Five things you need to know about: Mobile Marketing in 2010

1. Get your first taste of mobile internet advertising

Instead of tearing your head around the dozens of opportunities mobile can offer, get a taste of mobile advertising.

You’ve invested heavily on web content and traffic drivers to your brand website, but it’s indeed time to start diversifying your pocket to accommodate a mirroring approach for mobile, consider deeper targeting options (like device-specific targeting) to engage your audience who will be more task-oriented.

In mobile internet advertising, it’s about reaching out to small groups of users across a multitude of sites/apps that they visit, and guiding them to a platform for even the simplest of experiences – couponing, registration, click-to-call. It’s tactical but highly cost-effective considering banner click-rates of between 0.5 and 12 per cent, and over 50 per cent of users performing direct-response driven actions for the top two industry categories in APAC (according to Smaato).

2. Start collecting and managing user data, as you should with any digital campaign

Many underestimate the value of leads from mobile registrations because they are (generally) cheaper to acquire. Only few recognise the longevity of following up with these leads to amortise their media investments.

Here’s a simple example of what you could do if you were selling credit cards. Run your first mobile internet advertising campaign and drive users to a page where they’re incentivised to leave their name, privilege interests (e.g. shopping, dining), and a mobile number behind. Assign your sales teams to contact them via a call or SMS to convert the lead subsequently.

Your conversion rate might be lower, but your cost-per-acquisition could be surprisingly cheaper if you enforce personalisation and relevancy towards their interest.

3. Don’t waste anyone’s time developing a mobile app for your brand

Unless you’re clear about what you want to achieve in the long-term it doesnt make sense. Hundreds of thousands of apps are already available to users across multiple mobile devices, you don’t want to fight the clutter.

Consider two-things: a blue-ocean strategy to ensure your efforts are uncontested, and resource commitments or a community to sustain content for your app to ensure frequent and incremental usage after a download.

The app space makes complete sense for publishers and content developers to diversify or extend their distribution channels. More of them should explore an ad-revenue model to overcome resource commitment challenges, but for brands, stick to exploring app sponsorships or straight-of app banner buys for now.

4. Fuse mobile with your communication plans

You’ve probably heard this for the thirty-forth time, but few brands and agencies have actually managed to apply this.

Major online publishers like Yahoo! and Microsoft offer advertising across integrated digital platforms, but it doesn’t stop there. Consider QR codes on your outdoor buys, sponsored links to your mobi site through mobile-search triggers on the newspaper daily, or calling for users to tweet a comment with a #tag via mobile for a contest on a magazine. Many possibilities exist to connect your audience’s experience to your brand.

5. No debate on the channel, but what is the idea?

The mobile ecosystem is highly convoluted with media agencies, ad agencies, mobile agencies, mobile networks, mobile aggregators, publishers and telcos. Brands shouldn’t worry too much about who to work with for now as brand penetration in this space lags far behind mobile penetration. We are in the business of ideas to engage audiences in the right place, at the right time. Clearly, mobile can deliver both, but any partner who brings you the idea, should be your partner of choice.