Why You Shouldnt Have a Mobile Marketing StrategyPosted by willcritchlow Before I start, I should address the irony of writing this post on a site that isnt yet designed for mobile. I dont make those decisions, nor have the insight into the development backlog. I still think this is the community to have this discussion with, so Ill just have to put up with the irony. This post isnt really about responsive websites, though. I wanted to address a broader question. There are a few marketing topics that seem to make it into board rooms sooner than others. Social media was one – Ive heard a lot of senior people ask whats our social strategy? over the years and now Im hearing whats our mobile marketing strategy?. Thats why I picked mobile as my topic for our upcoming SearchLove conference in London. But I dont want to give another talk on responsive design, mobile user-agent server headers and googlebot mobile. Those things have their place, but they are inherently tactics. Instead, I want to ask myself the question what does a true mobile marketing strategy look like?. Before I get to that, some background:The changing mobile landscape Ive been closely involved in mobile since the early 2000s. Before starting Distilled, I worked for a strategy consultancy called Analysys who specialised in telecoms (and particularly in mobile). I distinctly remember every year back then being hailed as the year of the mobile (the earliest reference I can find online was optimistic that 2000 was going to be the year of the mobile). Its funny because a decade ago, we were doing email on our phones (the iconic Blackberry appeared in 2003), but somehow WAP, GPRS and the Nokia 6600 all failed to achieve ubiquity. In the end, by 2007, wed all stopped talking about the year of the mobile, which meant that even the explosive adoption of the iPhone took a while to fully seep into marketers collective consciousness. At the recent ThoughtWorks ParadigmShift conference, I gave a talk on the three paradigm shifting trends I see in marketing at the moment (the other two being what I called your TV is just another screen and robots are filtering everything you see). I showed these stats: Internet trends for marketers from Will Critchlow Mobile tactics Im clearly not the first or only person to have noticed this, and its generated a huge amount of thinking about mobile friendly and even mobile first design. Towards the end of this post, Ive collected some thoughts and further reading on specific mobile tactics, but before we get into that, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the strategic layer.You shouldnt have a mobile marketing strategy Theres something going on that Ive referred to as theres no such thing as mobile. What I mean by this is that consumers are seeing less and less of a distinction between their devices. Internet trends for marketers from Will Critchlow To see this, we first have to realise that 77% of all usage of mobile devices is done from home or work where regular computers are available. think.withgoogle/databoard/#lang=en-us&study=19&topic=54&dp=211 The vast majority of the attraction is not mobility, but a combination of a device that is: Ubiquitous (the same device everywhere) Personal (with your settings, a degree of privacy, etc) Always-on / instant-on Designed for rapid interactions Its the same set of trends that is driving the bring your own device (BYOB) trend that IT departments are having to learn to deal with. Our computers are fighting back by becoming more like our mobile devices (instant-on, app stores, even touch screens) and our mobile devices are adding to their ubiquity advantages with features previously limited to the desktop (faster processors, larger and brighter screens, faster connections, better keyboards). So, when you realise that all our data is in the cloud and our connection to the physical device is only sentimentality (and the cost of replacement), and you consider the range of screen resolutions that can be considered mobile, you realise that unless you mean to target customers who are literally walking around at the time, mobile marketing isnt really a distinct thing – its just the future of digital marketing.Every marketing strategy should be mobile You only have to watch a user whos never built their own website, and therefore cant empathise with the technical difficulties, try to use a website that doesnt work on their iPhone or iPad. They swear at the device. They swear at the brand. They wonder if theyre doing it wrong or if their connection has dropped. They abuse the idiots who built this website without realising the difficulty of what theyre asking for. Theres no such thing as mobile as far as the user is concerned. Which means you, as marketers, have to work exceptionally hard to play nicely with ubiquity. Fundamentally, people use their devices for: communicating with other people (1-1 and 1-many) consuming media (text, images, video) searching for answers As a marketer, you can see the opportunities to be available, be found, be recommended in any of these uses. To improve your chances, you will need to consider: Your platform – the CMS you use, the outputs its capable of Your content – the strategy of what to create and the tactical execution Your audience – where are they and how can you reach them? Your conversion paths – what do you want people to do and what would encourage them to do that? Your measurement abilities – how are you going to quantify and demonstrate success, and how are you going to refine your approach in light of new data? So, what does that sound like? It sounds a lot like the approach we take for every client who comes to us for digital marketing. And thats what I mean when I say that every marketing strategy should be a mobile marketing strategy. Through every single step of that process, you can (and should) append on mobile to the question.How might I be wrong? What if apps beat the mobile web? Thats the biggest threat to web marketers right now in my opinion. Clearly this is a threat to Google as well (how do you index the app ecosystem?). So its interesting to look at their response because theyre also embracing it. Think about: The pace of innovation in, for example, mobile gmail apps versus desktop gmail How Chrome is sneaking an operating system onto every device you own and can now run Android apps How much a search in Chrome looks increasingly like a search in the Google app - with features moving from the app to mobile Chrome in a similar way to the way features move from mobile to desktop The trend towards app constellations for most of the major mobile players – taking a slice not only from the monolithic apps, but also from the regular mobile web (theres an app for that) I dont think the pendulum is going to swing too far this way, however. Turns out that its not only Google that relies on indexing the sum of published human knowledge. Can you imagine going back to a world where you cant Google for an answer? I cant. So, I think that even in this situation, content remains something resembling the mobile web – as does much of ecommerce away from perhaps Amazon. The long tail of providers simply works against an app for everything. You might have an app for your favourite store and your favourite newspaper, but youre not going to have 15 of each (in my opinion). So where do we focus our marketing? In my opinion, we focus on search, social and content. Those are the fundamental human activities which are enhanced by ubiquitous computing devices, and theyre ones we understand deeply. The future looks like brands as publisher like never before.So, should I build an app? I dont believe this is a marketing question. Its a product and business question. I think the answer could well be yes for many businesses if you have elements that can be improved by: Native APIs (camera, coarse or fine-grained location, etc) Game-engine-style graphics abilities Offline functionality Lock-in that actually benefits your users somehow But its not a marketing question. Aside from a small number of communication tools that can grow via viral loops (think: whatsapp), apps are not a discovery mechanism. The vast majority of app store searches are navigational (i.e. people searching for apps theyve already heard of) and I dont see that changing any time soon – an app store search isnt going to replace a general web search for knowledge and so its not going to add people into the top of your funnel. Its also such a hugely fragmented market that – from conversations with developers whove seen their apps sitting at #1 in moderate-sized categories – I know that even success doesnt inherently drive more downloads and more success.Tactical recommendations for mobile Apart from repeating the advice to think about how your site appears on mobile, I wanted to end with some positive recommendations – i.e. what should you do tactically? Pay attention to dark referral sources that obscure the incredible mobile drivers of growth for networks like Facebook and, if your audience is active on Facebook, realise that Facebook marketing increasingly is mobile marketing The same is actually true of email – 66% of emails are now opened on mobile devices Consider all those native APIs and the apps that make the best use of them – 10% of all photos mankind has taken were taken in the last 12 months While most mobile sessions are not happening out and about (77% happen at home or at work), all true mobile sessions of course do happen on mobile devices so its worth thinking about hyper-locality (iBeacons) Of course, its not enough to drive just engagement, you need to drive revenue, so its well past the time that most people should be thinking about mobile CRO (video here if you have a DistilledU account) Make the most of second-screen mobile use (see slide 38 onwards) if you are spending money on offline or branding plays Watch for emerging networks – there are a variety of factors that power a high degree of volatility in mobile social (see slides 53-54 onwards) The key lesson here? We need to stop focussing on mobile as a device we use when on the go. Mobile is no longer a distinct thing but, rather, simply the future of digital marketing. It must inform every strategy we devise as marketers, and at every step of the way. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you dont have time to hunt down but want to read! Moz Blog
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 21:00:10 +0000
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