples are Nike and Sony marketing strategies that associate with the “new, hip, and cool” mobile channel.

2) Start with the easiest to use technology. That means an SMS or a call initiated interactivity.

3) Give simpler alternatives. Do not push a user into mobile domain unprepared. Give him or her a way to interact in some other, traditional way (like making a phone call).

4) Use multiple channels for marketing communication. Forget about bombarding a user with marketing SMSes. They will do harm not good. Use other channels to send the message: TV, radio, Web, or print mediums.

5) Measure response. It’s especially true about using traditional channels – one receives a measurement tool, interactivity of which does not compare with anything that existed before! Moreover, one can use different keywords to measure the audience by geography or time of day.

6) Target early adopters. They already have the necessary experience so they are most likely to adapt to the campaign.

7) Target by device. The handset is an interesting proxy for the type of user – you may want to use this fact.

8) Begin by filling a need. If you have a choice, close the need first, do promotions and “interesting stuff” later.

9) Keep it simple. Lenovo just had its logo and text about a sale with a clear call to action – clicking to land on an offer page.