Although MarketingSherpa reports that nearly half of consumer marketers (49.2%) are interested in using mobile marketing, and 13.8% plan to use it this year, there’s still a lot of unknowns when it comes to executing a mobile marketing campaign.
MarketingSherpa has the solution: an interview with one of the pioneers of mobile marketing, John Hadl. How long do you have to be in the business to be a pioneer? He’s been doing mobile advertising and branding for Fortune 500s since 2001. (Unfortunately, the article is only free access until tomorrow.)
Hadl gives 10 tactics for mobile marketing, but many of them would be well applied to any campaign. (The tactics here are his, the comments are mine.)
- Determine goal: audience reach or customer engagement?—Always step one. You can combine them into the same campaign, but if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, how will you know if you succeed?
- Match brands with the right audience—Know where your market is. If they’re not using mobile web, then why should you? And yes, the mobile audience does skew younger.
- Mobile application differences—Know the difference between text messaging, the mobile web and mobile video.
- Match campaigns to available infrastructure and inventory—Is your site mobile ready?
- Capitalize on mobile’s peer-to-peer communication abilities—That’s what cell phones were invented for, right? Give your audience the opporunity to share with a friend.
- Integrate mobile with online and offline marketing—Hadl says a lot of mobile users find out about mobile campaigns from other media, especially television.
- Allocate enough set-up time—Mobile marketing isn’t a last minute kind of thing. Campaigns require planning and foresight—and testing on lots and lots of different phones. (Hadle recommends planning for a minimum of 6-8 weeks.)
- Varying ad sizes for each phone—The Mobile Marketing Association has pixel guidelines for several screen sizes at the bottom of page 4 on this PDF.
- Don’t do mobile just because you can—Make sure you’re doing it to appeal to your customers where they already are, and integrate it well with your other campaigns.
- More guidelines from the Mobile Marketing Association—Lots more guidelines.
Sounds like sound advice all around. Anyone have insight on the tactics that have worked for them?
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