How to do Mobile Marketing for Dummies

Many consumer marketers are interested in using mobile marketing, and I m certain a good percentage of those interested will be exploring into the world of mobile marketing in the coming months. The big question would be how do we go about 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 last wednesday)

Hadl gives 10 tactics for mobile marketing, but many of them would be well applied to any campaign.

1. Determine goal: audience reach or customer engagement?—Always step one.

2. 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.

Success in mobile marketing has less to do with your particular industry or product type and more to do with connecting certain brands to the right audience. Its all about targeting. Marketers planning mobile campaigns should make sure their brands matches important characteristics of the mobile audience such as :

a. tech savvy;

b. early adopters; and

c. age

3. Mobile application differences—Know the difference between text messaging, the mobile web and mobile video. As each of the application will vary in size of the audience, marketers need to understand before choosing the best approach for the mobile marketing campaign.

4. Match campaigns to available infrastructure and inventory—Is your site mobile ready?

The good news is that there is currently ample supply of advertising on the mobile web but pricing must be negotiated 1st hand between the marketer and the mobile web ad owners and the current pricing models include :

a. Cost per impression (CPM),

b. Cost per click (CPC),

c. Cost per action (CPA), such as a purchase or a completed mobile survey.

5. 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.

6. Integrate mobile with online and offline marketing—A successful mobile campaign should be part of an overall marketing mix campaign leveraging on all available online and offline channels.

7. 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. (I would recommend at least an advanced planning period of 6-8 weeks)

8. Varying ad sizes for each phone—With so many phones on the market, screen size, supported formats, etc are all different. Therefore multiple creatives will be needed. The Mobile Marketing Association has developed a complete mobile marketing guidelines with the hope of easing such complexity.

9. 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.

1o. More guidelines from the Mobile Marketing Association—Lots more guidelines.

Definitely very sound advise and feel free to comment if you have other advises to add on.