Opinion
Don’t let mobile baffle you
09 January 2012
When you look at the amount of time consumers spend with an individual media channel and the amount of money advertisers invest in it, there are some incredible discrepancies.
While press earns far more than consumer time appears to warrant, mobile is at the other end of the scale. Spend is low compared to the increasing amount of time that consumers spend with their phones.
That’s unfortunate because empowered consumers are increasingly exercising their opinion and brand choices via the device they carry with them at all times: their mobile.
The mobile is giving them instant power to comment on their brand experiences, communicate with their friends and getting immediate price comparisons on products and services. Brands that aren’t there will ultimately fail.
The picture is, of course, patchy. Some brands are gaining competitive advantage via sophisticated usage of the space, while others seem almost paralysed with fear about taking the steps to make mobile work for them.
And it’s not just that some sectors have worked it out (although automotive and financial services can take a bow) and others haven’t. Even in the same sector you often find a huge gulf between competing brands. Car manufacturer Volkswagen has a very sophisticated approach but its rival Ford is much less evolved, for example.
Keeping it simple
One reason why I believe that some brands have failed to adapt to mobile is its complexity and the fact that the marketplace differs from region to region and country to country. With so many handsets, so many software platforms and so many new advertising formats – Facebook display, in-app ads, branded mobile sites, WAP sites plus search and optimisation – it’s perceived as a very expensive place to operate.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways that advertisers can learn and evolve their presence in this space that needn’t be technically challenging or budget busting.
The first thing brands can do is add response mechanisms such as QR codes to more traditional advertising. This will give great insight into how and where consumers are seeing your messages. It will reveal age, gender and responsiveness of key segments of the target audience as well as helping measure current media investment. In many cases QR codes can even provide the location where the consumer has scanned the ad.
The second simple step is to ensure that the brand has a dedicated mobile site for a new campaign. It doesn’t have to be all singing or all dancing but it’s essential to have an optimised destination for mobile traffic. A small campaign site with the most relevant material that’s adapted for all handsets will form the missing link for companies that haven’t been active in mobile before.
This allows brands to use the other elements in the mobile toolbox, such as search and display with all traffic directed to this destination. This will help ensure a far better return on investment as mobile messages are based within an overall strategy.
Success in these two areas will give brands the confidence and proof they need to start evolving their mobile strategy across other fields and address potential involvement in apps and similar options.
The important thing to remember is that mobile doesn’t have to be the unspoken monster of the marketing department. There are ways to develop a strategy that can be slowly and profitably rolled out across all elements of brand communications.
Steffen Krabbenhøft is head of mobile EMEA at Mediacom