Red Herring Finalists

by Amielle Lake

Smartphones are no longer just main stream, they are now Main Street.

The mobile shopping experience is becoming more common place than ever — from comparing products, evaluating prices, and selecting where to buy, to sharing product photos, tweeting price details, and actually completing the transaction. So why isn’t mobile being looked at as the ultimate shopping tool?

It’s a lot less complicated than it looks. Here’s how it works. Retailers and manufacturers can setup up “mobile cues” on product packages, in-store signage and other brand materials in-store.  These mobile cues are essentially tactics to make consumers aware of ways to access brand and advertising content on their phone.

Read on at Mad Ave Mobile for the full article

Related Posts: Creating powerful brand interactions in-store

by Amielle Lake

Mobile shelf talkers have a terrific chance to revolutionize the retailing industry.

For marketers, shifting to mobile shelf talkers for in-store tasks presents a wide range of avenues for improving the brand’s bottom line. So why are the bulk of brands still just standing idly by the shelf talker aisle? It’s time to make the experience interactive.

Adding mobile shelf talker elements to the advertising mix gives consumers a familiar, friendly and reliable tool for creating a more powerful brand experience. It frees them up for more quality shopping time. The result is a vastly improved customer engagement. And we all know, customer-friendly retailers command the lion’s share of the revenue stream.

Read on at Mad Ave Mobile for the full article.

Related posts: Tools to reach today’s mobile shopper

Shopping basket in one hand, smartphone in the other – today’s consumer is taking control of their shopping experience. According to a study conducted early in 2011, over half of all smartphone owners in the US have used their phone while shopping to accomplish a number of tasks.

Top 5 Mobile Activities of Smartphone Shoppers
1	Compare prices of a product or service
2	Locate a store
3	Look for deals
4	Read reviews
5	Research competitive products or services
source: Chadwick Martin Bailey & iModerate Research Technologies, 2011

It is now up to brands and retailers to meet consumers on their own terms by making mobile a priority in their digital strategy, and serving them the most convenient and valuable mobile experience possible.

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Step 1: Understand your audience’s mobile behaviors

The first step in crafting a good mobile strategy is to understand the profile of your target market’s mobile behavior. Are they mobile intensives, mobile casuals, or mobile restrained?

A study by Insight Express shows that mobile intensives represent about 70% of the rapidly growing smartphone market. Subgroups within the mobile intensive category, like the Millennial generation, techy men (early adopters), and iPhone Moms, have specific behaviors and interests that are important to understand when trying to reach them.

The mobile casual and mobile restrained segments are large, but are shrinking in size as mobile contracts renew and more and more consumers opt for smartphones.  The primary functions used by mobile casuals are the phone, camera and SMS.

Within your target market segment, it is also important to understand what type of device the majority of your audience uses. For example, building an iPhone app to target people working in the financial services sector might seem like a good way to provide a progressive image to your brand in what is often seen as a traditionally staid industry. But a bit of market research will show that this community predominantly uses Blackberries, meaning your brand’s messaging would miss its intended target.

And…. Hopefully, when you do your research, you don’t find that your audience is still on “The Brick”.

Mobile's debut in a feature film!

Step 2: Consider the nature of mobile experiences

When planning your mobile strategy, consider the nature of the platform. Mobile activity is most often brief and frequently interrupted, so the KISS principle applies. Too many steps or hurdles in your mobile campaign could result in steep drop-off rates as people’s attention is taken elsewhere by their immediate surroundings. Keep interactions simple and short.

Step 3: Understand the use case and design accordingly.

The primary driver for most mobile interactions is to either kill time or save time. Think about why a user will come to your mobile website, or download your app, and stick to the information that they are looking for in that context. For example, when looking up a restaurant, the user wants to find your location, call for a reservation, and check out your menu. Including the full contents of your main site would make finding key information frustrating and time consuming. When a person is out with friends and deciding on where to eat, it is imperative that you do a good job of answering their questions quickly or they will likely end up across the street at your competitor’s.

Step 4: Making sure that the tactic matches the strategy.

Mobile advertising is great for reach and awareness. Apps generate interest and evaluation.  SMS loyalty programs put incentives in consumer’s pockets to drive foot traffic, purchases and loyalty.  Understanding what stage in the funnel your tactic is addressing will help define your mobile approach. The further down the funnel you are, the lower your overall numbers will be – but each and every one of those engagements is of high value to your business.

Step 5: Define success upfront

Before launching your campaign, define up front what success will look like. Understand how your metrics relate to business outcomes and make sure all your supporting media is optimized to generate the results you are looking for. Running a mobile sweepstakes, for example, is a great way to generate awareness and engagement, but if the contest is not properly promoted in the right channels, you may fail to attract the number of entrants you need to be successful.

Step 6: Plan Holistically

When drawing out your campaign strategy, do not plan mobile as an isolated channel. The success of mobile depends upon support from traditional and digital media that contain compelling, value-added messages that drive consumers to pull out their phones and opt-in for a deeper engagement with your brand.

Keeping behaviors and use cases front and center in your planning process will provide the recipe for success when integrating the proper mobile tools across your marketing mix.

One quarter of the way through 2011 and the mobile marketing era has truly “arrived.” Marketers are embracing the channel to build loyalty for their products and brands, and discovering exciting results in the process.

But many of us are getting dazzled with the new tools and not stopping to consider the engagement behind the engagement tool. The fact that our consumers are carrying powerful, multi-media devices in their pockets 24/7 offers enormous opportunity, but the recipe for success is not to simply “add mobile” to a campaign and reap the rewards.

Successful mobile campaigns are the product of great engagement marketing. The best campaigns come from a genuine understanding of the audience, their media behaviors, and emotional triggers. This kind of understanding should shape your campaign’s messaging, and act as a guide for the information and services being provided. Then it is possible to choose and optimize the mobile tools that will make your information and services easily and immediately accessible.

The first step in engagement

An effective mobile campaign begins with an excellent traditional, digital, or social campaign – campaign creative that captures your consumer’s interest and inspires him or her to pull a phone out of their pocket and engage.

… click “more” for the rest of the post.

The next step is making it seamless

Once that individual has pulled their phone out of their pocket to respond, you need to make that engagement seamless and simple.

We have a number of mobile tools at our disposal to pull a consumer from great, creative campaigns into the mobile experience. Our tool kit contains QR codes, SMS, trackable URLS, call-tracking numbers, and will soon include NFC. All of these make it simple for your consumer to access richer information about products and services. In addition, these tools are trackable, providing marketers with the data we need to turn the dial on performance and optimize our campaigns.

Make sure the engagement is a value-add

Finally, when a person engages with your mobile content, it is imperative to provide value that builds loyalty and drives ongoing engagement. When a consumer invites your brand onto their mobile device – a device that many consider an extension of themselves, a tool through which they build and share their identity – you must reward them by addressing a need.

Putting a QR code in a print ad that takes a person to the digital version of that same ad is not providing value (some companies have done this!). This is a great example of someone getting dazzled by the tool rather than focusing on how and why the tool should be used.

Providing value & satisfying needs build loyalty

Focus on your consumer’s needs and behaviors, then select the mobile tools that make engaging seamless and simple, and you will be well on your way to effectively leveraging mobile to provide measurable lift to your marketing performance.

Mobile shoppers moving-ad targets

Texting Still has Game