By Hisham Isa, Vice President (Marketing)
If you represent a brand or advertiser, you probably already have your holiday sales and marketing strategy in place.
But the unsteady economic situation in many markets could mean that you need to tweak and adjust your plans to better influence consumers.
Here are a few tips and reminders that we hope are timely. And in case you need some stats to back up a case for a stronger mobile presence, check out this companion post, "A Wireless World".
8 Tips
1. Keep it simple! If there's a promotion or call-to-action, make sure it's easy to do. Just one or two clicks. You want to enhance consumer perception of the brand, not hurt it.
2. Provide value. Give consumers something cool to participate in your campaign. This could be a great discount or gift, an opportunity to win a prize, membership in your club or something that makes them laugh or has the "wow" factor.
3. Treat mobile as an integral part of your campaign, not as an add-on or stand-alone element. For example, print and outdoor ads can include a QR code to direct consumers to your mobile site. And with an increasing number of mobile surfers watching videos from a handset, consider embedding your TVCs into your mobi-site.
4. Make your EDMs mobile-friendly. Phones are an increasingly popular way to read email (I bet you do it all the time), so make sure that your mails can be easily viewed from most mobile devices. This will increase the success rate of your mobile marketing campaign. Be sure to set it up so that users can click directly on phone numbers rather than a link. And if you do have links to other pages, ensure that they're mobile friendly too.
5. Social Media is not a one-way broadcast. Brands have a bad reputation when it comes to responding to consumers online. All too often, companies treat social media postings as a feed or broadcast channel. Consumers expect dialogue. You don't have to respond to every comment, but you should reply to every trend, concern or question that has traction (there are a number of software tools that make it easy to see popular questions and sites like Facebook already aggregate comments).
6. If SMS makes sense, do it. But don't spam. Make sure users opt in.
7. Educate and prepare your customer-facing employees. Again, you want to enhance your brand, not diminish it.
8. Go back to basics. When planning a campaign, ask yourself some key questions, including "What are the campaign objectives?" and "How do we measure success?"
The bottom line is that mobile marketing needs to be treated as one channel in an integrated strategy. Regardless of whether you are looking at SMS, MMS, Mobile Advertising, Apps or Mobile Web, think about how your campaign can interact with consumers and provide an immersive experience in the always-on, always-connected personal communication world of mobile.
