January 31, 2014
By Jim Piper
As media proliferation continues to affect advertising budgets, managing your unique brand position becomes increasingly difficult.
Over the past two years, mobile technology has relegated traditional marketing programs to the sidelines. Furthermore, social media continues to permeate into every facet of your customer’s purchasing decisions.
So what is required to differentiate your strategy in uncertain times? How do you embrace a mobile-centric approach without destroying your brand identity?
Focus on content, not traffic
Your mobile marketing campaign's focus is to drive traffic to your Web site or landing page. However, if you aggregate the total views of viral video, blogs and social media – multiply them over the long term – you start to understand the true effect of connected marketing.
In my experience, less than 10 percent of any social network actively produces content on a regular basis.
Though this percentage may seem small, the potential online effect of these key individuals is paramount to the success of your program. It could easily become the secret weapon for your next advertising campaign.
Make it real
Ad agencies would never make a claim they could not substantiate, right?
Unfortunately, your audience is running away from advertising ghettos for precisely this reason. They are more inclined to believe a blog article read on their mobile device at Starbucks than trust your finely crafted prose.
Get your message into the cloud
With the immense computational capacity of cloud-based server farms, creative directors now have the tools to create genuinely authentic conversations with clients.
The operational management of cloud-based software-as-a-service applications including CRM modules and mobile content delivery platforms has finally addressed the desire to move away from network-specific system infrastructure and, instead, concentrate solely on the message.
Think mobile and social
Location tagging, mobile coupons, SMS campaigns and surveys all tap into large, passionate, pre-existing communities of interested users.
Mobile advertising is also indexed for discovery, meaning it is built in such a way that specific campaigns can be targeted with precision using available data.
Effective advertising still remains deeply rooted in the idea of differentiating your brand.
To address this goal, successful agencies are embracing a structured analytical approach to mobile marketing that quantifies which consumer segments are converting. This data stream often includes multivariate testing of mobile elements, publishers and channels.
Creating authentic mobile campaigns
By challenging conventional ad segmentation, advertising agencies can engage consumers from awareness right through to transaction for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising programs.
Ultimately, the mobile ad experience strengthens the emotional interaction, intimacy and influence of a brand over the entire campaign lifecycle.
Jim Piper is creative director at GlobalWide Media + Neverblue Media + Pulse Mobile, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Reach him at jim.piper@neverblue.com.
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