[highlight]This is a guest post by my good friend and IdeaMensch supporter, Jeff Hasen. He is one of the kindest, and smartest people and someone I root for every day. He is also about to come out with is new book which is called Mobilized Marketing and you should definitely pre-order it. I read it. It’s awesome.[/highlight]
With any new channel, some will dive in early and others won’t even put the pool location into their GPS.
In my new book, Mobilized Marketing: Driving Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Devices, more than three dozen marketers shared their experiences – good and bad — in lessons that potentially could move your business.
Here is advice from some of those who have included mobile in their integrated marketing plans:
Be Brave
You will be hard-pressed to find a smarter businessperson than Hank Wasiak, an ad man for more than four decades who has led small firms and global agencies while always seeking to reach his target audience on a personal level.
“Technology opened the door to what consumers always felt anyway—back in my day when we were doing IR [infrared] scores to gauge television commercials and saying how hard it was to break through, the average recall for a 30-second spot was maybe 25 percent of the people who were forced to look at a commercial would remember it,” he says. “They were telling us then, ‘I want it the way I want it when I want it.’ We just didn’t have the capability to do it. Now we do. Mobile, it gets you connected but it’s part of your life in a functional way, in an emotional way, an entertaining way, in a lifesaving way.”
And Wasiak, the former vice chairman of McCann Erickson WorldGroup who is now a partner at The Concept Farm, says fire sooner rather than later.
“To me, the key thing when looking at something is to be early and fast,” he says. “I’ve been the poster child for this. You want to overthink things sometimes. You want to get it perfect but things move so fast. To me in this world, especially in mobile, iteration is more important than innovation. You can find out quickly because you’re in real time in the hip pocket, the breast pocket and in the heart of your consumers.
“You have to put on a flak jacket and get a little more risk averse.”
Use Mobile Measurement Tools Even If They Aren’t Perfect
Nirvana would include a dashboard that showed marketers all of their initiatives in real time. That would allow for assessment and optimization long before the post mortem when, of course, it’s too late to impact a program. Some have refused to spend on mobile until measurement is more advanced.
ESPN’s John Kosner says that a bigger flow of brand dollars to mobile will solve the mobile metrics woes.
“It’s weak now but in my experience the measurement follows the money,” says ESPN’s general manager of digital and print media. “Everybody complains where it is now. I think we’ll see significant expansion in the measurement in the next 5 to 10 years. In the meantime, I think companies like ours—that have great products, demonstrate scale, and represent a safe buy—we may benefit disproportionately in a world less measured.
“I think the lack of strong metrics is a frustration for marketers today but I think it’s a mistake not to get started and learn this thing. Television has been an inefficient science forever and it is by far the most popular medium. This is going to be a booming business.”
Don’t Forget Feature Phone Users
More than 70 percent of American mobile subscribers text on a regular basis. In some parts of the world, the numbers are even higher. It is why Coca Cola looks at SMS as an integral element of its programs given the reach to the great majority of consumers and handsets. Further, Facebook’s worldwide mobile strategy has feature phones not only included but targeted. As the company looks to increase from 425 million mobile users worldwide, it struck sweetheart deals with carriers across the world to have relatively high function Facebook experiences on feature phones.
Stay Current
There is no industry moving faster than mobile. In many ways, that is great for marketers – there are more ways to reach targets on their most personal devices that are with them 24 hours a day. But behaviors and interests change fast. If you read something in 2011 and think you have this mobile thing down, the winds of 2012 change may knock you over.
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.